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A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

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Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#91

Post by ooloncoloophid »

willy_k wrote: post #56
vidarh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even know how to disprove that this statement with "AI" replaced by "other humans" other than by listening to people self-reporting and taking their word for it and/or defining the words in ways that do not rely on a subjective experience. Until we know how to objectively measure if someone or something is conscious, it seems unreasonable to make statements with any kind of certainty about it.

Sure, if you take a materialist empiricist perspective, which is myopic at best. As humans we have the unique and wonderful ability to know truths by themselves. Machines do not have minds, and they can not.

What position are you taking? (Genuine question.) Do you believe humans are conscious because of a special property we have? If you are a dualist, how do you explain the interaction in physical space between the non-physical special property and the physical brain?

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#92

Post by JoshTriplett »

pton_xd wrote: post #62
shawnz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Just because you don't remember the suffering doesn't mean you didn't experience it in the moment. Suffering does not suddenly become okay if your mind and body are going to forget it. "It's okay to torture someone if their mind and body both won't remember it afterwards" sure is a take.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#93

Post by staticman2 »

vidarh wrote: post #32
pton_xd wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

A model detached from a harness, sure. But we routinely do add persistent memory to systems incorporating LLMs.

I think a harness isn't really a memory in the sense that neural networks have memories...

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#94

Post by altruios »

orangecat wrote: post #39
OedipusRex wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citizens United proves we won't do any better this time around.

Citizens United was 100% correct. No, the government should not be able to throw you in prison because you used money to publish a book criticizing the government.

It is in fact more complicated than most people assume.

The above is true, but also: companies simply are not people, and they should not be supported above the individual, which was the consequences of that decision. Money is not the same as speech. treating it as such creates an aristocracy: something America as a country rebelled against during it's formation.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#95

Post by InsideOutSanta »

orangecat wrote: post #39
OedipusRex wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citizens United proves we won't do any better this time around.

Citizens United was 100% correct. No, the government should not be able to throw you in prison because you used money to publish a book criticizing the government.

> Citizens United was 100% correct

It's interesting to me that one can look back at the effects that decision has had on the US and say it "was 100% correct."

It's a bit like sitting in the burning ruins of Rome and contemplating that Nero was 100% correct to focus on his music. I mean, I'm glad he got to do what he loves, but maybe 100% is just a tiny bit of an overstatement.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#96

Post by monknomo »

Den_VR wrote: post #89
binlog wrote: post #55

Hard to disagree with this. Have all the philosophical debates about consciousness you want, but we need to treat and regulate the AI in front of us for what it is – an advanced computer, a tool, a weapon. You wouldn’t feel a different way about a nuclear bomb just because someone stuck googly eyes on it. Anthropomorphizing the AI is a convenient excuse to take responsibility away from companies that are building and…

Is it not a false dichotomy to say that companies cannot be accountable unless AI are mindless?

a company is liable whether it acts via ai, an army of people, an army of dogs, or a purely mechanical machine, should it do harm.

Why would an ai with a mind remove liability from the company? why would an ai without a mind remove liability from the company?

In both cases, that actions the ai takes are at the direction of the company, for the company's interests, seems preposterous to me that liability terminates at ai.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#97

Post by fl4regun »

svara wrote: post #80
fl4regun wrote: post #69

Ostensibly 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.

That's too simplistic, since it is in fact very common to be concerned about animal welfare even among people who do eat meat.

And most people wouldn't eat cats, but would eat some of pig, cattle, chicken, what's the difference between those exactly? My point is consciousness is not it, if it were, we (as in a majority) would still eat cats and dogs, or we wouldn't eat any animals. But we clearly have a way of picking and choosing which is OK and which isn't. And in both cases we generally don't give them the same moral consideration we give to people, conscioussness aside. There is something OTHER than consciousness which is important to us.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#98

Post by myrmidon »

addag wrote: post #85

It is interesting to see that in a time when a lot of people accept the theory of materialism for the human brain (i.e the view that everything is physical and the mind is a product of brain), the same people tend to have a "hidden" dualist view on LLMs. Suddenly, they claim that what happens in the brain cannot be replicated anywhere else because "something" is lacking, but either they don't say what it is, or it is…

Completely agree. My view is that a lot of people like to "pretend" (even to themselves) that they have an enlightened worldview, but this does not actually run very deep and is not really true, and any discussion on mind/consciousness reveals it.

Every indicator we have is that thinking/consciousness is simply an emergent property of our nervous systems and was basically bruteforced by evolution, but many people really hate to concede that point.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#99

Post by addag »

dgellow wrote: post #68
addag wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd argue it is mostly a technical constraint in some LLMs which is due to a few optimization factor (injected temperature, random rounding error caused by parallelism). In practice you could very well create a LLM that always reply the same thing for the same input, but it would take more time to complete (to be sure that the operations are made in the same order). I don't think those ones would differ so much from the "random ones" to call the firsts conscious and the second non-conscious.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#100

Post by broptimist »

karmakaze wrote: post #66
prologic wrote: post #2

First, 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.

Microsoft holds a 27% ownership stake in OpenAI
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