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1. We pull out our precise definition of "sentient" that everyone agrees upon.
2. The definition gives us a precise, iron-clad test procedure which we can apply to an object to get a yes-or-no answer.
3. The answer is false for today's AI.
Any questions?
> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. Why is it essential? I get that an LLM saying "I am hungry" has no feeling of hunger, it's stringing words together without the experience behind them. But does it need to? Give it a robot body to move around and…
This seems just like a single argument and counter argument against the sentience (or lack thereof) of AI today. I feel like the article lacks some broader views on the nature of sentience, and is quite narrow in its approach Although, in fairness, I probably wouldn’t make a much better case for either of the sides
(Contrarians, or meta-contrarians, may jump up to claim otherwise, but I would say that while the question of what a non-temporal consciousness could hypothetically be may be fun to debate, it is also so far out of our experience that it is clearly not what we generally mean by the term and is therefore a completely different conversation.)
LLMs do not strike me as amenable to fixing this. But that only applies to LLMs, not to any future architectures.
""All sensations—hunger, feeling pain, seeing red, falling in love—are the result of physiological states that an LLM simply doesn’t have.""
Sensors?
Why call out LLMs specifically? Other AI technologies, combined with sensors and goals. That would lead to AI having these 'internal responses'
1. If an actor says "I am hungry" during a theater play, he is not reporting his internal state, but merely playing along. The LLM might always be in a "play along" mode, and have its own thoughts (which it keeps to itself) about its situation. It might also not be able to articulate the feelings in natural language, just like normal people cannot communicate feelings in sign language (for all we know, LLM might even choose to communicate its feelings in a different way, e.g. hallucinate when annoyed).
2. LaMDA AI allegedly reported its own state of sadness and fear of death. So there are self-reported internal states that we cannot associate with any objective state of the system.
But I don't want to dismiss it entirely (though I think the article is pretty lazy); I think better tests of consciousness can be devised, along the lines of comparing objective circumstances and subjective experiences.
This seems just like a single argument and counter argument against the sentience (or lack thereof) of AI today. I feel like the article lacks some broader views on the nature of sentience, and is quite narrow in its approach Although, in fairness, I probably wouldn’t make a much better case for either of the sides
This gives wide latitude for moving the goalposts by asserting a specific definition that is favorable to whatever it is you've built.
It gives an equally wide latitude for dismissing what's been built as not being actually sentient by defining "sentience" in a way that makes the dismissal true.
meh, this is simply the grounding problem. I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. An AI trained on low level sensory input, rather than words, might well be able to 'feel' hunger. Even so, I think it's correct that current model architectures lack sentience. I think that requires a continuous updating loop of experience, rather than the once-through dream sequence of current models.
Speaking purely philosophicaly if you cloned a person, fed them memories, asked them a question and then killed them right after, would they not be sentient? It's really quite hard to come up with simple tests like these.
meh, this is simply the grounding problem. I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. An AI trained on low level sensory input, rather than words, might well be able to 'feel' hunger. Even so, I think it's correct that current model architectures lack sentience. I think that requires a continuous updating loop of experience, rather than the once-through dream sequence of current models.
Speaking purely philosophicaly if you cloned a person, fed them memories, asked them a question and then killed them right after, would they not be sentient? It's really quite hard to come up with simple tests like these.
IMHO the Turing test has not aged well, and is insufficient to really answer the question; It's now quite possible to make something that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, etc, but that is clearly, on close inspection, not actually a duck.
> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. Why is it essential? I get that an LLM saying "I am hungry" has no feeling of hunger, it's stringing words together without the experience behind them. But does it need to? Give it a robot body to move around and…
I do think that there is an important moral distinction between sentient beings and not.