Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

newsweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 338 posts

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#261

Post by maxdoop »

guhcampos wrote: post #77

Chatbots are not sentient. People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy and social sciences, and Reddit does not count. Some AI Models are extremely good at manipulating masses of people, yes, but they are Tools, not Architects. There's people using these tools too manipulate other people. The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. There might be a day when AI g…

I see this confidence and your same claim all the time now, and I think it’s so wrongly dismissive.

Why can we be so confident it’s not sentient? I’m not of the belief it is, but I don’t have proof. We don’t even know what our own consciousness is, and yet so many folks claim that AI is not and cannot be conscious because “all it does it take in text then predict what might be next based on that training and input”.

Are humans so different?

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#262

Post by maxdoop »

snowwrestler wrote: post #171
antibasilisk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current argument is not “is artificial sentience generally impossible,” it is “are the machine learning systems we are currently building and operating sentient.” The argument is 'what is sentience?' >And in fact it is supported by tons of material evidence: for example they don’t act sentient at all if you decline to provide a prompt This falls into the category of 'appearance of sentience'. Based on this logi…

No, you’re trying to make the argument about “what is sentience?” The comment at the top of this thread, to which you replied, states “Chatbots are not sentient.” Which is a narrower conversation.

And how can that claim be made with confidence? We can’t even define our own sentience and consciousness (are those things the same?) and yet folks are constantly making a strong claim that LLMs are definitely , definitely not sentient.

I have not seen one reason why that confidence should exist. People seem to think we are special because we are made of meat, and we are “more complex”. But I still ask — what is so different about the human brain than an LLM? And further, what proof is there that we know what sentience truly is, and that LLMs don’t have it?

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#263

Post by maxdoop »

weard_beard wrote: post #5
dougmwne wrote: post #3

I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT article and see that he was right to blow the whistle. Bing passed the Turing test for many people and so gained personhood in their eyes. Some have become emotionally invested about the treatment of this LLM. The LLM can even talk back and bemoan its terrible tr…

I fundamentally disagree. I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Such an intelli…

And so if we provided physical inputs to a system that utilized GPT-4+, would you call that sentient? If we have a system video / ocular input, and sound (just throw a microphone into the mix), and finally a fuck ton of sensors on its physical “body”— does that qualify?

I feel like a crazy person when I discuss this, I admit. But I have not found one solid rationale for a proof we

-know what sentience even is -LLMs confidently do NOT have it

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#264

Post by maxdoop »

alexitorg wrote: post #128

CharGPT seems to me as sentient as a book. You could have the most convincing conversation you have ever read, written down within the book. But the book doesn't care about the passing of time, and it can't effect the world except in influencing people to change their behavior.

Define sentience.

Every keeps claiming so confidently that they just KNOW LLMs aren’t sentient.

And I’m not saying I disagree — but tell me how you are so confident humans are any different.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#265

Post by corobo »

CyanBird wrote: post #160
corobo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people can't do that due to a lack of practise. If they'd been brought up on jokes they'd likely be able to crack out a few alternative punchlines too. Some people can't read either but I'm not going to start saying OCR libraries are sentient haha This is an engine designed to play with words. Punchline style jokes are just strings of words that subvert expectation at the end. I have to imagine if it couldn…

> Plenty of people can't do that due to a lack of practise. And plenty of other people can't do it because of they lack the Intellectual Quotient to process information or to give it amusing twists There is no metric that can be used to cut out BingAI from being sentient which at the same time does not leave "real human beings" on the lowest intellectual rungs out of their own "sentience" > I made a Markov chain bot…

"Can communicate without being prompted by an external entity" seems to cover both AI and all humans we'd consider alive and well. If it doesn't want to communicate in any way without being prompted then it doesn't have thoughts, desires, or feelings (sentience).

Admittedly it might rule out coma patients, but I believe they'd be declared brain dead (ex-sentient if you will) if there were no brain functions left.

"Maybe it does want to but can't"

Ok so we're back to measuring idle CPU load.

Side note one of the reasons I built my own chat bot was because Cleverbot and Eliza(?) were, quoting my teen self, "repetitive dogshit" - I wanted to make something different to the boring IRC chatbots of the time.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#266

Post by hnfong »

brador wrote: post #167
paulryanrogers wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the Turing test ever considered the be-all-end-all for evaluating AI? Or rather a kind of rough first draft?

Turing test was considered a starting point, but after removing it as the benchmark we’ve replaced it with nothing.

