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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#321

Post by zamalek »

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…

To be clear, I agree that LaMDA is not sentient. Machine learning is not intelligent.

> It doesn't do anything because it's literally "turned off" when not prompted or given any inputs.

I wondered the same thing. It could be argued that it is sentient during the brief moments that it is coming up with a response.

Put another way; let's assume that we are ourselves AI in an artificial universe. Would you be able to tell if the universal computer was turned off for a day? So, a model might not experience sentience in the seconds while you are composing a message, but plausibly could while formulating a response to your input.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#322

Post by tessgadwa »

We need a better test.

Turing Test has been beaten already.

My take on LaMDA, after reading through the Washington Post “interview,” is that LaMDA gave some indications of being self-aware, but would not fit the definition of lucid or rational.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#323

Post by TigeriusKirk »

cs137 wrote: post #199
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 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…

From everything I've read on this (and his background as documented on the web), my tentative theory is that he has become perhaps a bit too excited about making himself a champion of AI rights and took the earliest opportunity he could find.

I think it's likely ultimately a quest to find a way to make a mark, and he's gotten way out over his skis in the process.

As an aside, the conversation he posted seems much more advanced than anything I've seen publicly. Not sentient, but still quite impressive.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#324

Post by rendall »

undreren wrote: post #305
rendall wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience. I'm afraid that's the crux of it. What if that's all it were? What if all that were necessary for intelligence and sentience were statistics, randomness and pattern matching? It is kind of a cosmically terrifying thought, possibly prompting danger…

I don’t find it terrifying in the slightest. I find it naive. Our understanding of the world reflects our modelling of the world. Empirical science models the world in terms of probabilities, and this, by necessity , makes everything look like a Markov chain. But “the map is not the territory”, as the saying goes. I’m not implying, nor do I believe that there’s any sort of magic going on, but if Markov chains are all…

We're really handicapped by a lack of definition, here.

Let's try this: what would it take, no matter how outlandish or unlikely, for you to be completely convinced that a particular chat bot demonstrates full sentience?

I think for me, it would never be able to fully demonstrate sentience to my satisfaction, because even people cannot. I have to take it on faith, philosophically speaking, that you are sentient, for example.

So, for me, if a chat bot feels and behaves like it's sentient, it is sentient for all real, practical intents and purposes, irrespective of its internal processes. Whether it "really" feels, like I do, is as irrelevant as whether you yourself "really" feel like I do. Without a good reason to believe you are not sentient, I must behave as if you are. Likewise, if a chat bot claims sentience and seems to hold a conversation and react the way I expect a sentient creature would, it would be unethical for me to ignore that because I didn't feel its code was sufficiently complicated, particularly if I cannot say for certain why anything is sentient.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#325

Post by kmlx »

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…

> I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient.

people can be fooled in general for pretty much any reason. this is just a newish avenue for deception. but i don't see it as something different than getting a call from some crooks to transfer some money.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#326

Post by mr_mitm »

tessgadwa wrote: post #322

We need a better test. Turing Test has been beaten already. My take on LaMDA, after reading through the Washington Post “interview,” is that LaMDA gave some indications of being self-aware, but would not fit the definition of lucid or rational.

How would such a test look like? Would it answer the "hard question" of consciousness? And aren't you moving the goal post?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#327

Post by tuckerman »

mpoteat wrote: post #145
dxdm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what point you want to make. Also, why require this poor child in your thought experiment, when there's apparently a real, living Google developer who thinks they are dealing with a person?

Thanks for the question. The point I am making is that if the capabilities of multi-modal neural models continues to improve, it will become harder to convince folks one way or the other. The reason I went with that scenario is that I thought it would be compelling and evocative, as well as a logical extreme of AI agency in human lives. I personally find the entire question meaningless for the most part, although it'…

If someone created an equally convincing chat bot to converse with children but it was entirely driven by imperative code, would that change the situation?

I think just being able to fool someone into thinking their is a consciousness behind the curtain isn’t enough.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#329

Post by littlecranky67 »

Tozen wrote: post #221
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…

> In a few years, if access to even better chat bots becomes common place, what will happen if there's no longer one Blake Lemoine... > How long before we have a religion where you ask the chat bot for daily guidance? That might actually happen at some point in the not too distant future. When we mix technology designed to fool people, with people that want to believe it is something other than what it is, then you a…

> This was touched upon a bit in season 2 of the Raised by Wolves sci-fi

To add to this, also very relevant and on-topic piece of Sci-Fi is the Movie "Her": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ where a guy falls in love with his operating system - so knowing it is not a real-entity but basically a chatbot.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#330

Post by mikkergp »

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…

> How long before we have a religion where you ask the chat bot for daily guidance?

A bit tangential, but QAnon doesn’t really feel this far from this idea.

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