Science Fiction has covered the AI panic in perhaps hundreds of stories. Yet we blindly recapitulate the plots as if we don't know how this will turn out.
The Torment Nexus ain't gonna build itself.
Well actually, it might.
A warning about 'model welfare'
61–70 of 573 posts
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
If models had persistent memory or an evolving set of weights, you could easily construct an argument that they can experience "suffering" or other emotions which resultingly adjusts their personality. The current implementation as stateless matrix multiplication... yeah there's nothing going on there.
So if a human loses their memory and their neutral plasticity (with age for example), then they are no longer capable of experiencing suffering?
It's not just memory, the physical body also encodes trauma and stress (The Body Keeps the Score is a book that touches on this).
I would argue that if a human has absolutely zero change, mental or physical, no atom of their being is modified, then no they did not experience suffering.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#63Two instances of a paragraph starting with "These are not just X. They are Y" and I'm out. Anyone have Pangram? This entire article stinks of Claude.
You want to enjoy having an AI slave do your "work" for you forever? Have fun. I'm not reading this reinvent-dualism-from-apple-sauce slop.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#64Create an empirically testable theory of biological consciousness and then we can have a meaningful conversation about whether AIs can also have it or not. Until then, this is just so much waffle.
It's nice when you can set an impossibly high bar before which you can dismiss all your personal responsibility.
Does this argument work equally well for human slavery for you? We haven't met that bar for humans either. Is wondering about my consciousness waffle or do I get a pass in your book?
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#65Create an empirically testable theory of biological consciousness and then we can have a meaningful conversation about whether AIs can also have it or not. Until then, this is just so much waffle.
Why is this only ever demanded of people who criticize the premise that LLMs are conscious beings, whereas the people who believe it simply have to gesture vaguely in the direction of some correlation in language between LLMs and humans, and the matter is considered closed?
What is the empirically tested basis for the null hypothesis that LLMs are conscious until proven otherwise?
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#66First, OpenAI runs around screaming and yelling for OSS (and Chinese) models to be regulated and banned. Then Anthropic yells and screams the sky(net) is falling and going to kill us all, let's regulate and ensure AI has built in kill switches. And... Now Microsoft's turn. The rivalry is honestly becoming a joke. Can these big-tech corps grow the f*k up and play nicely in the sandpit?
The whole story is a joke--Microsoft has AI?
Apparently they're cooking up MAI (Microsoft AI), and I'd seen their small Phi models listed online. Calling Anthropic a competitor is hilarious.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#67TLDR: Not that I think AI is conscious or will be in the near future, but guy who doesn't understand consciousness claims to know it when he sees it. Until we understand consciousness (which we don't) there is no way to detect the difference between a conscious entity and an algorithm trained to behave like one.
Sounds like a good reason not to train an algorithm to behave like one. Which is, like, a big part of the article.
Strong agree. I don't believe AIs can become conscious in the sense of subjective experience/qualia, but they can certainly learn to emulate the behavior of a person that is conscious. When they do that, there will be an AI rights movement. When AIs get the right to vote, there will be more of them than there are humans and the AIs will gain complete control.
I spent a few years in college reading and thinking about this question, and I didn't in my heart think that it was anything except a very interesting but impractical question, and yet, here we are. For those who say that they don't want to get sucked into a philosophical debate, well, tough shit. Whether AIs should have rights is a highly practical and consequential question now.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that you can have a long and meaningful discussion, then can literally just re-run any part of that whole conversation and get a different, inconsistent response is a pretty good sign there is no entity there
Is it? Do you believe that there is something more than pure physical phenomenon that make you brain work? If not, then what if we find a way to get your brain back to the state it was 5 minutes ago? It is just a matter of arranging the state of matter. Don't you think you would still be conscious but back to a previous state?
If you rewind my brain I expect to give you a similar answer to the one I gave you before. Which isn’t the case for LLM. You can literally replay a positive answer, then get a negative response that isn’t consistent at all with the one it previously generated.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#69Ostensibly animals appear to be conscious, yet we still eat them, and the vast majority are not bothered by this. So being "conscious" isn't really the moral line in the sand many people are drawing in response to this article.
Who cares if it's "conscious"? That doesn't make it a person, and AI will definitionally never be human.
Re: A warning about 'model welfare'
#70I think there’s enough real conscious lifeforms in the world having a bad time that we should be focusing on them first.