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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

#111

Post by layer8 »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #104

The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness. It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember…

There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident or surgery, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#112

Post by eberkund »

Something I've found under discussed when it comes to artificial consciousness is how LLMs interact with the passage of time. I don't know exactly how to articulate this idea but don't see how something which takes an input, performs a calculation and stops can be considered conscious regardless of how life-like the responses end up being. I don't see context windows or the ability to reference a clock each time they are triggered as sufficient solutions. It makes me wonder what an AI system that is ON by default would look like.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#113

Post by handoflixue »

Barrin92 wrote: post #54
throwaway713 wrote: post #22

Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat. Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking…

>and one side has anything less than overwhelming support except that's not the case here. Chiang is explaining and reiterating what is the position that has overwhelming support on the question, and the people he is arguing the opposite side sound like this, which he helpfully quoted in the article "Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and t…

> When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl

Wow, what a cheap ad-hominem. Do you have an actual point?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#114

Post by runarberg »

throwaway713 wrote: post #22

Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat. Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking…

I don‘t see the problem here. Newton could have just as well published an article titled: “Objects with mass attract each other” and Darwin famously wrote a whole book titled “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection” which is just another way of saying: “Natural Selection is How Species Evolve”.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#115

Post by Conscat »

thrownthatway wrote: post #62
shafoshaf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time. This because obvious with things like the Holocaust. Or when you have a legal person (e.g. RFK Jr.) asking to debate a scientist (e.g. Dr. Peter Hotez.)

[flagged]

Obviously 5 year olds deserve access to safe abortions whether they are trans or cis. It's not safe to carry a pregnancy so young.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#116

Post by orangecat »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #61
atleastoptimal wrote: post #18

This makes sense. However there is an issue where many people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc. They use this to claim that since AI is not conscious, AI could never actually "think" and is instead just always a regurgitation of its training data. It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the h…

There is a difference between saying software can never be conscious and saying the software we have today isn't conscious.

Yes. There are really three separate questions:

  - Are current LLMs conscious?
  - Is it possible that future versions of LLMs with similar architectures could be conscious?
  - Can any AI be conscious?
I'd assign probabilities of around 0.1, 0.2, and 0.9. My completely ignorant take is that we probably need something more "dynamic" than a bunch of transformer layers in order to produce consciousness, but I wouldn't be shocked to be mistaken.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#117

Post by WhitneyLand »

Some things that jump out as unfortunate:

- Reductionist analogies like how Microsoft Word is not conscious therefore AI is not.

- Dismissive in saying LLMs are not capable of moral reasoning. Maybe he meant agency or responsibility?

- Builds a case based on a Julius Caesar example without realizing its natural extension leads to a philosophical zombie which is not easy to disprove as consciousness.

- Seems to casually disregard non human sadness as a concern.

- Rolls out the stochastic parrot argument with a new coat of paint. This argument never made sense. Having a predictive element a part of the mechanism doesn’t rule anything out. Proper functionalist arguments tend to say what is required not what excludes.

Overall the article seems like a bit of a red herring. The premise is LLMs are not conscious, but most people don’t think they currently are so what’s the point of the claim?

The more interesting questions are whether artificial consciousness is fundamentally possible, and if so how far away are we and what pieces are still missing.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#118

Post by hgfa-xx »

handoflixue wrote: post #113
Barrin92 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and one side has anything less than overwhelming support except that's not the case here. Chiang is explaining and reiterating what is the position that has overwhelming support on the question, and the people he is arguing the opposite side sound like this, which he helpfully quoted in the article "Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and t…

> When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl Wow, what a cheap ad-hominem. Do you have an actual point?

Yes, the point is that Askell's argument is like that of an 8 year old girl.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#120

Post by oulipo2 »

I believe everything is conscious, even stones. On the long timescale, stones decay, their hydrogen is released, they form water, which brings life, which brings plants and animals, but all of this is one big process, and everything is infused with consciousness from the start
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