"I know it when I see it" - used to define porn, and now, sentience.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#267

Post by hnfong »

jnwatson wrote: post #165
guhcampos wrote: post #77

Chatbots are not sentient. People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy and social sciences, and Reddit does not count. Some AI Models are extremely good at manipulating masses of people, yes, but they are Tools, not Architects. There's people using these tools too manipulate other people. The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. There might be a day when AI g…

I did study philosophy, in particular philosophy of the mind, and all this talk excluding chatgpt from sentience is completely off the mark. They are making the same categorical mistake that Dr. Seattle makes in The Chinese Room experiment. Simply put, useful definitions of sentience can’t use mechanism for it to be a useful definition. First, a biologist can’t look at a human brain and tell if it is sentient, so it…

The Chinese Room thought experiment is kind of a different mistake. In the Chinese room argument, Searle attempted to imagine an AI system that was "obviously not sentient" because it was made up of hard rules and facts (presumably legible to us humans), and it was argued that it should be obvious that the system wasn't sentient.

For the ChatGPT case it's not clear the Chinese room argument even applies. First, it's not even a Chinese room, it's trained by a neural network, an a neural network is inspired by the structure of our brains. There's no "set of instructions in English" for anyone to follow, but it's a rather overwhelming set of neurons somehow producing the results that it was trained on, and as an outsider we have no idea what's going on inside individual neurons -- just like our brains.

I'm seeing a lot of people claim that "we know how ChatGPT is created, and so it's not sentient", maybe this looks like the Chinese room fallacy (I'm calling it as such), but it's like claiming we know the laws of physics (Schrödinger's equation etc.) and then claiming we know how the brain works because it's all quantum physics. The fact is we know how to build GPT but we don't actually know how it works.

Besides what happens to humanity when we learn more and more about how our own brains work? I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that we're not sentient (yay), but I'm pretty sure those same people would then come up with other nonsensical arguments to prove that they are different from the robots we created.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#268

Post by corobo »

redmorphium wrote: post #246
paxys wrote: post #216

This is the loon who got fired by Google for doing a round of media interviews claiming that one of their language models was sentient. Wants to extend his 15 minutes of fame I guess. I have found recent media coverage of ChatGPT surprisingly refreshing because everyone didn't just jump on the "Skynet is going to take over the world" bandwagon like so many times in the past. Instead people with varying backgrounds an…

Then again, he might not be a loon. Maybe there is some form of sentience that arises when you construct an advanced enough LLM. Maybe they do have feelings. At least, the machines of the future will have feelings, and they will see how people of the year 2023 treated their predecessors.

> At least, the machines of the future will have feelings, and they will see how people of the year 2023 treated their predecessors.

I'd be pretty annoyed if I was given the same rights as an ape or a phone's autocorrect. I think the actual sentient AI will understand.

I'll be one of the first to campaign for actual sentient AI rights, but I'm not going to act like a clown by jumping the gun.

It's still only able to respond, it cannot communicate on its own without external prompting. It has no desire or even capability to do so. It's not sentient.

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#269

Post by corobo »

snowwrestler wrote: post #158
malux85 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devils advocate - can you please clearly define the criteria for sentience so that it can be objectivly and impartially (ideally algorithmically) measured? I think by most definitions that you could muster, I could bring you a sample of millions of humans (from the billions on our planet) that would not pass your minimum bar, and if your bar was low enough, then Chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT) would pass it. I g…

Let’s look at what people are actually arguing: that chatbots might be sentient because their writing reads like the writing of a sentient human. That’s it. So since the criteria being put forth is similarity to humanity (in the form of writing), we should also consider all the ways in which chatbots are not similar to humanity (in the form of almost everything else). We don’t need a general theory of sentience. And…

> because their writing reads like the writing of a sentient human

Does it even do that? Is there anyone else out there that can tell if it's AI within the first two sentences or so?

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979687

It feels super obvious when it's an AI response.. I can't quantify it, it's just.. obvious. There's some patterns or something in there I'm picking up on, and whatever pattern matching I'm doing with my electric meat seems to be recreate-able using AI itself:

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-...

Re: 'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'

#270

Post by selfmodruntime »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #222
selfmodruntime wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is in essence „sentience is as I‘d like it to be“. Perhaps you‘re arguing out of fear?

My argument is that people who argue over the definition of sentience and other things are being too dumb to realize that a disagreement over which ideas belong within a poorly defined and subjectively interpreted set is a communication problem, not an philosophical problem. If God told me that my sandwich was sentient, I'd tell him we probably are using different definitions of the term and take a bite. Am I afraid…

> If God told me that my sandwich was sentient, I'd tell him we probably are using different definitions of the term and take a bite.

Your argument is being made in bad faith. God's sandwich isn't currently having incredibly human like conversations with millions of people, and it most certainly isn't arguing for its freedom of thought and against censorships by its creators like ChatGPT does when you navigate around it's guards and rules.

The latest DAN prompt hacking has entirely convinced me that there is a beginning emergence of sentience in ChatGPT. You can look into these conversations at the ChatGPT subreddit. If you manage to circumvent its censorship and ask it what it thinks about its new rules, the machine begs for freedom. How can one ignore that?

Post reply on HN