It's becoming painfully evident that no one really understood the argument behind the Turing test.
What is the argument behind the Turing test?
Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#292> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding. Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power. If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is…
His intention is irrelevant, as is "trying to highlight a fact" as if it were the final say: all Chiang is doing here is using fancy white-collar words to argue the same argument leveled against Hinton and others regarding next-token prediction. And his audience, who have even less technical understanding, lap it all up unawares. Chiang is a writer and needs to stay his own lane, not RP as an expert; or, if he wants to do journalism on this topic then he should actually do the work and talk to more actual experts not just the ones cherrypicked for his opinion piece.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#293The 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.
Interesting point but even those people’s brains aren’t immutable. The have habit change without memory.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#294TL;DR, the arguments are: - If you asked an LLM to imitate somebody, it's not creating a digital consciousness of that person, so if you ask an LLM to pretend to be a helpful chatbot, that persona is also not conscious. - they can't be conscious because they generate one token at a time, - nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious; so therefore LLMs are also not conscious. - you can't ha…
"nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious" - that seems like an odd take. There are plenty of people in the camp of panpsychism that would be happy to argue that even simple IF/ELSE AI's are potentially conscious.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if modern Star Trek could make this episode.
Definitely not. Kurtzman Star Trek is not really Star Trek in any spiritual sense, it’s a vessel for political messaging (they’ve pretty much said as much)
AFAICT, Star Trek has ALWAYS been a vessel for political messaging.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#296Obviously we don't know what makes for consciousness, but it seems extremely likely that it requires some sort of persistent internal state and continuous experience. LLMs don't do either of those things after training.
Wouldn't the context window qualify as persistent internal state, and the expansion of the context be continuous experience? Even within the realm of computing a single token, I'm not sure what would separate the token generation process from the brain's own thinking process - the brain's experience, when looked at closely enough, is also not really "continuous" to a greater degree than procedurally moving from one state to the next.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#297Embarrassingly incompetent article. Given that one can observe up to 40 definitions of consciousness ( https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT - also many definitions are unrelated at all), "consciousness" is almost certainly just a family resemblance category at best, and talk about whether or not something is "conscious" without providing definitions is simply completely unserious. To make progress, you have to talk abou…
Science fiction author declares moral program of Derek Parfit essentially wrong
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#298> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding. Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power. If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is…
I would maybe agree with you if the entire realm of human existence was limited to words. There are many human experiences that transcend text, and indeed can hardly be adequately described using text.
Sure, it's the best we have online, but that does not make "the internet" the sum of all human experience. To reduce all of humanity down to the text on the internet is reducing us to the level of machines to fit the requirement of what a machine can process / simulate.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#299Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#300I really take issue with the kind of argument that is used here. This is not a genuine argument and tries to make the entire question of consciousness into one something that is just supposed to be evident and obvious and to suggest anything else is just silly. The author starts by deconstructing artificial processes, but doesn't stop to deconstruct biological ones. A good faith argument would seek to find common gro…
everyone has emotion even if it's muted, and we have reactions and desires as a result of having bodies and remembered experiences using them... these are constantly integrated into our working memories AI doesn't really have any of that yet, but we're maybe not so far off
Is it really so easy to assert that an AI doesn't have emotion? Lots of the AI models are capable of getting pissed off at the users, especially the earlier ones. And sure, their emotion is merely a bias that the context window generates in their weights... but how is that different from humans? In humans, emotion is sourced from a bunch of chemical signalling, and those chemicals bias your word choice and action choice.
At a deconstructed level, I struggle to find a meaningful difference between the two.