I strongly agree with this. I'm going to bookmark it and pass it on. Very sound advice.
Three Inverse Laws of AI
31–40 of 388 posts
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#32All of these are entropy-lowering behaviors so without a forcing function, no one will adopt them.
Whether they are the right things to donate not is tangential. As such, they're dead on arrival.
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a good way to think about it. At some point, this becomes partly a matter of philosophical belief. But I am somewhat skeptical of the idea that everything can be reduced in that way. In order to build theories, we often reduce too much. When we build mental models of complex systems, especially when we try to treat them as closed systems, we always have to accept some degree of information loss. So I do parti…
this whole consciousness thing is fairly easy to put to bed if you run with the ideas from things like buddhism that everything is consciousness. then none of us have to bother with silly, distracting arguments about something that ultimately does not matter. is it helpful or harmful? am i being helpful or harmful when i interact with it? am i interacting with it in a helpful or harmful way? i’d rather people focusse…
hmm.... That also seems like a reasonable framing.
But the original article is, first of all, arguing that we should de-anthropomorphize AI. My point is only that, from the perspective of human cognition, anthropomorphizing can sometimes be useful. In practice, though, I think I am mostly on the same side as you.
To be honest, I have not thought about this topic very deeply. If we debated it further, I would probably only echo other people’s opinions. As you know, when something complex is compressed into a mental model, some information is always lost. In this case, the compression may be too large to be very useful.
I have not spent enough time thinking about this issue on my own. I also have not really imitated different positions, compared them, and tested them against each other. So my current thoughts on this topic are probably not very high-resolution.
In that sense, I may agree with you, but it would not really be an answer in the form that my own self recognizes as mine. It would mostly be an echo of other people’s opinions.
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a good way to think about it. At some point, this becomes partly a matter of philosophical belief. But I am somewhat skeptical of the idea that everything can be reduced in that way. In order to build theories, we often reduce too much. When we build mental models of complex systems, especially when we try to treat them as closed systems, we always have to accept some degree of information loss. So I do parti…
this whole consciousness thing is fairly easy to put to bed if you run with the ideas from things like buddhism that everything is consciousness. then none of us have to bother with silly, distracting arguments about something that ultimately does not matter. is it helpful or harmful? am i being helpful or harmful when i interact with it? am i interacting with it in a helpful or harmful way? i’d rather people focusse…
I don't think that really helps. If you believe rocks are conscious, then does extracting minerals resources cause them pain? Do plants suffer when we pick their fruits and eat them? I don't see any behavioral or physical reason to think those things have conscious states.
As for what consciousness is, it's pretty simple. You're sensations of color, sound, etc in perception, dreams, imagination, etc. The reason to dismiss LLMs as being conscious is those sensations depend on having bodies. You can prompt an AI to act like it's hungry, but there's really no meaning to it having a hungry experience as it has no digestive system.
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#35“ Humans must not blindly trust the output of AI systems. AI-generated content must not be treated as authoritative without independent verification appropriate to its context.”
I’m lost, how do individuals actually do this in our current world? Is each person expected to keep a “white list” of reliable sources of truth in their head. Please don’t confuse what I’m saying with a suggestion that there is no truth. It just seems like there are far more sources of mis- of half-truths and it’s increasingly difficult for people to identify them.
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#36I strongly disagree with this framing. It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines, and it simply won't work in the majority of cases. Humans WILL anthropomorphize the AI, humans WILL blindly trust their outputs, and humans WILL defer responsibility to them. Asimov's laws of robotics are flawed too, of course. There is no finite set of rules that can con…
> It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines
Talking to chatbots is like taking a placebo pill for a condition. You know it's just sugar, but it creates a measurable psychosomatic effect nonetheless. Even if you know there's no person on the other end, the conversation still causes you to functionally relate as if there is.
So this isn't "accommodating foibles" with the machine, it's protecting ourselves from an exploit of a human vulnerability: we subconsciously tend to infer intent, understanding, judgment, emotions, moral agency, etc. to LLMs.
Humans are wired to infer these based on conversation alone, and LLMs are unfortunately able to exploit human conversation to leap compellingly over the uncanny valley. LLM engineering couldn't be better made to target the uncanny valley: training on a vast corpus of real human speech. That uncanny valley is there for a reason: to protect us from inferring agency where such inference is not due.
Bad things happen when we relate to unsafe people as if they are safe... how much more should we watch out for how we relate to machines that imitate human relationality to fool many of us into thinking they are something that they're not. Some particularly vulnerable people have already died because of this, so it isn't an imaginary threat.
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#37> Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing, while at the same time it's a good thing to say stuff like "put a computer to sleep", "hibernate", "killing" processes, processes having "child" processes, "reaping", "what does the error say ?", "touch", etc? To me that's just language, and humans just using casual language.
There's a boundary between knowing vs. forgetting that it's a metaphor. When you use convenient language like in your examples, you tend to remain aware of the difference, or at least you can recall it when asked. When some people talk about AI, they've lost track completely.
I don't love the recommendations in TFA. The author is trying to artificially restrain and roll back human language, which has already evolved to treat a chatbot as a conversational partner. But I do think there's usefulness in using these more pedantic forms once in a while, to remind yourself that it's just a computer program.
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#38I just treat it as if I'd asked a public forum the question like reddit. Decent for stuff that doesn't really matter, even if it gets it wrong. Still gonna be polite to it because I'm about ready to slap the next person that talks to me like an LLM, I don't want to get used to not being polite in a chat interface
Great point about being polite. I think it's pragmatic to keep "please" and "thank you" out of AI interactions, but I try to remain conscious of their ommission so I don't start down that slope.
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#39> Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing, while at the same time it's a good thing to say stuff like "put a computer to sleep", "hibernate", "killing" processes, processes having "child" processes, "reaping", "what does the error say ?", "touch", etc? To me that's just language, and humans just using casual language.
Maybe read the corresponding section of the article.
Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI
#40> Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing, while at the same time it's a good thing to say stuff like "put a computer to sleep", "hibernate", "killing" processes, processes having "child" processes, "reaping", "what does the error say ?", "touch", etc? To me that's just language, and humans just using casual language.
These are just words, yes, and I believe it harmless. But describing the LLM machinery as if it thinks is one thing when used as a common parlance, and another when people truly believe that there's some actual thinking or living going on. This "law" is for there to be no latter.