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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#261

Post by tmalsburg2 »

stavros wrote: post #228
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "LaMDA is not sentient because come on" I think this is a perfectly fine argument because the claim is so outrageous. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and none has been presented. I'd also say that defining sentience is the job of the person claiming it.

No, it's not. You can't say "this is false because it's unlikely to be true". Some things are unlikely to be true and are .

In lack of any evidence, you can and actually must rely on your priors. There are things that were a-priori unlikely but are still considered true. However, we believe that they are true because solid evidence has been provided to override our priors. In the present case, there is no such evidence.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#262

Post by tinco »

tsimionescu wrote: post #249
tinco wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

I wonder how many examples it would need to respond with "hah, trick question!". I wonder how it would do if you managed to frame the question more neutrally. To be fair you might trick a 7 year old into responding with a fantasy answer as well.

I tried to get GPT-3 to tell me the most popular forums on some topics, and I noticed it would never include subreddits. So I prefaced my question with "given that subreddits are also a type of forum.." and it would give me a list that would include subreddits. I have to admit that in that new list it would then fail to mention some forum that was in the previous list, so it didn't have a super reliable ability reorganize information.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#263

Post by Tozen »

tsimionescu wrote: post #257
concinds wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do know approximately how emphatic he was internally, since the WaPo article reposted in its entirety the internal Google Doc he sent to executives on LaMDA being sentient. Here's the language Lemoine actually used: > But is it sentient? We can’t answer that question definitively at this point, but it’s a question to take seriously. > John Searle once gave a presentation here at Google. He observed that there does…

Per the WaPo article, he also came in with a lawyer he ahd retained to represent the interests of LaMDA. I don't see how that can square with anything other than a deep belief that the model is as sentient as a human.

It could also be possible that he doesn't really believe that LaMDA is actually sentient, but that he wants to cause some type of trouble for Google because he was disgruntled or indirectly shed light on something they are doing. With the press and public being aware of LaMDA, he might hope that other things that Google is doing might come out.

What are all the things that Google is doing or planning to do with their AI?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#264

Post by t_mann »

The points are all well taken, but it's also a bit reminiscent of how we keep shifting the bar for what makes humans supposedly unique among animals with every new paper in behavioral biology (some of which with questionable reproducibility, which is another topic of its own).

We should acknowledge that in a lot of senses it doesn't really matter whether AI experts agree that something most definitely isn't sentient if enough humans falls in love with it.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#265

Post by Tozen »

sriku wrote: post #202
rlue wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…

Wouldn't this be relatively easy if we wanted it? We could just feed it a "time step" token periodically?

To take that a step further, why couldn't such an AI periodically generate questions to ask itself?

Being good at generating questions, could become almost as important as answering them.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#266

Post by jmmcd »

hackernews1134 wrote: post #230
cs137 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't think this guy intended to run a hoax or generate publicity, given that he's made himself look foolish. I think he was actually seduced by the idea of a sentient computer. It's not that far a leap to go from the stance of well-respected people inside Google who believe we'll see artificial sentience within 30 years to believing that we've achieved it now with something like LaMDA. We're all suspectible…

Why isn't it simply "asleep" when not questioned? In a "coma" perhaps. One made from our programming / "genetics"?!?! I don't think it is sentient without more evidence. But just wondering if not "thinking" when not questioned is a good reason it isn't?!?!

When it's not predicting a word, it's not doing anything. Literally GPU usage goes to zero.

Still it's interesting! Obviously we have to program the system to stop after a sentence or two so the user can read it. What if we could program it to keep "talking to itself", eg speculating about possible continuations on both sides.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#267

Post by stavros »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #261
stavros wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. You can't say "this is false because it's unlikely to be true". Some things are unlikely to be true and are .

In lack of any evidence, you can and actually must rely on your priors. There are things that were a-priori unlikely but are still considered true. However, we believe that they are true because solid evidence has been provided to override our priors. In the present case, there is no such evidence.

Sure, but the title isn't "LaMDA is probably not sentient", it's "LaMDA is not sentient", and there's no definitive proof of that.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#268

Post by Joeri »

tsimionescu wrote: post #249
tinco wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

Anyone who has ever spoken to a small child knows they often “think” in the same way. They are likely to answer a who question with a name, sometimes laughably made up, because this is what they think they’re supposed to do and they lack the higher order reasoning to think it through. They also will continually forget things they already know when it suits their purpose. But nobody would say a toddler is not sentient.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#269

Post by smolder »

its_Caffeine wrote: post #259
rlue wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is giving Lemoine far too much credit. He's not an idiot; he's a charlatan. He's acting in bad faith and it should be extremely obvious to anyone who's tried to have a conversation with a chat bot before. Picture yourself sitting at a desk, typing messages into a program you wrote. You hit enter, you get a response. Then what? Silence. It waits idly for more input from you, the user. For all its talk of lone…

I don't know why you're attributing malice on his part when it's far more likely that he's suffering from some sort of mental health issue.

Poor mental health and deliberate antisocial behavior that you could call malicious often go hand in hand. It's not very clear to me over the internet here whether he's having a laugh behind an act, making some calculated move for self-gain, really perceives what he's done as good and true, or even whether he sees it as socially good somehow despite being an act. It could be malicious behavior, it could be unhinged, it might be both, but I doubt it's neither.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#270

Post by Tozen »

tsimionescu wrote: post #60
ehsankia wrote: post #13

I also think the claims are overblown, but I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we…

> I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. You're missing the point. Humans use their language to think or communicate about a problem that they want to solve. If LaMDA produces the sentence…

> ...A human uttering that sentence is doing it because they want to feel validated or something similar (well, assuming they're not proving a point, like I was here).

> This difference is crucial to understand: LaMDA is not an agent with desires that it expresses in language...

There is a flaw in that line of reasoning, because an AI could be designed to mimic or generate human-like emotions. Such functions could be part of its core programming. For that matter, how "real" are human emotions? Aren't they something the brain generates?

If for example, you designed a robot to experience "pain" when kicked and damaged, how much less real would it be than the human equivalent?

Consequently, for such an AI that was designed that way, it could be expressing an equivalent to various human emotions. That we would perceive its pain as "less real", could be partially a matter of how we evaluate its importance, as in robots or lower animals are lesser than.

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