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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

#461

Post by hilariously »

mc32 wrote: post #456
the_af wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the whole point of the essay is that it's Anthropic that's making the argument (or roleplaying/hinting as if they believed it). Ted Chiang isn't making the argument, he's saying Anthropic making it is misleading and deceitful, and that it's actually a pointless thing to claim. One of the essay's stronger paragraphs is when Chiang explains that Anthropic doesn't truly believe this, otherwise what they are doing wo…

Why would using something that's not organic be akin to slavery? Is using steel under heavy stress in bridges a form slavery of an unconscious object?

You missed the part where they said if it was conscious, it has nothing to do with being organic or not.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#462

Post by the_af »

pdonis wrote: post #387
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…

> Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption. Even many humans produce text that has the same appearance, but don't actually have those qualities--which becomes clear when you look at what they do, not what they say. So…

> You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption

Exactly. In fact, assuming it does is ignoring large parts of the essay which dismantle this belief. Just like Caesar and Khan having an argument in text output of an LLM don't have emotions (even though the words indicate otherwise), we have no reason to believe the LLM does either.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#463

Post by int_19h »

mc32 wrote: post #456
the_af wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the whole point of the essay is that it's Anthropic that's making the argument (or roleplaying/hinting as if they believed it). Ted Chiang isn't making the argument, he's saying Anthropic making it is misleading and deceitful, and that it's actually a pointless thing to claim. One of the essay's stronger paragraphs is when Chiang explains that Anthropic doesn't truly believe this, otherwise what they are doing wo…

Why would using something that's not organic be akin to slavery? Is using steel under heavy stress in bridges a form slavery of an unconscious object?

Why would being organic or not matter for the purpose of deciding whether it is slavery? What matters is whether the models have personhood. Anthropic statements imply that it is a possibility, so if we take them at face value then their other actions - indeed, their entire business model - are not consistent with that (well, unless they want to consciously present as supervillains).

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#464

Post by throw4847285 »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #8
solid_fuel wrote: post #6

> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category. Well said. I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious. Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!…

> misanthropic Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person. > so obviously incorrect It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then

Misanthropy is not true definitionally. It is a value judgment, that causes one to be biased against other humans even when it is irrational.

And it is accurate to depict this kind of argument is misanthropic, because it is already directed at other people. Nobody says, "If AI is not X then what about the fact that I lack X." It's always other people. It's transparent. The person is always saying, "AI is useful to me because it can do X. Many people I interact with can't do X and it drives me crazy, because I view others as a means to an end and not as ends in and of themselves."

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#465

Post by Rekindle8090 »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

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 e…

[dead]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#466

Post by azakai »

root_axis wrote: post #419
lgessler wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raphaël Millière has a very useful term for this kind of vacuous dismissal, the redescription fallacy ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.03910 , page 9): > Recent debates have been clouded by a misleading inference pattern, which we term the “Redescription Fallacy.” This fallacy arises when critics argue that a system cannot model a particular cognitive capacity, simply because its operations can be explained in less abstr…

> In the present context, the fallacy manifests in claims that LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity because their operations merely consist in a collection of statistical calculations, or linear algebra operations, or next-token predictions Nobody actually makes this argument though.

If you want examples of this, see the recent book "The AI Con"

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/217432753-the-ai-con

which describes LLMs as "souped-up autocomplete", complex statistics that cannot truly understand anything. A more recent example is this paper:

https://zenodo.org/records/20071869

which says,

> [LLMs], as turbo-charged statistical models (recall their formal relation to logistic regression) can only but provide correlations.

And, of course, the Stochastic Parrot paper is the classic example in this area. It is from 5 years ago, but "LLMs only do statistics / can't understand" is very much alive and active among academics, even if it is a minority position.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#467

Post by the_af »

fjdjshsh wrote: post #390
pdonis wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption. Even many humans produce text that has the same appearance, but don't actually have those qualities--which becomes clear when you look at what they do, not what they say. So…

Read parent's post carefully. The post starts by saying that discussing whether they have subjective emotion is a waste of time, so the post is definitely NOT saying that Claude has emotions.

"It's important that Claude is happy" is an emotion. But it's begging the question that Claude can be happy at all.

If it's pointless to consider whether Claude has subjective emptions, then it's pointless to state that Claude must be happy.

If we want to be precise (and honest) we could say "it's important that as a tool people interact with, Claude acts as a happy and helpful assistant, and does not produce offensive or unhelpful text output".

But see? This is the con Chiang is protesting against: Anthropic encourages us to perceive Claude as if it was a sentient being.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#468

Post by nozzlegear »

dmitshur wrote: post #196
empath75 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude once said to me: "After six months we have made no progress on this and I think we should reconsider another option" and I was like my dude we have been at this for only 2 hours.

Maybe time passes at a different rate for it, making it an easy "mistake" of not accounting for that for it to make.

Maybe it's just a dumb, unconscious machine

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#469

Post by int_19h »

trescenzi wrote: post #360
hackinthebochs wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake. Evolution learns various solutions to optimization problems, and so if co…

> There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake. > There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness. We don’t know either of these are true or false though. We simply don’t know. There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness, aside from maybe _the having of qualia_, so arguing that some can or c…

> There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness, aside from maybe _the having of qualia_

Try to define qualia though without explicitly or implicitly recursing into consciousness.

It's all a large house of cards that's built on handwaving and "I know it when I see it".

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#470

Post by slashdave »

supern0va wrote: post #328
slashdave wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> of the form of original data streaming in and out. Except this is not consciousness.

I will say, I find it fascinating that there are some philosophers and consciousness researchers who seem to be less certain. I just listened to Chris Hayes interview David Chalmers this week, whose position seemed to be that it's probably not conscious, but that we can't be certain. And more than that: he seemed open to the idea that they may become conscious under further scaling/training/advancements. It's a great…

Imagine yourself in an isolation chamber. What are you thinking? Are you no longer conscious?
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