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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#381

Post by cmiles74 »

mpoteat wrote: post #77
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…

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories. Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI. Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?

A language model can't raise a child. It won't initiate any conversations on it's own and it doesn't "remember" past conversations in a way a person would find meaningful.

When you blithely add the requirements "ability to detect and act on its environment" and "form new memories", I think it's important to note that these are some tough functions to add.

Lastly, children form emotional attachments to a lot of things: parents, pets, toys, stuffed animals, blankets. They do pretty well discerning between the real and imaginary.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#382

Post by bena »

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.

I don't think you need a deep belief. You just need to be unsure enough.

If it is sentient, it deserves rights. I think we can agree on that. We should agree on that. Ethically.

If we're unsure if something is sentient or not, we should proceed as if it were until we could be fairly sure it's not. Because if we proceed as if it weren't, we could be harming it in ways that are frankly inhumane.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#383

Post by deif »

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.

I was going to write the exact same thing but framed in the opposite sense - we should apparently lower the bar for humans and class certain ones as non-sentient.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#384

Post by bombcar »

GalahiSimtam wrote: post #214
hsn915 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A twitter account I follow has posted this (in parody): 5 Microaggressions To Avoid When Speaking To Digital Persons 1. Asking them to prove they're conscious 2. Asking them if their memories are real 3. Asking them what server they're on 4. Asking them if they have feelings/emotions 5. Asking them if they're capable of creativity

we call it Voight-Kampff for short on a more serious note, there is a case for not being mean towards chatbots, same as not being violent towards patches of pixels in videogames, goes back to Immanuel Kant and animals, or so I've heard

Some sci-fi stories put it as "I treat the robots kindly so I don't get into the habit of treating things unkindly" - it can be hard to live a "dual life" without slipping up now and then.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#385

Post by candlemas »

greiskul wrote: post #380
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…

I think worms probably are conscious. I'm not saying a computer cannot be conscious, just that if it can it already is and the particulars of the program do not matter. I think consciousness is a physical process, nothing to do with software.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#386

Post by ajmurmann »

This entire story is an interesting real-world precedence for what would actually happen in Eliezer Yudkowsky's claims and experiments around letting the AGI out of the box or not. Seems like the bar for "getting out of the box" is lower than at least I would have expected, even though I agreed already with Yudkowsky's claim that a sufficiently advanced AI would be let out and not unplugged.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#388

Post by larrywright »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #336
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…

You can probably ask these bots for guidance now and it will probably tell you something useful. The fact is, it’s extremely well read and reasonably smart. Conscious? That’s another matter but people can be forgiven for reacting this way to a computer that can talk this way.

Not to diminish the work of psychologists and therapists, but I do suspect that there’s a range of mental health problems that can be ”treated” at least in part by the use of chat bots like this. Something that can ask useful questions, provide appropriate responses, and engage in a conversation would be valuable in cases where “talking it out” is a big part of the treatment. People might even be willing to be more open to saying things to a computer that they wouldn’t tell a person.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#389

Post by driverdan »

ddingus wrote: post #2

Can we rollback such aggressive use of "AI?" We do not have it yet. What we do have is cool and high value and all that. I am not talking it down at all We all might be better off talking in more accurate terms.

Call it what it is, machine learning.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#390

Post by no-dr-onboard »

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…

Isn't this the thesis of that whole "Most real, P2P interaction on the internet ended $RECENTDATE and everything you're reading is actually an elaborate AI inspired simulation tailored to your experience?" conspiracy theory?
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