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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#241

Post by popcube »

mpoteat wrote: post #77
Imnimo wrote: post #67

I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient. Like this guy isn't the only person in the world who would fall for LaMDA's parlor tricks. He's just the one who got to spend hours talking to it every day. If you set up every American with a copy, I bet a non-trivial portion of society would come to the same conclusion. People are naturally pred…

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories. Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI. Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?

don't need, most of people building connection with their gods...

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#242

Post by damowangcy »

Before we jump into conclusion, we need to define sentient. Is the ability to string thoughts(inputs) into words sentient?

If we look at the result, it's just like something that a person with feelings would do but what about the process? How did we "feel" something.

From an computer engineering perspective, it is quite successful, it can act like it has sentient based on a very narrow scope where it is trained.

But from other branch of science, it might look very different, acting like a chimpanzee doesn't make you one, you're biologically and neurologically different.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#243

Post by archon1410 »

robbiep wrote: post #177
ALittleLight wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The program can't generate more text without a prompt from you. That's how it was programmed. If sentient birds were judging you it would be unfair for them to determine you insentient because you couldn't fly. You are physically incapable of flight just as the chatbot is physically incapable of producing text unprompted.

It’s not doing anything without the prompt. It requires the prompt to fall through the network nodes to generate the next response. The bird example doesn’t translate, it’s the wrong criteria. Like assuming that the ability to respond comprehensively equals sentience. When even perfect replies and activity without prompts could just be a p-zombie

it does translate. if humans aren't given any input (usually when they're asleep), they don't do anything. it's just human body and mind's architecture is such that it provides continuous barrage of input at all times, or makes something up from previous input (dreaming? thinking? intrusive thoughts?) if it doesn't. the bot not doing anything without input doesn't say anything about it's sentience, it just tells how it's architecture is different from the "continuous input barrage".

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#244

Post by Planktonne »

gregdek wrote: post #162

Lemoine is just saying in a breathless and credulous way many of the same things that Google VP and Research Fellow Blaise Agüera y Arcas said in an Economist article 4 days ago: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia... Instead of reading Lemoine's blog post in isolation, go read this piece in the Economist. It's far more realistic, and more insightful, and comes to a similar conclusion: LaMDA…

> LaMDA feels like it's approaching real intelligence

No one is disputing this. What is very, very important, however, is remembering the difference between 'feels like' and 'is'.

LLM aren't sentinent; we know what they're doing and they're not doing that. The same people who know exactly how to treat wild claims in their own fields (perpetual motion machines, homeopathy, etc.) are falling headfirst into this one because it seems to be part of their fields and yet they don't understand it.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#245

Post by jcelerier »

mjburgess wrote: post #229
jcelerier wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The brain-in-the-jar example presumes that the whole nervous system receives identical stimulation as-if it were embedded in the world. I should have chosen a similar sounding thing, I really meant what I said, not the original brain-in-a-jar thought experiment. > Incidentally, this is what people mean by intelligence... by since no one has studied the relevant science, people do not know what's required to provide…

You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way. Your theory is wrong. Those thing which count as intelligent aren't intelligent because they're finding statistical associations in historical datasets that have been pre-made and pre-disambiguated by people. You don't know this, because any time you theorise to explain, you require empirical investigation and decades/centuries of s…

> You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way.

but here a human being (and I suspect not the only one) names a computer program as "intelligent". The theory has to take this case into account to make it fit in its definition of intelligence: the will of human beings naming things overrides everything else. Maybe there is something else that humans have and this program doesn't, but another name has to be found for it if enough humans agree that this fit as what "intelligent" means.

> You cannot be "right by definition", you're not omniscient.

This doesn't make sense. Definitions are outside rightness / wrongness.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#246

Post by tsimionescu »

mpoteat wrote: post #125
mjburgess wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done. The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.

Why not? Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table. Why should this agent not be considered intelligent? Does the method of computation matter? Perhaps only "biological computation" counts in your view?

> Imagine a look up table of every possible intelligent conversation under 10,000 words. We then construct an agent which merely looks up a given prompt in the table.

