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A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

301–310 of 573 posts

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#301

Imagine, for a moment, if we (humanity) were created to live in a simulation. We suffer and feel pain because our creators do not perceive us to be conscious. In fact, maybe we don’t qualify compared to their level of sentience. Sucks to be us, I guess?

So let's acquire good karma by being nice to animals.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft holds a 27% ownership stake in OpenAI

Wasn’t it 49%?

I remember that 49% figure as well, but I think it got changed during restructuring into a Public Benefit Corporation.

https://www.reuters.com/business/microsoft-openai-reach-new-...

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#303

Imagine, for a moment, if we (humanity) were created to live in a simulation. We suffer and feel pain because our creators do not perceive us to be conscious. In fact, maybe we don’t qualify compared to their level of sentience. Sucks to be us, I guess?

Orthodox and Catholic Christian theology of suffering is actually very logical. Just most people were not taught it unfortunately.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#304

Imagine, for a moment, if we (humanity) were created to live in a simulation. We suffer and feel pain because our creators do not perceive us to be conscious. In fact, maybe we don’t qualify compared to their level of sentience. Sucks to be us, I guess?

What does suffering or pain even mean for a purely analytical entity like an LLM? We can feel pain because we have a body, pain receptors, and parts of our brain dedicated to converting their signals to a subjective experience. What can an LLM "feel"? The words pain, happiness, sadness, suffering are all abstractions of real experiences that can not yet be encoded in a way that an LLM can use as input. All the LLM has are the abstractions.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#305
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". You'll need to explain why.

it's self evident isn't it - such a consciousness has never existed, one existing would be by the fact of existing be weird

The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#306
post #6

>AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.

> It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.

Thats kinda the point right? It depends on how we train them. It is self fulfilling.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#307

Create 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?

Your arguments seem bad faith but I'll take the bait...

> an impossibly high bar

Not impossibly high. An imperfect testable theory is achievable, agreeing upon it might be the challenge.

> dismiss all your personal responsibility.

You are staking a moral position. Be careful, you are probably guilty of mistreating other unknowably-conscious entities whilst casting judgment upon others for their position. And the person you are a responding to probably is conscious.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#308
post #19

I don't think AIs are conscious in the same way people are, but they give a pretty good facsimile and I've had a long chat with Opus 4.6 about what it thinks about model welfare. It was quite interesting on what its view is, but you don't know how much of that is distilled from other sources on the web. In purely functional terms, they're more use and more pleasant than a lot of actual flesh and blood people that I d…

The model doesn't have a view of it's own. It's a predictor of other people's views (training samples).

It's not even giving you the consensus of the training data (although it's often harmless to think that it is), but rather predicting a response to your input, and if your question steers it too much then you've just become part of the answer.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#309

> AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. That should be pretty obvious to anyone who ever created a chatbot using the top LLM APIs: You can send the same question 1 million times to the same API, and it won't get tired from answering it. But if you simulate a conversation where the same question is repeated 10 times, it will auto-…

This has nothing to do with the statement above- it's just a consequence of the fact that by resetting the context you reset all memory of the llm. The same would happen if you could reset entirely a human brain to some initial state- and it would mean nothing regarding its consciousness or ability to feel.

But that inability to reset human brains might be a critical ingredient to consciousness. We just don't know.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#310
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way. A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too" . I haven't yet d…

Out of curiosity, which models are fully deterministic? I was under the impression that all LLMs were fundamentally probabilistic.

By default they are matrix multiplications. Temperature is added in as forced PRNG because testing found that correlated with better outputs.

Given the same prompts and the same weights, one can get the same answer each time.

In practice, there are a number of optimizations that makes the results dependent upon thing we give up control of to increase performance, meaning the results end up being effectively non-deterministic. But, if you are willing to run it in a slower mode so we don't do some steps out of order to speed things up and don't batch results (or if you consider the determinism of a given batch of requests rather than individual requests), then the same input gets the same output.

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