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

Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 212 posts

Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

#31

Post by pbhjpbhj »

parasti wrote: post #5
bethekind wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They likely already have. You can use all caps and yell at Claude and it'll react normally, while doing do so with chatgpt scares it, resulting in timid answers

For me GPT always seems to get stuck in a particular state where it responds with a single sentence per paragraph, short sentences, and becomes weirdly philosophical. This eventually happens in every session. I wish I knew what triggers it because it's annoying and completely reduces its usefulness.

Usually a session is delivered as context, up to the token limit, for inference to be performed on. Are you keeping each session to one subject? Have you made personalizations? Do you add lots of data?

It would be interesting if you posted a couple of sessions to see what 'philosophical' things it's arriving at and what proceeds it.

Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

#32

Post by Fraterkes »

Chance-Device wrote: post #29
Fraterkes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think these llm's have subjective experiences? (by "subjective experience" I mean the thing that makes stepping on an ant worse than kicking a pebble) And if so, do you still use them? Additionaly: when do you think that subjectivity started? Was there a "there" there with gpt2?

Yes, I think they probably are conscious, though what their qualia are like might be incomprehensible to me. I don’t think that being conscious means being identical to human experience. Philosophically I don’t think there is a point where consciousness arises. I think there is a point where a system starts to be structured in such a way that it can do language and reasoning, but I don’t think these are any different…

Do you think there are "scales" of consciousness? As in, is there some quality that makes killing a frog worse than killing an ant, and killing a human worse than killing a frog? If so, do the llm models exist across this scale, or are gpt-3 and gpt-2 conscious at the same "scale" as gpt-4?

I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less parameters/complexity than gpt-4. But both gpt-2 and gpt-4 are very fluent at a language level (both moreso than a human 6 year old for example), so in your view they might both be roughly equally conscious, just expressed differently?

Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

#33

Post by Underphil »

incognito124 wrote: post #26
Jensson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emotional signals are more than just text though, there is a reason tone and body language is so important for understanding what someone says. Sarcasm and so on doesn't work well without it.

Gee, you think so?

I think the point was that not ALL sarcasm works well. I see what you did there, of course :)

Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

#35

Post by nelox »

silisili wrote: post #17
yoaso wrote: post #10

[flagged]

Probably the other direction. Emotions are raw, most humans relate and change behavior accordingly. Only psychopaths think of emotion as nothing but a means to changing behavior. The scary thing is that LLMs by nature would exhibit the same behavior.

Many non-psychopaths e.g., CBT therapists, evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists, such as Damasio, view emotions as adaptive tools for guiding/changing behaviour.

Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

#37

Post by elcritch »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #30
viralsink wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emotion is mainly encoded in tone and body language. It is somewhat difficult to transport emotion using words. I don't think you can guess my current emotional state while I am writing this, but if you'd see my face it would be easy for you.

Dammit, you cheated though! Why must you always do that? In your sentences it doesn't matter what your emotional state is, it makes no difference; bit like life really. Hopefully, you can see that at least my chosen sentences have an emotional aspect? An LLM could add emotional values to my previous sentences that a TTS can use for tonal variation, for example.

Makes me wonder: are there Unicode code points for tone of voice? If not could there be?

Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

#38

Post by BoredPositron »

Chance-Device wrote: post #9

> Note that none of this tells us whether language models actually feel anything or have subjective experiences. You’ll never find that in the human brain either. There’s the machinery of neural correlates to experience, we never see the experience itself. That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing.

[dead]

Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

#39

Post by Chance-Device »

Fraterkes wrote: post #32
Chance-Device wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think they probably are conscious, though what their qualia are like might be incomprehensible to me. I don’t think that being conscious means being identical to human experience. Philosophically I don’t think there is a point where consciousness arises. I think there is a point where a system starts to be structured in such a way that it can do language and reasoning, but I don’t think these are any different…

Do you think there are "scales" of consciousness? As in, is there some quality that makes killing a frog worse than killing an ant, and killing a human worse than killing a frog? If so, do the llm models exist across this scale, or are gpt-3 and gpt-2 conscious at the same "scale" as gpt-4? I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less par…

This is really a different question, what makes an entity a “moral patient”, something worthy of moral consideration. This is separate from the question of whether or not an entity experiences anything at all.

There are different ways of answering this, but for me it comes down to nociception, which is the ability to feel pain. We should try to build systems that cannot feel pain, where I also mean other “negative valence” states which we may not understand. We currently don’t understand what pain is in humans, let alone AIs, so we may have built systems that are capable of suffering without knowing it.

As an aside, most people seem to think that intelligence is what makes entities eligible for moral consideration, probably because of how we routinely treat animals, and this is a convenient self-serving justification. I eat meat by the way, in case you’re wondering. But I do think the way we treat animals is immoral, and there is the possibility that it may be thought of by future generations as being some sort of high crime.

Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

#40

Post by thrance »

Chance-Device wrote: post #9

> Note that none of this tells us whether language models actually feel anything or have subjective experiences. You’ll never find that in the human brain either. There’s the machinery of neural correlates to experience, we never see the experience itself. That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing.

See also: Functionalism [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of...

Post reply on HN