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Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

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Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#271

Post by mlcrypto »

whimsicalism wrote: post #240
zach_garwood wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who wears tshirt and jeans every day, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on others' fashion choices. But if I wanted people to take me seriously, that wouldn't be my first choice of outfit.

e: Keeping below comment for posterity, but given that this is his official twitter profile photo I'm going to retract it. > But if I wanted people to take me seriously, that wouldn't be my first choice of outfit. You would wear the most serious outfits at all time so no publication can ever take a picture of you to make fun of you? Sounds exhausting. But let's be clear - it's not like he picked out this photo to be…

It's his LinkedIn photo

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#272

Post by mmmpetrichor »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #230
justapassenger wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s as simple as that.

How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?

Humans didn't create dogs by typing a bunch of letters into a keyboard.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#273

Post by Cupertino95014 »

logicalmonster wrote: post #260
Cupertino95014 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't whistleblowing. It's blowing his own horn to make himself the Flavor of the Week (if that's not a mixed metaphor).

I don't know whether this AI is sentient in any real sense and can't read Blake's mind to see what his real motives were, but I'd say that if he genuinely believed that the AI achieved sentience, there's a reasonable case to call him a whistleblower.

I can't quote the whistleblower statutes from memory, but I believe that, even if we conceded your point about his state of mind: there is no law that Google would be violating.

Is there some law regulating sentience of computer systems? Of course not. So is there a law about "developing dangerous weapons"? Maybe. But is "sentience" a dangerous weapon?

You have to stretch the laws to the breaking point for your claim to work, sorry.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#274

Post by NHQ »

srvmshr wrote: post #4

LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…

No post body was provided.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#275

Post by bobsmooth »

davesque wrote: post #92

This is going to sound like I'm defending this guy which I'm not. It's also going to sound like a less technical point which I claim it isn't. I see some people chiming in here saying things like, "I've got a PhD. It's just statistics. Definitely not sentient." I recognize this sort of comment as basically saying, "There's nothing fundamentally different about how these things work that makes them somehow special." A…

Every other form of life we know of has some sort of continuous sensory input. These chatbots take in text, do math, and spit out text. They don't have the fundamentals for sentience.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#276

Post by chris11 »

UIUC_06 wrote: post #12

No judgment about whether Google was right or not. Same for Lemoine. As a career move for him, this only makes sense if he wants a brief, meteoric career in media or public advocacy. He can get articles published in The New Yorker and go on TV now. Maybe he can sue Google and get a settlement. In five years, there will be AI systems much better than LaMDA and no one will return his calls. He's got a name, whereas if…

> Same for Lemoine.

Lemoine got a lawyer invovled and they started filing lawsuits on the AI's behalf. I'm not shocked he was fired.

https://fortune.com/2022/06/23/google-blade-lemoine-ai-lamda...

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#277

Post by simonh »

whittingtonaaon wrote: post #202
KerrAvon wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite following your argument on pain. Ability to feel pain is not sentience.

It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.

Dictionary definitions are of limited utility in philosophical discussions because they often make very broad assumptions. For example computers can certainly sense things, they can detect inputs and make decisions based on those inputs. What is the difference between feeling and sensing though?

In this case by ‘feel’ we might implicitly assume various capabilities of the subject experiencing the feeling, like self awareness. If we’re being precise we can’t just say feeling is enough, we need to state the assumptions the dictionary leaves unstated.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#278

Post by zach_garwood »

None of this coverage has convinced me in the slightest that we've encountered a sentient software. But it has really highlighted for me how incredibly cool human language is that we can use math to generate it, and it makes sense! I really should look into this technology more.

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#279

Post by snowwrestler »

briga wrote: post #48

Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)

This is sort of begging the question, because the only beings broadly considered sentient right now are humans. We’re the type specimen. So when people say something does or does not seem sentient, they’re basically opining on whether it seems like human behavior. While a rigorous physical definition would be incredibly useful, it’s not necessary for such comparisons. We make a lot of judgments without those.

It’s also sort of irrelevant that we have not clearly defined sentience because we have clearly defined how these large computerized language model systems work, and they are working exactly as they were designed, and only that way. Sentience might be a mystery but machine learning is not; we know how it works (that’s why it works).

Re: Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient

#280

Post by dcow »

bee_rider wrote: post #185
dekhn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I know the source of the statement. It's not a philosophical statement. Please define think, and am, first. Remember, Descartes spent a lot of time positing that the mind and the brain were distinct, and that the mind was non-corporeal, non-physical, non-matter. Not super-convincing to me (whereas I think what he had to say about the Great Deceiver poses a huge challenge to those who believe that humans can…

Does it really say that? I thought the point was more -- there definitely is an entity which observes subjective experience, the "I" in I think therefore I am, and... that's about all I can say. That everyone else experiences some sort of internal reality is wild speculation. And while my experience may be entirely artificial (that is, maybe I'm a brain in a vat being fed signals), I still must exist to be experienci…

And what follows more practically is that even if we are all brains in a vat, it doesn't matter. Because it can’t.

I’m somewhat surprised this discussion got so philosophical in the first place. Sure we can question the nature of sentience and argue about its definition all we want, but the unsettling problem is that we can’t prove anything. As time goes on, we are only going to encounter more, definitely sentient, people who, like Lemoine, are absolutely convinced they are communicating with another sentient being (whether Lemoine is or is not acting faithfully here, in this instance, is besides the point). What do we do?

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