41–50 of 212 posts
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Evolution isn't a god, it has no steering hand, it is accidents that either provide advantage or don't.
LLMs are getting more human-like because that's how we're developing them. Arguably that's about market forces. LM owners see opportunity to exploit people's desire for emotional interactions (ie loneliness) in order to make money.
> Note that none of this tells us whether language models actually feel anything or have subjective experiences. You’ll never find that in the human brain either. There’s the machinery of neural correlates to experience, we never see the experience itself. That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing.
I know I feel experience. I don't know for sure if you do, but it seems a very reasonable extension to other people. LLMs are a radical jump though that needs a greater degree of justification.
When the prompt frames things with urgency -- "this test MUST pass," "failure is unacceptable" -- you get noticeably more hacky workarounds. Hardcoded expected outputs, monkey-patched assertions, that kind of thing. Switching to calmer framing ("take your time, if you can't solve it just explain why") cut that behavior way down. I'd chalked it up to instruction following, but this paper points at something more mechanistic underneath.
The method actor analogy in the paper gets at it well. Tell an actor their character is desperate and they'll do desperate things. The weird part is that we're now basically managing the psychological state of our tooling, and I'm not sure the prompt engineering world has caught up to that framing yet.
There was a really old project from mit called conceptnet that I worked with many years ago. It was basically a graph of concepts (not exactly but close enough) and emotions came into it too just as part of the concepts. For example a cake concept is close to a birthday concept is close to a happy feeling. What was funny though is that it was trained by MIT students so you had the concept of getting a good grade on a…
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What are other alternative, realistic possible ways to see emotions?
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Do you think there are "scales" of consciousness? As in, is there some quality that makes killing a frog worse than killing an ant, and killing a human worse than killing a frog? If so, do the llm models exist across this scale, or are gpt-3 and gpt-2 conscious at the same "scale" as gpt-4? I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less par…
This is really a different question, what makes an entity a “moral patient”, something worthy of moral consideration. This is separate from the question of whether or not an entity experiences anything at all. There are different ways of answering this, but for me it comes down to nociception, which is the ability to feel pain. We should try to build systems that cannot feel pain, where I also mean other “negative va…
I would not personally consider the death of a sentient being with decades of experiences a neutral event, even if the being had been programmed to not have a capacity for suffering.
I think the idea of there being a difference between an ant dying (or "disapearing" if that's less loaded) vs a duck dying makes sense to most people (and is broadly shared) even if they don't have a completely fleshed out system of when something gets moral consideration.
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This is really a different question, what makes an entity a “moral patient”, something worthy of moral consideration. This is separate from the question of whether or not an entity experiences anything at all. There are different ways of answering this, but for me it comes down to nociception, which is the ability to feel pain. We should try to build systems that cannot feel pain, where I also mean other “negative va…
Okay, but even leaving aside the pain stuff, people generally find subjectivity / consciousness to have inherent value, and by extent are sad if a person dies even if they didn't (subjectively) suffer. I would not personally consider the death of a sentient being with decades of experiences a neutral event, even if the being had been programmed to not have a capacity for suffering. I think the idea of there being a d…
It’s also about how we think about death. It’s weird in that being dead probably isn’t like anything at all, but we fear it, and I guess we project that fear onto the death of other entities.
I guess my value system says that being dead is less bad than being alive and suffering badly.
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I know I feel experience. I don't know for sure if you do, but it seems a very reasonable extension to other people. LLMs are a radical jump though that needs a greater degree of justification.
And what kind of evidence would convince you? What experiment would ever bridge this gap? You’re relying entirely on similarity between yourself and other humans. This doesn’t extend very well to anything, even animals, though more so than machines. By framing it this way have you baked in the conclusion that nothing else can be conscious on an a priori basis?
Essentially we have created the Cylon.