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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#441

Post by 1eieie »

sfn42 wrote: post #380
tsunamifury wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, I invented parts of this technology at Google and am baffled why this is debated. We discovered math that decodes data storage in langauge and is able to use sophisticated continuation cohorts from ALL OF HUMAN RECORDED KNOWLEDGE to respond to you in a call/response model with very good synthesis capabilities. Its super useful, but not life or conciousness. Its a simulated echo from our collective recorded b…

Right? It's a computer program. Of course it isn't conscious.

I think of it as a guessing machine

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#442

Post by the_af »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

But the whole point of the essay is that it's Anthropic that's making the argument (or roleplaying/hinting as if they believed it). Ted Chiang isn't making the argument, he's saying Anthropic making it is misleading and deceitful, and that it's actually a pointless thing to claim.

One of the essay's stronger paragraphs is when Chiang explains that Anthropic doesn't truly believe this, otherwise what they are doing would be deeply unethical, much like slavery.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#443

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

The number of electrons involved in the so-called consciousness, compared to the number of electrons in the universe not involved in it, is so small that they are a mere temporary statistical aberration.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#445

Post by verdverm »

timssopomo wrote: post #103
FloorEgg wrote: post #73

Has anyone come across a clearly articulated case for LLMs being conscious but in an entirely different way than would be intuitive to us? I often think of LLM consciousness as like tiny fish popping into existence, swimming through vector space and then going poof out of existence. When they help you write your bad news email, they don't understand what it's like to be a human getting bad news bluntly, but they do c…

I think this is exactly right. The thing that makes AI (imo) different than hitting the center option in text suggestions is that it's _not_ simply picking the most likely word following the last. It's attending to the entirety of the context its provided, activating a semantic vector space, and predicting a response based on _that_. I've had AI infer facts about me and attitudes I hold based on related information I…

> It's attending to the entirety of the context its provided, activating a semantic vector space, and predicting a response based on _that_.

It does so token by token, not by reading all the input and then generating the output. Every output token is also an input token in a tight loop to get the next token with as a special section like , trained into the weights via gradient descent.

> I've had AI infer facts about me and attitudes I hold based on related information I provided - I don't see how that isn't theory of mind.

Facebook can predict (know) more about you than any other human from something like a dozen or two likes. There is a surprising amount of information in aggregate data.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#446

Post by Lerc »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

Does the moon have gravity?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#447

Post by root_axis »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #435
root_axis wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the present context, the fallacy manifests in claims that LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity because their operations merely consist in a collection of statistical calculations, or linear algebra operations, or next-token predictions Nobody actually makes this argument though.

Are you serious? I hear it every single day, especially from computer scientists. There are top ranked posts here on HN _today_ with this argument.

Please link one of these top ranked posts. Before you do, be aware that I'm going to read what it says and assess if it meets the description of the argument as claimed.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#449

Post by confidantlake »

tomhow wrote: post #148
moi2388 wrote: post #16

Really Chiang? Alright. What is consciousness? Please provide a definition that somehow encompasses all humans and excludes all current AI. I’ll wait.

Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This isn't an example of fulminating, please don't incorrectly quote the hacker news guidelines at people. We strive for curious discussion here.

An example of fulminating would be: How dare you accuse him of fulminating? That is the most ass backwards moderating I have ever seen! Do you even know the definition of the word? Who paid you to call him out?

His comment may be sarcastic but it is not "fulminating".

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#450

Post by nozzlegear »

Taek wrote: post #274
krupan wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are conscious because even for short periods of time they do form memories and those change them even if only briefly. They think on their own too. It is a very limited level of consciousness though.

Is that any different from an LLM having a context window?

Yes, LLMs don't think on their own, for one; they think when you invoke them.
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