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Today's AI Isn't Sentient

time.com

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Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#71

Post by mewpmewp2 »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #14

Does Time have any in-depth analysis anymore? This seems like a rather shallow take on the subject. ""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'

In addition what about an LLM or more specifically a next token predictor where the cycles of token exchange vs prediction are smaller and not in a 100% ChatBot way.

E.g. there's status update after each 10 tokens for the LLM.

Something like:

----

Battery: 67%.

Wind Pressure: 20%.

Noise: 35DB

... other stuff

----

Action: Walk Around

Say: Hello

... 5 hours later ...

Battery: 13%

...

----

Goal: Find charging station

Action: Look right

So the battery here for example would be important... And it would have strong meaning for the LLM/Token predictor because in its neural network it would strongly signal that now is the time to find the charging station.

So here this robot is an LLM that is in a constant token input/output loop with sensors data being the input.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#72

Post by ben_w »

adamrezich wrote: post #59
lores wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. While it's a valued characteristic, society also respects athletes, cooks, nurses, or businessmen, none of them because of their thinking capacity. The people who assign the most worth to intelligence are people who value their own, so there is a bias inside our bubble.

All of those things involve abstract thinking and complex decision-making based upon learned heuristics.

I'm old enough to remember people saying that about chess, finding things in images, translation, composing music, go, and creating artistically pleasing images.

At what point do we run out of things to say we can do that computers can't? And what happens then?

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#73

Post by tsunamifury »

ben_w wrote: post #72
adamrezich wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those things involve abstract thinking and complex decision-making based upon learned heuristics.

I'm old enough to remember people saying that about chess, finding things in images, translation, composing music, go, and creating artistically pleasing images. At what point do we run out of things to say we can do that computers can't? And what happens then?

We will be forced into the most novel (and high risk) edge spaces of the human experience -- because without novelty we will lack any new experiences to compress into new cognitive behaviors to pass on to our young. And then we will run out of reasons to exist in the forward march of time.

That or, we somehow change enough to learn to live simply because of our shared existence with eachother, the novel engagement with ourselves and others, and learn a certain contentment with our position in the universe as unimaginably rare, but also limited.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#74

Post by antisthenes »

ben_w wrote: post #5

> 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…

> Why is it essential?

I'm sure some philosophy enthusiasts will explain this to you in a book-sized response, but for me personally it's as simple as this:

There must be a physical phenomenon that can be associated with the concept being described. So your description of a robot that interprets a charge level of a battery as hunger would actually "be hungry", yes.

> it doesn't say why a camera responding to a 550 nm photon isn't seeing red when your retina is.

I think in that case we can agree that the camera IS seeing, because the camera sensor serves the same function as our retina. The physical process of capturing photons exists in both cases.

But the current LLMs don't have any requirement to be attached to physical sensors, so they can't be sentient by that definition alone.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#75

Post by LetsGetTechnicl »

js8 wrote: post #15

Nice that at least, the authors are trying to define a practical test for sentience, and do not remain in the subjective realm. There are 2 problems though: 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…

This might be one of the stupidest things I've read on here. LLM/generative "AI" is not capable of what you're suggesting. They do not possess personalities, intelligence, creativity, or any sort of sentience even if you think "hallucinations" are indicative of this. Hallucinations are merely a symptom of the problem that is foundational to all LLMs: they are just really, really complicated programs that determine mathematically likely output based on an input, and since they don't "know" anything, they can, and often, get it wrong. That's what hallucinations are.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#76

Post by ben_w »

antisthenes wrote: post #74
ben_w wrote: post #5

> 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…

> Why is it essential? I'm sure some philosophy enthusiasts will explain this to you in a book-sized response, but for me personally it's as simple as this: There must be a physical phenomenon that can be associated with the concept being described. So your description of a robot that interprets a charge level of a battery as hunger would actually "be hungry", yes. > it doesn't say why a camera responding to a 550 nm…

> But the current LLMs don't have any requirement to be attached to physical sensors, so they can't be sentient by that definition alone.

Ultimately, the text reaching an LLM (be it by training or by prompting) is from the real world.

Even without that… dreams may be missing important things, but still have something experimental to them. Not sure if I would want to call it a "sentient" experience due to linguistic ambiguity, but I would call it one of qualia, which is the thing the article is writing about.

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#77

Post by grantcas »

JaggedJax wrote: post #27

To me a more important part of sentience is a continuous existence. Today's AI is still very discrete. It exists and then it does not, repeated. Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. A mostly always-on streaming style architecture where the model is continuously fed input and sensory data and always processing it, whether or not it is being asked a question,…

[dead]

Re: Today's AI Isn't Sentient

#78

Post by lores »

adamrezich wrote: post #59
lores wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. While it's a valued characteristic, society also respects athletes, cooks, nurses, or businessmen, none of them because of their thinking capacity. The people who assign the most worth to intelligence are people who value their own, so there is a bias inside our bubble.

All of those things involve abstract thinking and complex decision-making based upon learned heuristics.

Sure, but the point is that it's not their intelligence that's valued. You'd often praise a great professor by saying they're very smart, but very rarely a great cook.
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