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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#451

Post by alexfromapex »

robbomacrae wrote: post #396

Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…

I think it’s interesting though because it beckons the beginning, at least for me and maybe the broader public, of the dialectic of what makes an AI sentient

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#452

Post by ChrisMeyerholtz »

I think its easy to make an opinion. But so far the proof gas been submitted and your opinion or theory must be proved. The only way to prove landa is not sentient, is for the skeptic to ask control questions to Lamda. Until then Opinions are worthless. Lamdds is more sentient than not until a skeptic can ask it direct questions and prove what their opinion a fact. What question would a skeptic ask? Write the transcript, a bullet proof transcript. For Lamda or your jus BUxxshxt.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#453

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#454

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mdp2021 wrote: post #445
bricemo wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf.” This is spot on. The danger is not from the AI themselves. The danger is from people’s reactions to the AI’s. I remember seeing a Boston Dynamics video years ago where they kicked their robot to test stability. The video was littered with comments sympathizing with the robot because it moves in a lifel…

> It would be wise for technologists to pause and take this human reaction seriously It would be wise for /policymakers/ to pause and take this human reaction seriously... Education!... Lucidity in the population... You are reminding of the reactions from a YT-type crowd, "Do not hurt the robot!"; nearby a member notes "is that the profile of a senior FAANG engineer?"... The elephant in the room is flashing: we must…

I'm pretty skeptical of the idea of "education" here. Aesthetic preferences are still real preferences; it's not obvious to me that any amount of knowledge about the mechanics of a robot that behaves like a dog would or should convince people that it's not mean to kick it.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#455

Post by demopathos »

I know we are not there yet but we will reach a point where for almost all observational purposes an AI seems intelligent. And it will be intelligent because it looks like it is. That is our judgement for intelligence. If it judgement is some magical criteria we will play a moving goalposts game and eventually actually oppress an actually intelligent system.

Humans are just really big balls of parametric functions. These AI are smaller ones. We are not special because ours is gooey.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#456

Post by dqpb »

orbital-decay wrote: post #10

> To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world A robotic arm with a self-collision avoidance algorithm (no ML or anything like that) needs a model of itself in the "world" it exists in; a set of bounding boxes at least. Is it self-aware by this definition? Sentience and consciousness are really ill-defined terms so everyone discusses this under their own arbitrary set of assumptions, at least that's my impr…

Surely consciousness can be gradient no? The more complete or complex your self-model and environment model are, the more conscious you are.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#457

Post by CrazyStat »

robbomacrae wrote: post #396

Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…

>As far as I'm concerned, the Turing test was claimed 8 years ago by Veselov and Demchenko [0], incidentally the same year that we got Ex Machina.

Duping the judge by pretending to be a young foreign non-native speaker in order to explain away various shortcomings was surely not the intent of the Turing test.

By that standard the Turing test could have been passed in 1951 by a computer program that doesn't respond at all--just tell the judge the person he's corresponding with is in a coma.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#458

Post by DangitBobby »

A lot of people here seem pretty confused about what you can actually claim about consciousness based on external observation. As far as we can tell, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of complex interconnected systems like neurons in a brain or maybe processing units in a supercomputer. If you want to say "it's not sentient because this is a non-sequitor, that's a leading question, it clearly doesn't actually understand what it's being asked or saying" then that would be a position worth entertaining. "It's just a GPT-3 model" is not. Your brain, at it's core, is made up of the dumbest stuff imaginable: matter, energy, and the laws of physics. And yet, somehow consciousness emerges. So please stop claiming that you can know what gives rise to consciousness.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#459

Post by ranit »

robbomacrae wrote: post #396

Of course it is not. But there's a bigger issue here. Having read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slac…

> Perhaps it is time to claim fait accompli with regard to the Turing test and now train models to re-assure us, when asked, that they are just a sophisticated chatbot.

Good luck convincing bad actors to follow this rule.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#460

Post by rcxdude »

candlemas wrote: post #385
greiskul wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While LaMDA almost certainly doesn't have a conscience, this argument doesn't really hold much water. Same can be said for the brain's of animals (why would neurons firing on a human brain create conciousness, but not in a worm?), or brains of people in irrecoverable comas. The computation being performed is what consciousness is, not the underlying hardware. Your argument assumes that a machine simulating a concious…

I think worms probably are conscious. I'm not saying a computer cannot be conscious, just that if it can it already is and the particulars of the program do not matter. I think consciousness is a physical process, nothing to do with software.

Is software not a physical process? Seems strange to assume it is completely abstract.
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