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A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

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Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#71

Post by mewpmewp2 »

dgfitz wrote: post #64
quotemstr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of... > Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people? Give an LLM memory and a source of randomness and they're as deterministic as people. "Free will" isn't a concept that typechecks in a materialist philosophy. It's "not even wrong". Asserting that free will exists is _isomorphic_ to dualism which is _isomorphic_ to assertions of ensoulment. I can't argue…

As long as you realize you’re barking up a debate as old as time, I respect your opinion.

What I don't get is, why would true randomness give free will, shouldn't it be random will then?

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#72

Post by fenomas »

> The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost.

TFA really ought to have linked to some concrete examples of what it's disagreeing with - when I see arguments about this in practice, it's usually just people talking past each other.

Like, person A says "the model wants to X, but it knows Y is wrong, so it prefers Z", or such. And person B interprets that as ascribing consciousness or values to the model, when the speaker meant it no differently from saying "water wants to go downhill" - i.e. a way of describing externally visible behaviors, but without saying "behaves as if.." over and over.

And then in practice, an unproductive argument usually follows - where B is thinking "I am going to Educate this poor fool about the Theory of Mind", and A is thinking "I'm trying to talk about submarines; why is this guy trying to get me to argue about whether they swim?"

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#73

Post by fastball »

"Don't anthropomorphize token predictors" is a reasonable take assuming you have demonstrated that humans are not in fact just SOTA token predictors. But AFAIK that hasn't been demonstrated.

Until we have a much more sophisticated understanding of human intelligence and consciousness, any claim of "these aren't like us" is either premature or spurious.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#74

Post by ifdefdebug »

degamad wrote: post #37
gtsop wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Why would you ever want to amplify a false understanding that has the potential to affect serious decisions across various topics? LLMs reflect (and badly I may add) aspects of the human thought process. If you take a leap and say they are anything more than that, you might as well start considering the person appearing in your mirror as a living being. Literally (and I literally mean it) there is no difference.…

> Why would you ever want to amplify a false understanding that has the potential to affect serious decisions across various topics? We know that Newton's laws are wrong, and that you have to take special and general relativity into account. Why would we ever teach anyone Newton's laws any more?

Newton's laws are a good enough approximation for many tasks so it's not a "false understanding" as long as their limits are taken into account.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#75

Post by Veedrac »

The author plot the input/output on a graph, intuited (largely incorrectly, because that's not how sufficiently large state spaces look) that the output was vaguely pretty, and then... I mean that's it, they just said they have a plot of the space it operates on therefore it's silly to ascribe interesting features to the way it works.

And look, it's fine, they prefer words of a certain valence, particularly ones with the right negative connotations, I prefer other words with other valences. None of this means the concerns don't matter. Natural selection on human pathogens isn't anything particularly like human intelligence and it's still very effective at selecting outcomes that we don't want against our attempts to change that, as an incidental outcome of its optimization pressures. I think it's very important we don't build highly capable systems that select for outcomes we don't want and will do so against our attempts to change it.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#76

Post by quotemstr »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #69
ants_everywhere wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're directionally right, but > a human as something other than a function to generate sequences of words! Humans have more structure than just beings that say words. They have bodies, they live in cooperative groups, they reproduce, etc.

I think more accurate would be that humans are functions that generate actions or behaviours that have been shaped by how likely they are to lead to procreation and survival. But ultimately LLMs also in a way are trained for survival, since an LLM that fails the tests might not get used in future iterations. So for LLMs it is also survival that is the primary driver, then there will be the subgoals. Seemingly good ne…

> Seemingly good next token prediction might or might not increase survival odds.

Our own consciousness comes out of an evolutionary fitness landscape in which _our own_ ability to "predict next token" became a survival advantage, just like it is for LLMs. Imagine the tribal environment: one chimpanzee being able to predict the actions of another gives that first chimpanzee a resources and reproduction advantage. Intelligence in nature is a consequence of runaway evolution optimizing fidelity of our _theory of mind_! "Predict next ape action" eerily similar to "predict next token"!

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#77

Post by BrenBarn »

> In contrast to an LLM, given a human and a sequence of words, I cannot begin putting a probability on "will this human generate this sequence".

I think that's a bit pessimistic. I think we can say for instance that the probability that a person will say "the the the of of of arpeggio halcyon" is tiny compared to the probability that they will say "I haven't been getting that much sleep lately". And we can similarly see that lots of other sequences are going to have infinitesimally low probability. Now, yeah, we can't say exactly what probability that is, but even just using a fairly sizable corpus as a baseline you could probably get a surprisingly decent estimate, given how much of what people say is formulaic.

The real difference seems to be that the manner in which humans generate sequences is more intertwined with other aspects of reality. For instance, the probability of a certain human saying "I haven't been getting that much sleep lately" is connected to how much sleep they have been getting lately. For an LLM it really isn't connected to anything except word sequences in its input.

I think this is consistent with the author's point that we shouldn't apply concepts like ethics or emotions to LLMs. But it's not because we don't know how to predict what sequences of words humans will use; it's rather because we do know a little about how to do that, and part of what we know is that it is connected with other dimensions of physical reality, "human nature", etc.

This is one reason I think people underestimate the risks of AI: the performance of LLMs lulls us into a sense that they "respond like humans", but in fact the Venn diagram of human and LLM behavior only intersects in a relatively small area, and in particular they have very different failure modes.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#78

Post by dgfitz »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #71
dgfitz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you realize you’re barking up a debate as old as time, I respect your opinion.

What I don't get is, why would true randomness give free will, shouldn't it be random will then?

In the history of mankind, true randomness has never existed.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#79

Post by elliotto »

To claim that LLMs do not experience consciousness requires a model of how consciousness works. The author has not presented a model, and instead relied on emotive language leaning on the absurdity of the claim. I would say that any model one presents of consciousness often comes off as just as absurd as the claim that LLMs experience it. It's a great exercise to sit down and write out your own perspective on how consciousness works, to feel out where the holes are.

The author also claims that a function (R^n)^c -> (R^n)^c is dramatically different to the human experience of consciousness. Yet the author's text I am reading, and any information they can communicate to me, exists entirely in (R^n)^c.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#80

Post by photochemsyn »

dgfitz wrote: post #38
quotemstr wrote: post #12

> I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human. And I'm baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a human as something other than a function to generate sequences of words! Oh, but AI is introspectable and the brain isn't? fMRI and BCI are getting better all the time. You really want…

“ Determinism, in philosophy, is the idea that all events are causally determined by preceding events, leaving no room for genuine chance or free will. It suggests that given the state of the universe at any one time, and the laws of nature, only one outcome is possible.” Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people?

This is an interesting question. The common theme between computers and people is that information has to be protected, and both computer systems and biological systems require additional information-protecting components - eq, error correcting codes for cosmic ray bitflip detection for the one, and DNA mismatch detection enzymes which excise and remove damaged bases for the other. In both cases a lot of energy is spent defending the critical information from the winds of entropy, and if too much damage occurs, the carefully constructed illusion of determinancy collapses, and the system falls apart.

However, this information protection similarity applies to single-celled microbes as much as it does to people, so the question also resolves to whether microbes are deterministic. Microbes both contain and exist in relatively dynamic environments so tiny differences in initial state may lead to different outcomes, but they're fairly deterministic, less so than (well-designed) computers.

With people, while the neural structures are programmed by the cellular DNA, once they are active and energized, the informational flow through the human brain isn't that deterministic, there are some dozen neurotransmitters modulating state as well as huge amounts of sensory data from different sources - thus prompting a human repeatedly isn't at all like prompting an LLM repeatedly. (The human will probably get irritated).

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