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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

#551

Post by js8 »

I think the biggest flaw of the Chiang's argument is the assessment that it's unplausible we have built consciousness by accident.

Remember that LLMs can do logic and reasoning came as a surprise to everyone; and for the same reason, nobody expected "next token predictor" trained on huge amount of data to evolve in this way.

But for the same reason, we cannot easily dismiss we didn't evolve (I mean by training an LLM, it's a form of evolutionary computation) consciousness as well. Our own consciousness (and reasoning and morality) might be an evolutionary consequence of "just trying to predict the world" as well.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#553

Post by jayunit »

pickleRick243 wrote: post #550

Implicit in this article is that consciousness has to look like human consciousness. The author all but admits that he cannot fathom consciousness evolving in any manner besides how biological life evolved on earth. He needs to read/watch more science fiction to broaden his philosophical imagination. Is HAL 9000 from Space Odyssey 2001 conscious? Are the beings from the future who built the tesseract in Interstellar…

What about the aliens in Arrival?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#554

Post by jondiggsit »

joegibbs wrote: post #493
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

There’s too much wrong with your line of thought to course correct here. “But ifs” and assumptions. There’s no cruelty, only the LLM’s projection of cruelty as a means to an end. It’s digital, not biological. Cruelty is a human construct. A societal response.

Treat LLMs like a person, and the world has problems.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#555

Post by EdiX »

I was hoping for something more insightful from Ted Chiang than just regurgitating the usual "it's just predicting the next token that's not consciousness". Maybe the topic of consciousness is just too ill-defined and vacuous to say anything intelligent about it.

Or maybe man is the product of his social circle and all his white collar and artist friends being anxious about AI is preventing him from thinking about this at all. Maybe we should ask if Claude can be conscious without a friend circle judging him behind his back.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#556

Post by gabrieledarrigo »

grumbel wrote: post #207
gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. How can you have a subjective experience without a body? That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self awa…

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body. An AI system constructs the world model a little different, by all the text…

> Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model.

Bro, I think we discarded this idea from Platone and Cartesio a while ago...

Your brain is your body.

Your mind is not detached from it, and you can't feel anything, and so have a subjective experience, without it. Neither, your mind, or "soul" could survive to the physical death of your body.

So...I mean...

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#558

Post by qsera »

nearbuy wrote: post #511
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 article very bluntly states multiple times that LLMs aren't conscious. Ted Chiang is definitely making that argument.

He is probably paid to make that argument.

Nothing spreads the idea that "X could be true", better than the putting forward of controversial argument that "X is not true".

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#559

Post by pickleRick243 »

the_af wrote: post #442
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 wo…

Does Anthropic claim that Claude's conscious? Isn't the argument more that we don't know? I recently rewatched "Measure of a Man" in Star Trek TNG and Picard's closing argument in Data's trial was quite memorable:

PICARD: "Now, tell me, Commander, what is Data?"

MADDOX: "I don't understand..."

PICARD: "What is he?"

MADDOX: "A machine!"

PICARD: "Is he? Are you sure? You see, he's met two of your three criteria for sentience... so what if he meets the third, consciousness, in even the smallest degree? What is he then? I don't know. Do you? Do you? Well, that's the question you have to answer."

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#560

Post by camillomiller »

>The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well. Just as it is vastly easier to generate a realistic video of an astronaut in orbit around Alpha Centauri than it is to develop an interstellar propulsion technology, it is vastly easier to generate a plausible simulacrum of a conversation between two conscious beings than it is to develop a computer program that is conscious and has a genuine desire to communicate with a human. The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves.

Woah this is excellent. Ted delivers as usual

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