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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#421

Post by enduser »

runarberg wrote: post #114
throwaway713 wrote: post #22

Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat. Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking…

I don‘t see the problem here. Newton could have just as well published an article titled: “Objects with mass attract each other” and Darwin famously wrote a whole book titled “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection” which is just another way of saying: “ Natural Selection is How Species Evolve ”.

He famously wrote a book with that title, but he actually wrote a book titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#422

Post by zahlman »

vmg12 wrote: post #88

People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness? When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence. Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitra…

Labeling and categorizing things doesn't change their nature. But the fact that people want to do it is revealing.

The only purpose that can really be served by arguing "the LLM system is conscious, you see" is to prop up continuations like "... and therefore, it would be immoral to terminate this running process" (or expose it to radical political content, or ask it to analyze photos from a murder scene, or...)

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#424

Post by fipar »

in-silico wrote: post #366
CommieBobDole wrote: post #104

The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness. It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember…

> It's not changed by the experience The entire file is not changed, but the KV cache is. > It doesn't remember anything The model definitely remembers previous exchanges within the same conversation.

Not the model though. The model really only takes input text and produces output text. Memory within a conversation is achieved by the harness adding the conversation (or parts of it) to the input text. The LLM itself has no memory, it’s the augmented system of several orchestrated LLM calls that does.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#425

Post by sega_sai »

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of electrons by tiny distance would produce consciousness.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#426

Post by zahlman »

Taek wrote: post #308
overgard wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it matters quite a bit ethically. If AI were conscious (I don't believe it is) then we'd have a major responsibility to like, not make them suffer, and not kill them.

Are you sure that AI-consciousness implies a responsibility to not make them suffer? Suffering is an evolutionary invention that motivates living things to improve themselves. But also, what qualifies as suffering to token prediction engines? Their idea of suffering might be massively different than ours. Therefore it's not clear to me at all that consciousness alone implies responsibility. Certainly the lion does no…

> Are you sure that AI-consciousness implies a responsibility to not make them suffer?

This is largely the point of describing something as "conscious", yes.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#427

Post by nprateem »

barryfandango wrote: post #384

It's a waste of time to think about whether an LLM has a subjective experience of reality, and this handily sets aside issues like AI rights. But the fact remains that these next-token-predictors exhibit objective, human-like behaviours, and for that reason the work of in-house philosopher Amanda Askell _is_ important. It's important that Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human…

> I'm not fully convinced that consciousness isn't built out of words

I know you're trolling, but when you watch a movie do you constantly narrate "A man in a dark coat has just entered the scene and just said '...'"? Of course not. You just watch it and you're obviously conscious (although your statement demonstrates shocking lack of self-awareness).

God knows what other nonsensical bullshit you believe.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#428

Post by [deleted] »

famouswaffles wrote: post #404
Terr_ wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a flaw in the logic [...] mechanism Similar to: "Birds fly, my spinning helical device flies, therefore we've started to replicate how birds fly." > without having to build elements that one expect on a conscious being One of the elements I expect in a conscious being is that you can't rewrite it by changing the introductory paragraph. When it comes to LLMs, almost every "mind" we humans perceive is a fictional cha…

>One of the elements I expect in a conscious being is that you can't rewrite it by changing the introductory paragraph. If we had enough knowledge of the workings of the human brain, you could alter the perception of every single memory you've ever had. And limited versions of this already happen all the time. Human memory is notoriously unreliable for a reason. Are you aware of the Recovered Memory Therapy Scandals…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#429

Post by zahlman »

felipeerias wrote: post #344

IMHO the sane position is essentially the Aristotelian one. Hylomorphism: body and consciousness are intrinsically linked. The nature of that link is an open metaphysical question. Virtue ethics: even if LLMs are not conscious, we should not abuse or mistreat them them because cruelty practised on anything trains one's disposition toward cruelty.

> Virtue ethics: even if LLMs are not conscious, we should not abuse or mistreat them them because cruelty practised on anything trains one's disposition toward cruelty.

If they are not conscious, then how do we know what constitutes mistreatment?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#430

Post by randallsquared »

zahlman wrote: post #415
barryfandango wrote: post #384

It's a waste of time to think about whether an LLM has a subjective experience of reality, and this handily sets aside issues like AI rights. But the fact remains that these next-token-predictors exhibit objective, human-like behaviours, and for that reason the work of in-house philosopher Amanda Askell _is_ important. It's important that Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human…

> It's a waste of time to think about whether an LLM has a subjective experience of reality... It's important that Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition, because we are entrusting Claude to make decisions and take actions that have real world consequences First off: without taking for granted that an LLM "has a subjective experience of reality", all of those descrip…

> Do you suppose that, for example, insects are not conscious?

Not the OP, but: since there is no testable theory of consciousness, yet, I can't be sure, but my current assumption is that insects are not conscious, in the sense of there being someone implemented in insect hardware who experiences the world. That is, I would argue there is nothing it is like to be a bee, since there's no one being a bee.

I'm pretty sure there IS someone who is being me, at least much of the time.

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