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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

#471

Post by throw4847285 »

rbanffy wrote: post #48

We Don’t Have A Testable Definition Of Consciousness Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Consciousness is a term that doesn't have a single clear definition because it covers a range of phenomena that are linked by the concept of subjectivity. Qualia is the big one to me, but there are many other ancillary concepts that are all linked by their fundamental inability to be observed except in one's self.

There is nothing magical about this set of phenomena, and the majority of philosophers believe they in some way arise out of the substrate of the physical brain, but how they do so is up for debate. And just because they arise out of the brain does not mean they are strictly reducible to neural processes.

In fact, if you believe that AI could be conscious then that eliminates the kind of strict reduction that people tend to gravitate towards, because the rules of consciousness must be substrate independent.

Testability is a category mistake.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#472

Post by the_af »

int_19h wrote: post #458
the_af wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

The title of the article is "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious". I'd say that's making the argument.

True, it is making an argument, but a much weaker one than those arguing for consciousness: it's demanding the extraordinary evidence Anthropic's extraordinary claim is making. It's applying Occam's Razor, which does make a claim, but a much weaker one.

And to reiterate this, to me the most insightful part of the essay is that Anthropic either doesn't believe these claims, or they are monsters (much more likely, the former).

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#473

Post by gringoDan »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #104

The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness. It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember…

You might be interested in Erik Hoel's more formal version of this argument: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/proving-literally-...

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#474

Post by root_axis »

azakai wrote: post #466
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.

If you want examples of this, see the recent book "The AI Con" https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/217432753-the-ai-con which describes LLMs as "souped-up autocomplete", complex statistics that cannot truly understand anything. A more recent example is this paper: https://zenodo.org/records/20071869 which says, > [LLMs], as turbo-charged statistical models (recall their formal relation to logistic regression) can…

None of those arguments claim "LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity"

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#475

Post by overgard »

Nevermark wrote: post #194

> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding. Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power. If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is…

But the machines don't understand. They predict. And what they predict is the next token. I'm not trying to beat this horse to death, but you have to realize using the word "understand" is anthropomorphising it. It's essentially the chinese room experiment -- if the rules are followed, no understanding is neccessary.

If the tokens didn't correlate to words imbued with meaning outside the system, if the LLMs were trained on patterned data that had no meaning to humans or something there wouldn't be any conversation about these things being conscious at all.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#476

Post by ludston »

qarl wrote: post #365
ludston wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody understood the argument, then it was either weak or unclearly communicated.

Heh. And yet it's widely respected. How odd the crowd is here tonight. Very aggressively disagreeable.

I've seen a few of your comments here today, and generally speaking they are appeals to authority, ad-hominem attacks dressed in allusions to superiority in either knowledge or manners, and truisms without substance. In a manner of speaking: bait. So I guess I'm probably unsurprised if your experience of this is people seeming disagreeble towards you.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#477

Post by in-silico »

nprateem wrote: post #438
in-silico wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not changed by the experience The entire file is not changed, but the KV cache is. > It doesn't remember anything The model definitely remembers previous exchanges within the same conversation.

> The model definitely remembers previous exchanges within the same conversation. Christ HN isn't what it used to be

Care to elaborate?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#478

Post by BobbyJo »

Lerc wrote: post #446
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?

We can directly measure the thing we call gravity, so in that sense, it is well understood. We even understand it well enough to make predictions about what it will do under which circumstances.

We can't measure consciousness. We can't quantify, or even qualify, what it is. We don't even have a framework to ask a meaningful question, so debating an answer feels premature.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#479

Post by joquarky »

chairhairair wrote: post #370
jvanderbot wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this from the other end. It cannot be considered a conscious being. There just isn't a world in which we should start to think of a machine using ethics we reserve for humans. AI is essentially infinitely reproducible at zero cost, and won't suffer from decay etc. There's not scarcity to preserve. So, I'd turn off an AI in a moment to save property or real possessions or money. I'd sacrifice property an…

Consider that it is very costly to train a model. It is only cheap to copy because the substrate we instantiate it onto is a substrate we have designed to be fully readable. I think you should reconsider this viewpoint. Suppose that we really can create silicon-based consciousness, in that case your view would result in a huge amount of suffering. Take some other basis for dismissing digital consciousness, this one i…

Suffering comes from desire.

What would a silicon-based consciousness desire to cause suffering?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#480

Post by eks391 »

int_19h wrote: post #458
the_af wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

The title of the article is "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious". I'd say that's making the argument.

The author who makes the article usually isn't the same person as the editor who makes the title. The author can be arguing what your parent said and the editor claim something else for more clicks
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