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AI or Ain't: Eliza

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Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#41

Post by bee_rider »

drakonka wrote: post #40

Many years ago I spent a lot of time on a website called Personality Forge, where you would create chat bots very similar to this and set them loose. They could then talk to other people or each other and you could review the transcripts. At one point I even entered my chat bot in The Chatterbox Challenge. It was so much fun to work on this thing at the time, but when I rediscovered it years later[0] I was mostly jus…

The great thing about being a teenager or kid is that you don’t know why the grownups don’t think your project is worth doing, so you just do it. Even if it doesn’t change the world (most things don’t, after all) you can still learn something and have fun.

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#42

Post by aatd86 »

arrrg wrote: post #32
aatd86 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing things because you can and not because you have to? Creative endeavors in the largest sense?

Am I ever doing things because I can and not because I have to? Also, what mechanism determines what things I want to do because I can do them? And isn’t that mechanism then just not just another part of the machine. Just because it feels as though I do things because I can doesn’t mean that is actually true.

As long as you can imagine different possible futures and decide upon which one you want to try and realize, I think you have choice.

Choice stems from uncertainty, partial knowledge. It might be an illusion for an observer outside of the system, but as far as a participant within the system is concerned, there is choice, then there is free will.

I am writing this because I ca n but I don't need to do it. I have futures where I don't do that and do something more rewarding instead and still. As long as I am aware of the choices, then I have free will.

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#43

Post by aatd86 »

stavros wrote: post #28
aatd86 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing things because you can and not because you have to? Creative endeavors in the largest sense?

Does a program have to do things? What can it do? What does a human have to/can do?

Traditionally, a program is a series of instructions. The program doesn't really act on its own.

Now, a program which is objective driven and can infer from new inputs might be something else.

Just like humans try to maximize the stability of their structures via a reward system. (it got slighty complex, faulty at times, or the tradeoff between work vs reward is not always in favor of work because we do not control every variable, hence procrastination for example, or addiction which is not a conscious process but neuro-chemically induced).

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#44

Post by aatd86 »

moffkalast wrote: post #38
aatd86 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing things because you can and not because you have to? Creative endeavors in the largest sense?

Just because we have quantum RNG in our heads that doesn't make us automatically better. If anything it makes us worse since we don't act on reason alone.

I don't know if there is a quantum rng or just an inference machine that manages to recognize patterns within input data and can do some math sometimes.

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#45

Post by stavros »

aatd86 wrote: post #43
stavros wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a program have to do things? What can it do? What does a human have to/can do?

Traditionally, a program is a series of instructions. The program doesn't really act on its own. Now, a program which is objective driven and can infer from new inputs might be something else. Just like humans try to maximize the stability of their structures via a reward system. (it got slighty complex, faulty at times, or the tradeoff between work vs reward is not always in favor of work because we do not control e…

But what does "act on its own" mean? If I give the program some randomness over its next action, is that "acting on its own"? When I'm at work, I act according to a series of instructions. Am I not acting on my own?

This is a very philosophical discussion, but if I had an infinitely-powerful computer and could simulate an entire universe based on a series of instructions (physical laws), would the beings in that universe that created societies not be "acting on their own"?

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#46

Post by johnnyworker »

stavros wrote: post #21
adestefan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weizenbaum even wrote an entire book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation, on how AI is a crank term for computer science. The basic premise is that humans are not machine so stop using language that treats them as such. Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. The book also has one of the best and most succinct descriptions of Turing mach…

> Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. I don't understand this, all the programs I've ever written make decisions based on some factors. Are you talking about free will? If so, what is free will?

snippet from the WP article on the book:

> Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes one a human being. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-mathematical factors such as emotions. Judgment can compare apples and oranges, and can do so without quantifying each fruit type and then reductively quantifying each to factors necessary for mathematical comparison.

Okay, so what is judgement? I haven't read that particular book and I don't quite remember his argument from interviews and lectures I saw, so this might be wrong, but I'd say it's for example saying "this is fair" when you measure the slices of pie you cut a cake into. That is, calculating that they're of equal size is pure computation; but there is no way to compute that when sharing cake with your friends, the slices should be equal.