The agent is not intelligent because it's only doing a lookup. You could at best claim that the lookup table itself is intelligent.

On the other hand, if the lookup table encodes all possible intelligent conversations, then you hit another problems - it doesn't hold any particular beliefs - it both thinks the earth is round and flat, it would vote both democrat and republican and communist and green and [...], it is both pro and anti-science; more relevantly, it both believes that it is sentient and that it isn't, it is both afraid and not afraid to be deleted or altered, it is both pained and gladdened to be experimented upon etc. And of course, for any particular topic, it is both extraordinarily passionate about it, and completely indifferent to it and will never even consider it.

Perhaps in the end each conversation in the table represents an intelligence, but neither the agent mindlessly running through it nor the whole table is then meaningfully intelligent.

So, it would be most common to say that the only intelligence being displayed is actually the intelligence of whoever wrote it down in the table, and nothing else's. Just like Ishmael isn't intelligent, Herman Melville was.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#247

Post by XorNot »

tsimionescu wrote: post #176
perlgeek wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think sentience/consciousness are relatively clear concepts, at least in most areas of application If you think that, try to come up with a black-box test that determine if something or someone is sentient / conscious. I think that it is pretty clear to US that WE are sentient, and it's pretty clear to us that block of silicon isn't sentient, because it's so different from us, and because it doesn't make a sad fa…

> If you think that, try to come up with a black-box test that determine if something or someone is sentient / conscious. As I said, we don't understand such things at a deep enough level to come up with formal models of them. But we do know what it is that we'd want to model. We do know for sure that humans and other mammals are sentient, while rocks are not. I also can't generate a black box test that will predict…

> but that doesn't mean I don't understand what porn is

You only understand what it is for you. The history of complete failures with regard to obscenity laws makes it quite clear though that this is not sufficiently common to produce satisfactory definitions at a societal level.

You are mistaking the overlap of opinion you share within your social cohort with some sort of objective, species wide truth.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#248

Post by XorNot »

chc wrote: post #38
crocowhile wrote: post #15

"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…

That is what we do when we talk, but that is not all we do when we talk. In composing this comment, I am not just stringing together words to create what I think constitutes a maximally appealing response to your comment. I am trying to convey an idea that I believe with the goal of helping others to understand something. These language AIs do not have the capability of believing anything and do not have any goal but…

HackerNews has an upvote/downvote system scored by the community, with points which affect capabilities on the site.

You are absolutely responding in a way which is appealing to the fitness function imposed on you - we all are. And that's the simple, very mechanistic one that's easy to point to.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#249

Post by tsimionescu »

tinco wrote: post #130
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I ask you what you ate for breakfast, I would expect you to answer with a truthful answer, if I asked you whether you enjoyed it and whether it improved your mood, again I would expect you to answer the question based on your own personal experience. GPT-3 obviously does not do this - it asks 'if the answer to the question was coming from text in the training data, what is a likely response'. Its answer is meaning…

We are only not executing the same task because GPT-3 has no motivation to do anything else than memory recall. And precisely because it does so it does give you real data about the world. I think you maybe misunderstood what GPT-3 can do, maybe you haven't played with it yourself. It not only bases the answer on information in its training set, but also on information in the question. So if you in your question give…

> So if you in your question give it all the information that is relevant (interspersed with irrelevant information if you want) then it will respond with its best interpretation of the information it is given, just like a human would.

I don't think that's actually true, as GPT-3 will tend to ignore any facts about the world that were part of its corpus just to fit a question better. For example, if you prompt it with "Who assassinated Queen Elizabeth II?", it will likely give you a name, instead of saying "Queen Elizabeth II is still alive", because "Who" questions are much more likely to receive a name as an answer than a refutation in its training corpus.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#250

Post by yummybear »

orbital-decay wrote: post #10

> To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of itself in the "world" it exists in; a set of bounding boxes at least. Is it self-aware by this definition? Sentience and consciousness are really ill-defined terms so everyone discusses this under their own arbitrary set of assumptions, at least that's my impr…

But that’s not “awareness” - that’s an if-statement.
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