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Three Inverse Laws of AI

susam.net

281–290 of 388 posts

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#281

>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Impossible. I anthropomorphise my chair when it squeaks. Humans anthropomorphise everything. They gender their cars and boats. This tool can actually make readable sentences and play a…

Yup. That post is a typical example, symptomatic of modern technology culture, of calling for humans to change their nature in response to technology.

This is a fundamental mistake. It’s always the job of technology (indeed, its most important job) to work within the constraints of human nature, not the other way round. Being unable to do that is the defining characteristic of bad technology.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#282
post #6

I 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 kind of funny that he wrote them at a period in history when robots were already being used to aim artillery at human beings.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#283

>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Impossible. I anthropomorphise my chair when it squeaks. Humans anthropomorphise everything. They gender their cars and boats. This tool can actually make readable sentences and play a…

>>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Still angry about this. The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to. LLMs are even better than animals at this. If you aren't…

> The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to.

Is that really why?

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're vastly underestimating how little of human intent is really encoded in language in a strict sense, and how much nontrivial inference of intents LLMs do every day with simple queries. This used to be an apparently insurmountable barrier in pre-LLM NLP, and now it is just not a problem. Suppose I'm in a cold room, you're standing next to a heater, and I say "it's cold". Obviously my intent is that I want…

> Yet ChatGPT can easily figure out likely intent in situations like this, just as humans do No, it is not "figuring out" anything, much less like a human might. Every time "I'm cold" appears in the training data, something else occurs after that. ChatGPT is a statistical model of what is most likely to follow "I'm cold" (and the other tokens preceding it) according to the data it has been trained on. It is not infer…

>it is repeating the most common...

This nonsense hasn't been true since GPT-2, and even before that it was a poor description.

For instance, do you think one just solves dozens of Erdős problems with the "most common textual sequence": https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contribution...

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLMs are doing this via chat, not by physically standing in a room inferring context. You have to prompt the LLM that you're in a room next to someone saying it's cold, the most likely answer being a desire to have temperature turned up. Of course that won't always be the case. Could be an inside joke, could be a comment with no intent to have the heat adjusted, could be a room where the heat can't be adjusted, c…

Precisely.. this is what the bozo AI-accelerants don't understand. What LLM's are is almost like a hacked-means of intuition. Its very impressive no doubt. But ultimately it isn't even close to what the well-trained human can infer at lightning speed when combined with intuition. The LLM producers really ought to accept their existing investments are ultimately not going to yield the returns necessary for a viable se…

> it isn't even close to what the well-trained human can infer at lightning speed when combined with intuition.

It's a lot closer to that than anything was five years ago. Do you really think we're going to be interacting with them the same way five years from now?

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#287

>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Impossible. I anthropomorphise my chair when it squeaks. Humans anthropomorphise everything. They gender their cars and boats. This tool can actually make readable sentences and play a…

>>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Still angry about this. The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to. LLMs are even better than animals at this. If you aren't…

I think the best way to counter this is what Elon's doing with Grok's personalities. He has the unhinged, sexy, and argumentative avatar among others. If you try to talk about technical stuff to sexy tells you that's boring and just tries to sexually escalate. It's super funny when one is used to Claude's endless obsequiousness.

This really shows that AI is just a tool that can be configured to whatever you want. Animals (well maybe pit bulls) and people do not switch their personalities in a millisecond, but AI does all the time.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right, and then look at any number of research papers showing that CoT output has limited impact on the end result. Which research papers? Do I have to find them? > We've trained these models to pretend to reason. I have no idea why that matters. Can you tell me what the difference is if it looks exactly the same and has the same result?

When they say "pretends to" here they're talking about something quantifiable, that the extra text it outputs for CoT barely feeds back into the decisionmaking at all. In other words it's about as useful as having the LLM make the decision and then "explain" how it got there; the extra output is confabulation. Though I'm not sure how true that claim is...

You make a good point. I had the impression they were using 'pretend' as a Chinese Room shortcut in that they are asserting that it is incapable of reasoning and only appears to be capable from the outside, which is completely irrelevant and unfalsifiable.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#289

>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Impossible. I anthropomorphise my chair when it squeaks. Humans anthropomorphise everything. They gender their cars and boats. This tool can actually make readable sentences and play a…

>>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Still angry about this. The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to. LLMs are even better than animals at this. If you aren't…

In other news, area sociopath hates puppies and LLMs equally!

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Still angry about this. The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to. LLMs are even better than animals at this. If you aren't…

> The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to. Is that really why?

Yes, we don't ban plant cruelty or insect cruelty or fish cruelty.

For example fish is treated way worse than meat animals and vegetarians still happily eat fish.

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