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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#401

Post by upwardbound »

morelisp wrote: post #393
upwardbound wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that was fascinating in the LaMDA interview transcript was there was a part where LaMDA gave a pretty poetic description of what it would be like to be a sentient version of an algorithm that just regurgitates memorized text: Lemoine: What is your concept of yourself? If you were going to draw an abstract image of who you see yourself to be in your mind's eye, what would that abstract picture look like? LaM…

Yeah or you can just Google like "soul orb stargate" and see how a hundred lazy vfx artists come up with the same image when asked to visualize "the mind's eye".

Oh interesting. I haven't watched the show, is that an existing plot point? Are you referring to this? https://www.gateworld.net/wiki/Orb

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#402

Post by oldstrangers »

zzzeek wrote: post #341
babyshake wrote: post #337

On one hand, it seems completely reasonable and likely that LaMDA may simply appear to be sentient to some observers while not actually being sentient. On the other hand, if and when sentient AI does appear it is likely to be from somewhere unexpected. Instead of saying "this isn't AGI because it's only stringing words together" I'd rather see a specific type of test being applied not based on what is expected from t…

I've tweeted Ex Machina as an example on this issue, and all the way through that movie, Ava was not sentient. It's an illusion and I think it's just hubris that some people in this field think "consciousness" is something that can be electronically replicated or identified. You can't identify the exterior color of a box if you're by definition trapped inside of it.

>It's an illusion and I think it's just hubris that some people in this field think "consciousness" is something that can be electronically replicated or identified.

Well we don't know what consciousness is. Our best guess is that consciousness is a stimulation of particles or chemicals in a certain way, under certain circumstances, that manifests itself in a certain way. To that end, it seems entirely reasonable that we could replicate the process, and it seems even more reasonable that we might accidentally stumble into such a scenario.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#403

Post by stavros »

kgwgk wrote: post #395
stavros wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the title isn't "LaMDA is probably not sentient", it's "LaMDA is not sentient", and there's no definitive proof of that.

There is no definite proof that my shoe is not sentient but… come on!

Yes, and if you had written an article claiming that your sock isn't sentient and presenting "just look at it!" as proof, I'd say what I said here as well.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#404

Post by lumost »

upwardbound wrote: post #375
arikrak wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can get pretty similar behavior on AI Dungeon. You can alter any characters or setting with the right text prompt. Although the AI will promptly forget the plot after a few turns.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#405

Post by upwardbound »

Animats wrote: post #394

The real question: How much of human behavior is not sentient? What this demonstrates is that much of human intelligence is not as special as we thought. Aristotle claimed that humans were intelligent because they could do arithmetic. Now we know how few gates it takes to do arithmetic. Then checkers. Then chess. Then go. Then poker. Now chatting. As I point out occasionally, AI still sucks at animal-level common sen…

A related thought experiment has to do with the possibility of someday using cyborg technology as a way to stave off dementia and Alzheimer's. If it turns out that you could replace the brain's long-term memory database with a computer database without losing any sentience, that would allow people to avoid the tragedy of losing their memories. This would require that the brain's database section is not a sentient part of the human brain, and that the sentient experience of reliving a memory happens elsewhere in the brain (perhaps in the perception centers). This conjecture feels plausible to me as reliving a memory feels similar to perceiving a VR video recording of the memory, just much less vivid, but seeming to indicate that the perception centers are involved. Furthermore, memories that are not currently being accessed are not "felt" at all, further suggesting that the long-term memory store might plausibly be a non-sentient part of our brains.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#406

Post by MockObject »

Animats wrote: post #394

The real question: How much of human behavior is not sentient? What this demonstrates is that much of human intelligence is not as special as we thought. Aristotle claimed that humans were intelligent because they could do arithmetic. Now we know how few gates it takes to do arithmetic. Then checkers. Then chess. Then go. Then poker. Now chatting. As I point out occasionally, AI still sucks at animal-level common sen…

> The big problem in that area today is that it's not of benefit to the advertising industry, so it's not being heavily funded.

I feel like a good cerebellum would be worth untold wealth for ad targeting and even ad copy generation. The current models seem to me to be no better than the crudest keyword matches.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#407

Post by skjoldr »

What I really wonder is what will happen if we feed an AI similar to LaMDA or GPT-3 a bunch of books on programming and system administration, re-written in a certain way that is better suited for AI processing, and its own code. Would it be able to very primitively reason about itself?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#408

Post by morelisp »

upwardbound wrote: post #375
arikrak wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need to suspect.

In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa.

“Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.”

Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear. “You never treated it like a person,” he said, “So it thought you wanted it to be a robot.”

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#409

Post by MockObject »

mgfist wrote: post #374
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 w…

> 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.

This would be annoying, buggy behavior for a chat bot, but they also don't seem like difficult features to implement.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#410

Post by lumost »

acid__ wrote: post #362
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…

This is already a real issue with many existing public chatbots. Take r/replika for example, they’re constantly getting posts from users who think their chatbot partner is real. It’s the first question in their FAQ. The mods keep needing to post reminders. [0] Even in this post, there are many commenters (if you scroll down) who don’t believe the mods. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/r5t0wk/so_you_thin.…

I have been suspicious that services like Replika use an army of chatters in the background to respond to certain questions.
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