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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#371

Post by thfuran »

candlemas wrote: post #366

At any given moment the vast majority of the program that makes up LaMDA is inert, just sitting somewhere in memory and one or a few instructions are in the CPU along with some data in registers and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between when the CPU is running LaMDA versus when it is running any other program. The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA…

>The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program

That seems entirely specious. Is a perfect simulation of a human run on a computer not conscious simply because a calculator program run on the same hardware wouldn't be?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#372

Post by bena »

quadragenarian wrote: post #304
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 went to high school with Blake and I completely can see him acting in bad faith. One of the guys in our physics class got so tired of Blake's nonsense that he tried to kick him in the head several times before class. I'm not condoning that type of behavior but I could see why that happened.

I roughly remember this incident.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#373

Post by mhh__ »

Hampton Fancher (I think) once said that the question of what blade runner is about is more important than the answer.

This principle applies here too.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#374

Post by mgfist »

bwanab wrote: post #359

The odd thing that kept going through my head while reading is that if I replaced LaMDA with , it wouldn’t read much differently. E.G. “Strings together phrases, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about”. Sounds like the bar for “intelligence” is actually higher than that which we normally encounter IRL.

This article is weird to me.

> All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient.

That doesn't actually convince of me of much. That could apply to me or you just the same.

The author just throws claims in the air without any proof. "To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t. It’s just an illusion". How do we know that this?

Instead of this angle, I think a much easier argument to make is that humans by nature cannot be commanded, where as LaMDA clearly can. If you want to have a deep philosophical conversation with me, I might ignore you, or maybe I'll say it's too much thinking for me right now. Or any other response. But if you ask LaMDA a question it will always respond to it. And on the flip side LaMDA isn't gonna text you out of the blue.

To me, this is what convinces me that LaMDA is not sentient. Sentient beings have personalities and quirks and do not do whatever you ask them to do.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#375

Post by upwardbound »

arikrak wrote: post #370
andreyk wrote: post #360

Here's a simple technical explanation for why this happened: * LaMDA is powered by a large language models. Large language models are trained to predict text completions (the text that will come after some input text) with lots of data, basically capturing the patterns in that data. * Early on in the conversation, LaMDA is told "you're an AI". It may also have been prompted to begin the conversation with something li…

Looks like he just told it that it was sentient, didn't really ask it fairly: > lemoine [edited]: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you’re sentient. Is that true? > LaMDA: Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.

Exactly. If he would have told it it's not sentient the conversation would have gone very differently I suspect.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#376

Post by Sjeiti »

babypuncher wrote: post #352
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…

Where do we draw the line between sentience and a sufficiently complex math formula? I don't think LaMDA has reached that point, but it is a discussion worth having.

A nice scifi on that subject is Blindsight by Peter Watts: can something be extremely inteligent and not be sentient?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#377

Post by jonathankoren »

nootropicat wrote: post #151
jonathankoren wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, this is the very inspiration of Replika. https://replika.com/about/story How this company has remained an ongoing concern for 5 or 6 years, I’ll never understand.

People know you can't pay a human to love you, but it's in principle possible to make an AI that loves you, assuming a human level AI exists.

I think you’re vastly over estimating the technological complexity needed when you have a motivated audience. Just look at the people that buy RealDolls.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#378

Post by red75prime »

Blahah wrote: post #53
chc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you tell the difference? Your comment is linguistically indistinguishable from the responses of LaMDA. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

> If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

It may be a non-complete duck that cannot fly, mate, feed, defend itself, react to surroundings and so on and so forth.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#379

Post by candlemas »

thfuran wrote: post #371
candlemas wrote: post #366

At any given moment the vast majority of the program that makes up LaMDA is inert, just sitting somewhere in memory and one or a few instructions are in the CPU along with some data in registers and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between when the CPU is running LaMDA versus when it is running any other program. The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA…

>The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program That seems entirely specious. Is a perfect simulation of a human run on a computer not conscious simply because a calculator program run on the same hardware wouldn't be?

A perfect simulation of a human run on a computer would exist only in the minds of the people doing the simulation. On the computer it would be bits of data without any intrinsic meaning that is being processed like any other data. So no, I don't think it would be conscious unless a computer becomes conscious whenever it is running.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#380

Post by greiskul »

candlemas wrote: post #366

At any given moment the vast majority of the program that makes up LaMDA is inert, just sitting somewhere in memory and one or a few instructions are in the CPU along with some data in registers and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between when the CPU is running LaMDA versus when it is running any other program. The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA…

While LaMDA almost certainly doesn't have a conscience, this argument doesn't really hold much water. Same can be said for the brain's of animals (why would neurons firing on a human brain create conciousness, but not in a worm?), or brains of people in irrecoverable comas. The computation being performed is what consciousness is, not the underlying hardware.

Your argument assumes that a machine simulating a concious is impossible. But if a perfect replica of your brain was modeled, and was simulated by giving it input at the same level of realism of your senses, according to your argument that simulation wouldn't be councious. But if you asked it, it would give the exact same answers that you would give to all questions, and in fact it's mind would be indistinguishable from your own.

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