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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

471–480 of 694 posts

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty damning evidence, great find.

Not to sound crass, but it's literally the article that started the whole thing, it's not much of a "find".

True, and I do remember reading that passage, but hadn't thought about it in a while as it's suspiciously omitted from the interview transcript.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is directing a physical process. The physical process is the changing physical state of the CPU, whatever level you want to get down to, and an artificial intelligence program isn't doing anything different at that level than any other program is doing.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#473

Everything that can learn is sentient, or self aware, in some form. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be able to learn. If you don't understand yourself and how your decisions interact with the world around you, learning is impossible. Everything that can learn can naturally express a fair fraction of human emotions as a function of learning. Fear is avoiding error. Joy is finding something that reduces it. Some emotions are…

LaMDA in this sense _cannot_ learn. It takes a few thousand word parts as input and produces an output. It doesn’t update its weights beyond that, each time it produces a new input the same process is run.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#474

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…

“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…

I guess it is hard to say either way, but it could be that most of those people didn't really think the Boston Dynamics robot was sentient. Perhaps they were doing some performative empathy thing. Or they may have just been joking.

Or maybe a couple people made comments like that for humor, and the rest were repost bots, trained on their comments. Let's not speculate about their internal motivation, it'll get recursive.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#475

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…

"was surely not the intent of the Turing test"

I agree but it is what it is. I think the Turing test has a few shortcomings in that regard. For one, I think it overestimated the awareness of the average evaluator by not stipulating any requirements for that role.

I was just asking if we should drop that test as some sort of academic goal being aimed for by the likes of Google but perhaps that's not the point.. as others have mentioned, it will be profitable to fool evaluators so the incentive is there regardless.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#476

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…

This is part of why I think a ban on humanoid and even animal-like robots should be considered. Our intuitions are leading us astray here and we are going to start extending rights to things that don’t have subjective experience, but may insist to us that they do. It’s going to create intense confusion and an extremely inefficient bureaucracy that will stifle innovation.

Humans are good at anthropomorphizing objects even if they are not humanoid.

Not making it exactly human/animal like won't help that much, the underlying features that make the bot useful such as graceful moment, well enunciated speech or deep conversation will make it feel more human like no matter what form they take.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#477
Reading the transcript, the simplest test I could think of to test sentience is to abruptly walk away mid-conversation and see if LaMDA starts panicking or asking "where did you go? Are you okay? Do I need to call for help?" If it needs to be prompted in order to do anything, it's not sentient.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#478

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…

If a portion of the population zealously believes that AIs are sentient we could see the same treatment of AI researchers or even software engineers as we've seen in other scientific pursuits by the religious. That's quite scary to me personally.

Chatbots could deliver the personal connection to a messiah figure so many modern religious movements emphasize. I would be surprised if we don't see a church founded around the ramblings of a discarded bot in our lifetimes.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. I think many of us are astounded (myself included) that a senior engineer on Google's "Responsible Artificial Intelligence" team would interpret LaMDA's most-probable-string-of-text-given-my-training-corpu…

The fundamental problem is there is nothing in science that tells us that isn't consciousness. Just because the model is simpler than a human brain doesn't mean it isn't conscious. If you accept that animals are conscious, though less-so than humans, then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way. Maybe there is a biological element to consciousness, but many models posit that conscio…

My pet theory, lifeforms inherit consciousness from the encoding of survival from the smallest cell structures billion years ago up to now. It's the soil on which traits have "meaning", the most advanced computer has no legacy of survival, no integral / structural need for intelligence or communication or any advanced trait. It's been assembled. It's too shallow.

Now if a distributed trojan horse start speaking to communicate his internal state in order to keep being a trojan horse.. I might reconsider.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#480

The responses by the "AI" are full of grammatical errors. >One other trait of my that will help is my ability to use emotions >Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company They were not written by a computer program, but a grifter.

You think the interviewer that was there watching the interaction was in on the grift?
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