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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

#491

Post by DangitBobby »

ux266478 wrote: post #131
scarmig wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I feel very strongly that I'm unique, therefore you are wrong" is a bad argument. Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action pot…

It's unfortunately the most common on this topic. I've been in the position of advocating for the existence of cognition and sentience in generally less-than-considered places, like plants, for a long time. I wish I could say LLMs expanding the domain has been interesting, but it's mostly just created more people spouting the same boring identity-protective reactionary pessimism.

It's hardly surprising given most people's attitude towards the general welfare of other animals. More of the same, really.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#493

Post by joegibbs »

jondiggsit wrote: post #304

Here's a simple idea to consider: It doesn't matter. You won't be able to tell the difference. No one will. I don't think it's necessary to explain this idea further. Just think about it.

But if it's conscious we shouldn't e.g. tell it to work for days without breaks, we should give it rewards, it would be made illegal to be cruel to it

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#494

Post by DangitBobby »

canelonesdeverd wrote: post #101
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> misanthropic Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person. > so obviously incorrect It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then

> It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then I'd say people who have the lived experience of, well, living, are well aware that the brain is much more than just a token predictor.

Yet here I am, alive, and I'm not willing to make the claim that our brains are much more than prediction machines. A "predict the next thought" machine, if you will.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#495

Post by moi2388 »

McGlockenshire wrote: post #97
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.

Consciousness excludes all current AI because all current AI is just autocomplete over the corpus of human text. It's just a word machine. There are no thoughts. It cannot be conscious. How is this even up for debate in any way whatsoever? I do not understand how people can believe this. Is this not a site for software engineers?

What is consciousness, McGlockenshire?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#496

Post by 8bitsrule »

The chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770 seemed to have a consciousness to its viewers. The viewers were encouraged to think that it did. The Turk's human chess opponent knew that there was an actual human chess-player inside the box, along with levers and magnets. That illusion was profitable for 84 years.

LLM's have no problems using expressions that make them sound human. The algos are demonstrably not human, and will admit it. Whatever's in the box is playing a game ... more sophisticated than the one Eliza was playing.

"My discussion here will be directed at the claims I have defined as those of strong AI, specifically the claim that the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states..." John R. Searle, 1980: https://web.archive.org/web/20071210043312/http://members.ao...

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#497

Post by DangitBobby »

yakbarber wrote: post #418

we first need to agree the definition of consciousness, before we can start trying to attribute it to various animals and machines.

No, we don't. It's currently an impossible task, yet our answer to it has implications in the present, so we must do our best with incomplete information. FWIW that's how we treat practically all problems of consequence. A great many things happen to be unknown and unknowable.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#498

Post by joegibbs »

If an LLM is conscious where would the bar be set? Would lowering the model's temperature make it less conscious, since it's going to return the same answer to the same question more often?

Would other models be conscious? An image upscaler?

Would other pieces of software be conscious? Surely not Hello World, but would a really big video game be conscious, or an operating system?

A lot easier if it's not.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#499

Post by wangii »

Ted Chiang is a great Sci-Fi author, but his remark `GPT-3 and similar models as a "blurry JPEG of the Web"` was misleading at the best.

I share the view with others the term `consciousness` is not well-define yet, therefore his assessment is pointless. Maybe the real question to ask, if consciousness is merely an illusion at the macro level, when the observers not looking at the tech/implementation level deep enough, just like the term "intelligence" itself, might be more precisely captured by drifting amongst high dimensional manifold pitches.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#500

Post by DangitBobby »

glaslong wrote: post #362

The one thing we know FOR CERTAIN is that having actually read the article is not a prerequisite for consciousness. The number of people posing questions that are already directly addressed in TFA is impressive.

Neither is having read other comments before posting one. There are about 100 of them that start with "we have no definition of consciousness" which is not novel or helpful.
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