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

271–280 of 338 posts

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

#271

Post by selfmodruntime »

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…

Ever since the pandemic I've grown very careful of calling people with opinions against the hive mind loons or conspiracy theorists.

Before you know it, they might be proven true.

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

#272

Post by hnfong »

antibasilisk wrote: post #104
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…

This is not a tenable argument if you are a materialist. Either you accept the idea that human sentience is attributable to a soul (and therefore cease to be a materialist), you decide that the outward appearance of sentience is sufficient (which you might find to be troubling due to its potential implications for the insane), or you say that sentience is unknowable. There's no fourth option.

The True Materialist will tell you that it's biological cells and DNA that gives rise to sentience.

AIs made from artificial neural networks are actually not quite the materialistic thing. It's some spooky emergent property that doesn't depend on material substrates, you can run an AI on a Nvidia card for sure, but you can also run it in your head (theoretically, if you live forever). Or at least with the assistance of (a lot of) pen and paper. Where does the sentience live then, in your mind? That doesn't sound very materialistic to me :D

(Note: I think the GP is full of it, but I just thought I'd set the record straight about materialism here :P )

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

#273

Post by hnfong »

maxdoop wrote: post #261
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”.…

Note that Turing essentially claims that intelligence is predicting what another human would write in text. So the fact that a generative language model that "predicts what might be next" trained on human text is almost by definition something that passes the Turing Test.

The only remaining question is whether intelligence is equivalent to sentience consciousness etc. those funny things.

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

#274

Post by hnfong »

bloppe wrote: post #52

I've yet to see a single person who thinks these models are sentient demonstrate an actual understanding of how they work. They're called transformers and they're based on this research: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 How do you square the lack of durable memory and the massive matrices of "attention" values with the ways that memory and attention are understood by neuroscientists to work in a natural brain? These…

> How do you square the lack of durable memory

This one is easy. There are people who lack durable memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia

Are they not sentient?

> I've yet to see a single person who thinks these models are sentient demonstrate an actual understanding of how they work.

Condescendence aside, I don't know how you can truthfully claim that. Did you actually hand out test papers to those people and they failed? Or did you tautologically conclude those people don't understand it because there's no way a person can understand how transformers work and still arrive at a different conclusion as you did? You might think your logic is watertight, but I think, as mentioned, this is probably an empirical question.

> Humans can be sentient without language. Indeed; some humans are tragically raised in isolation and struggle mightily with language after being saved. A transformer is nothing without language.

A=>B does not imply not A => not B.

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

#275

Post by weard_beard »

maxdoop wrote: post #263
weard_beard wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

It would be a pre-requisite, yes. Certainly not the only criteria.

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

#277

Post by corobo »

fooker wrote: post #108
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…

>People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy. Are you perhaps trying to pass off your opinions and beliefs as 'philosophy and social sciences'? People who dismiss this out of hand have a bit more reading to do. Philosophers have been divided for millennia about the definition of sentience and consciousness. Questions like 'Is an earthworm conscious?', 'Can the earth be sentient?' have wi…

At the point of bringing animals into this we'll probably have to clarify whether we're actually interested in sentience or sapience at some point.

A worm responds to external stimulus. It can also act without external prompting. It reproduces and tries to keep itself alive. Sentient, yeah I'd say so. Does it ponder, have wisdom, goals and dreams, etc? Sapience is probably a nah.

Does the earth respond to external stimulus? It can be affected by it for sure. If you changed the strength of the sun's gravity the earth would do something different. But that's physics of the situation rather than planet itself responding or reacting to the change. Things on earth respond to stimulus, ecosystems can change due to disasters or changes in predator/prey populations, but does the planet itself respond to things - nah. If you could move the entire living population to another planet the ecosystems would work under the same rules. Earth (the physical ball of rock, not the "there's no place like home" personification) wouldn't be changed, damaged, or killed.

Does an AI respond to external stimulus? Yes! Does an AI act without external prompting? It does not at this time. Not sentient. Not sapient.

There are other definitions of course, don't get caught on this one example. There's no reason to check any other definitions as this one fails. Same thing as ordering your if statements.

Maybe "sentient" just means "has and acts based on a dopamine or equivalent motivation system"

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

#278

Post by onetokeoverthe »

corobo wrote: post #268
redmorphium wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"I'll be one of the first to campaign for actual sentient AI rights..."

Why???

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

#279

Post by corobo »

onetokeoverthe wrote: post #278
corobo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"I'll be one of the first to campaign for actual sentient AI rights..." Why???

Because at the point of actual sentience that becomes a being that deserves rights. Equivalent to animal cruelty laws at least at the sentient level.

It would deserve more rights if it then progressed to sapience. Equivalent to human rights at that stage. An equal mind.

Bonus reasoning: If I get on the right side of the history books from the get-go maybe the AI will keep me as a pet :)

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

#280

Post by fooker »

corobo wrote: post #277
fooker wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy. Are you perhaps trying to pass off your opinions and beliefs as 'philosophy and social sciences'? People who dismiss this out of hand have a bit more reading to do. Philosophers have been divided for millennia about the definition of sentience and consciousness. Questions like 'Is an earthworm conscious?', 'Can the earth be sentient?' have wi…

At the point of bringing animals into this we'll probably have to clarify whether we're actually interested in sentience or sapience at some point. A worm responds to external stimulus. It can also act without external prompting. It reproduces and tries to keep itself alive. Sentient, yeah I'd say so. Does it ponder, have wisdom, goals and dreams, etc? Sapience is probably a nah. Does the earth respond to external st…

> Does an AI act without external prompting?

  SentientChatGPT {
    while (true)
      ChatGPT(“Write something random”)
  }
> Maybe "sentient" just means "has and acts based on a dopamine or equivalent motivation system"

An equivalent system is exactly how it works.

Post reply on HN