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Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

arxiv.org

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Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#41

Post by jfengel »

bawolff wrote: post #13
jfengel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of the early days of "AI" when that consisted of building chess engines, because chess is what "intelligent" people do. They quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem, doing the thing that humans are bad at and computers are good at. In a sense language models appear to be doing the same thing again, one step down the scale. They're doing a human-specific thing, but missing whatever it is…

> I'm reminded of the early days of "AI" when that consisted of building chess engines, because chess is what "intelligent" people do. They quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem, doing the thing that humans are bad at and computers are good at. Is this really true? Because a lot of effort was spent on making computers as good at chess as human experts. It was considered a pretty big breakthrough w…

By the time they were trying to defeat the world champion, they didn't really think of it as an AI project any more. They often used the term "expert system", which had a much narrower scope. It had become a challenge unto itself, but they didn't expect it to lead to any kind of generalized intelligence.

It came rather out of nowhere when neural-net-type engines suddenly swept back into dominance. Even after becoming the world chess champion, nobody expected Go to be solved any time soon.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#42

Post by scarmig »

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #19

Very easy to see how well davinci-003 can do this. I'll admit that it frequently is more perceptive than myself (although not always factually accurate). 1) Go to something like /r/relationship_advice, where the poster is likely going through some difficult interpersonal issue 2) Copy a long post. 3) Append to the end, " After reading the above, I identified the main people involved. For each person, I thought about…

After trying this, say what you will about ChatGPT, but it's way better at looking at a situation and giving advice than random Redditors.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#43

Post by Imnimo »

Is it easier to have a theory of mind when you don't have a mind of your own? Like the part that makes the ToM test hard is that you know what's in the bag, and you have to set that knowledge aside to understand what the other person knows and doesn't know. You have to overcome the implicit bias of "my world model is the world". But if you're a language model, and you don't have a mind or a world model, there's no bias to overcome.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#44

Post by manv1 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #8
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

My belief, based on experiences with domestic and wild animals is that there is nothing uniquely human about "theory of mind". It's a running gag in our household (where my wife runs a riding academy) that academics just published a paper showing that some animal (e.g. horse) has just been proven to have some cognitive capability that seems pretty obvious if you work with those animals. It's very hard to know what is…

I recall reading that pointing is something that only a few animals, including us, do and understand. If I get my cats' attention and point at something, they're more interested in the tip of my finger than the direction I'm pointing at. Now, my cats will occasionally meow to get my attention and then walk over to where the problem is - an empty food dish, an empty water bowl, the bed that they expect us to be in bec…

Many dogs will look at what you're pointing at and not your finger. It depends on the dog.

And there are dogs that are literally bred to point...but they're usually pointing at game.

There are dogs that will literally drag you to what they're trying to show you. And many (most?) dogs will bring you a toy to you that they want you to play with. I've never actually seen a cat do that, but I presume there must be a few.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#46

Post by didntreadarticl »

didntreadarticl wrote: post #40
hesk wrote: post #20

> Me: There is a box on the table labelled "flubbergums". Somebody opens it and shows you the content. Inside the box are "jellyfils". They close the box again so you cannot see their contents. What do you think is in the box? > ChatGPT: Based on the information provided, it is likely that the box labeled "flubbergums" contains "jellyfils". However, since the contents of the box are no longer visible, I cannot confir…

You have some typos and slightly weird constructions there - What do you think do they think is inside the box? I rephrased and had a go and gave it a bit more context (billy can read etc) and it passed: Me: There is a box on the table labelled "flubbergums". Somebody opens it and shows you the contents. Inside the box are "jellyfils". They close the box again so you cannot see their contents. What do you think is in…

Here's a simpler scenario that doesn't involve reading:

Me: There is a banana on the table. Someone comes and peels the banana and shows you that inside it, there is actually a carrot! Then they carefully stick the peel back so it look unpeeled. What is inside the banana skin?

ChatGPT: According to the scenario described, there is a carrot inside the banana peel that has been carefully placed back to look unpeeled.

Me: Billy comes into the room. Please speculate about what they might think is inside the banana peel?

ChatGPT: Billy, upon entering the room and seeing the unpeeled banana on the table, would most likely assume that there is a banana inside the peel, as that is what one would typically expect to find. However, it's possible that they might have some suspicion or doubt, especially if they saw someone previously peeling the banana and acting strangely. In that case, Billy might investigate further to see if there is indeed a banana inside or if something else is inside the peel.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#47

Post by freejazz »

brookst wrote: post #11
tus666 wrote: post #10

They are still big state-machines, unlike the human brain.

Certainly they are big state machines, but is there any proof that we are not?

People ask this question like it's meaningful... is there any proof that we are? No. Then stop asking it as if it sheds light into the similarities between humans and machines... it doesn't and it's obfuscating to that extent.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#48

Post by spuz »

lsy wrote: post #33

This highlights one of the types of muddled thinking around LLMs. These tasks are used to test theory of mind because for people, language is a reliable representation of what type of thoughts are going on in the person's mind. In the case of an LLM the language generated doesn't have the same relationship to reality as it does for a person. What is being demonstrated in the article is that given billions of tokens o…

> So the tasks remain useful and accurate in testing ToM in people because people can't perform statistical regressions over billion-token sets and therefore must generate their thoughts the old fashioned way.

Is it not also possible that the study suggests that the human mind actually operates as a statistical regression over billions of data points rather than through some kind of Baysian logic? You say humans are known to be not-great at statistical next-word guesses, but I would antelope they're actually pretty good at it.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#49

Post by valine »

ChatGPT disagrees that it has theory of mind.

“As an AI language model, I do not have consciousness, emotions, or mental states, so I cannot have a theory of mind in the same way that a human can. My ability to predict your friend Sam's state of mind is based solely on patterns in the text data I was trained on, and any predictions I make are not the result of an understanding of Sam's mental states.”

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#50

Post by mannykannot »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #6
dragonwriter wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These findings suggest that ToM-like ability (thus far considered to be uniquely human) What it suggests to me is that the particular test of “Theory of Mind” tasks involved actually test the ability to process language and generate appropriate linguistic results, not theory of mind. It also suggests (with the “thus far considered to be uniquely human”) that the authors are unaware of other theory of mind tests tha…

It's hard to look at behaviour separately from language if the only behaviour available is to generate text. As long as we don't have a test agnostic of medium, this will have to do. In the end, we can't overcome the limitation that all we can empirically see is the ability to process X and generate appropriate Y. If that invalidates the test where X is language and Y is language, what stops us from invalidating any…

We cannot assume that, because text generation is all these models do, then it must be possible to get answers to the questions we want to ask by examining their textual responses.

It is fair to ask why, if we accept these verbal challenges as good evidence for a theory of mind in children, we would not accept them for these models, but children have nothing like the memory for text that these models have, and the corpus of text that these models have been trained on includes a great many statements that tacitly represent their authors' theory of mind (i.e. they are the sort of statements that would typically be made by someone having a theory of mind, just as arithmetically-correct statements concerning quantities are to be expected from people who know arithmetic.)

To be clear, I am not arguing that it would be impossible to show a theory of mind in a system that can only interact through text, but personally, I think it will require a model with greater capabilities than responding to prompts. For example, when models can converse among themselves, I think we will know.

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