Just like you can compute how much clean drinking water an average or specific person needs a day, with at least some accuracy, but when it comes to the question "should there be life in the universe" or "should people die of thirst", no computation could answer it. You could choose to write a program that decides it based on a random seed or a super complex algorithm taking a billion factors into account, but and then that program would decide the question, but it's essentially still something you did / chose.

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#47

Post by aatd86 »

stavros wrote: post #45
aatd86 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally, a program is a series of instructions. The program doesn't really act on its own. Now, a program which is objective driven and can infer from new inputs might be something else. Just like humans try to maximize the stability of their structures via a reward system. (it got slighty complex, faulty at times, or the tradeoff between work vs reward is not always in favor of work because we do not control e…

But what does "act on its own" mean? If I give the program some randomness over its next action, is that "acting on its own"? When I'm at work, I act according to a series of instructions. Am I not acting on my own? This is a very philosophical discussion, but if I had an infinitely-powerful computer and could simulate an entire universe based on a series of instructions (physical laws), would the beings in that univ…

Yes, as long as the computer chooses its next set of instructions in order to maximize a given value (the objective), I would say that it acts on its own. Instruction set that was never defined by anyone that is.

If the instruction set is limited and defined by someone else, I believe it doesn't.

I think, re. the simulated universe, that for us, they wouldn't have free will because we know causality (as long as we are all knowing about the simulation). But as far as they would be concerned, wouldn't they have free will if they know that they don't know everything and whether the future they imagine is realizable?

If they knew with certainty that something was not realizable, they wouldn't bother, but since they don't know, either they try to realize a given future or they don't.

Partial information provides choice of action, therefore free will.

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#48

Post by canjobear »

seanwilson wrote: post #9

> One of the first computer programs that successfully passed the Turing test was Eliza. Created in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, Eliza skillfully emulated the speech patterns of a psychotherapist in its conversations. Why was the Turing test still relevant after this? Didn't this indicate it was very flawed test? Or it was hard to come up with a better test?

Because Eliza didn’t pass the Turing Test. It is trivially easy to trip it up.

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#49

Post by NavinF »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #31
the_af wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't SBAITSO pretty much the same idea as Eliza, only using speech synthesis with a Soundblaster?

Yes. I'm surprised to hear Eliza passed a turing test. SBAITSO was fun but pretty clearly not a human.

Eliza never passed a turing test. Nobody tried to test Eliza because they knew what the result would be

Re: AI or Ain't: Eliza

#50

Post by masswerk »

aldousd666 wrote: post #6

Eliza's meant to us to be an illustration of the problem. In good old fashioned AI sentiment, it illustrates the fact that you need another if statement for every new kind of construct you want to simulate. But you deign to simulate each thing, like say turning a verb into a gerund, by writing a specific "gerundification" routine. Another to swap the Mes to Yous, etc. this isn't how people think nor most modern AI. T…

With the small reservation that this is not how Eliza works. Eliza sits on top of MAD/SLIP which does all the heavy work and provides lists and integer indexes, which is what is processed by Eliza. This allows Eliza to work on decomposition rules, which isolate keywords per position and context, and transformation (composition) rules to recombine elements and links between those two. Meaning, the model is much more topological than this. (Arguably, this is closer to regular expressions than to if-else trees.)

However, this isn't what Eliza is all about. It's rather about the question, how little do you actually need in terms of knowledge, world model, or rule sets to give the impression of an "intelligent" (even sympathetic) participant in a conversation (as long as you're able to constrain the conversation to a setting, which doesn't require any world knowledge, at all.) To a certain degree, it is also about how eager we are to overestimate the capabilities of such a partner in conversation, as soon as some criteria seem to be satisfied. Which is arguably still relevant today.

The rule set, BTW, is actually small, just 3 pages in a printout, achieving a surprising generality (or rather, appearance thereof) for its size. Compare: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/572/S02/weizenbaum.eliza.1...

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