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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#511

Post by lordnacho »

layer8 wrote: post #371
tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

Sometimes after a night’s sleep, we wake up with an insight on a topic or a solution to a problem we encountered the day before. Did we “think” in our sleep to come up with the insight or solution? For all we know, it’s an unconscious process. Would we call it “thinking”? The term “thinking” is rather ill-defined, too bound to how we perceive our own wakeful thinking. When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feelin…

> When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feeling that they have a solid grasp on the conversation. When you dig into topics, there is always a little too much vagueness, a slight but clear lack of coherence, continuity and awareness, a prevalence of cookie-cutter verbiage. It feels like a mind that isn’t fully “there” — and maybe not at all.

Much like speaking to a less experienced colleague, no?

They say things that contain the right ideas, but arrange it unconvincingly. Still useful to have though.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#512

Post by antonvs »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #277
myrmidon wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they assume consciousness emerges through purely mechanical means. From my view, all the evidence points in exactly that direction though? Our consciousness can be suspended and affected by purely mechanical means, so clearly much of it has to reside in the physical realm. Quantum consciousness to me sounds too much like overcomplicating human exceptionalism that we have always been prone to, just like geocentrism…

Your memory formation gets inhibited and you become unresponsive under anesthesia. The brain still processes information. Let's take a step back from the "how" and talk about the what. The fundamental dichotomy is emergent consciousness versus panpsychism. The irony is that even though panpsychism is seen as more fringe (because materialists won, smh), it's actually the explanation preferred by Occam's razor. Emergen…

Panpsychism doesn’t explain anything, it just asserts that consciousness doesn’t have an explanation, that it just “is”. It’s not impossible that something like panpsychism could be true, but knowing that wouldn’t get us any closer to understanding consciousness.

It also raises more questions than it answers, such as how an integrated consciousness arises within a brain/mind, whereas it presumably doesn’t in, say, a hamburger patty. Ironically, attempts to explain that start to hint that such an explanation might not need to rely on panpsychism in the first place - i.e. if you can explain how consciousness arises from a sum of parts, you may not need to postulate that it exists independently of that combination of parts.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#513

Post by lordnacho »

aydyn wrote: post #414
bongodongobob wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculous. I use it daily and get meaningful, quality results. Learn to use the tools.

Learn to work on interesting problems? If the problem you are working on is novel and hard, the AI will stumble. Generalizing your experience to everyone else's betrays a lack of imagination.

Even people who do actual hard work need a lot of ordinary scaffolding done for them.

A secretary who works for an inventor is still thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#514

Post by NaomiLehman »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #276

all this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically. To be clear, I don't believe that current AI t…

humans don't care what is happening to humans next door. do you think they will care about robots/software?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#515

Post by NaomiLehman »

kerblang wrote: post #278
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #276

all this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically. To be clear, I don't believe that current AI t…

Slaves that cannot die. There is no escape.

i have no mouth and i must scream

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#516

Post by bayindirh »

efitz wrote: post #503
simulator5g wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having seen photocopiers so many times produce coherent, sensible, and valid chains of words on a page, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking.

https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_mea...

That's not a flaw. That model's creativity tuned a bit too high. It's a happy little copier which can be a little creative and unconventional with reasoning, at times.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#517

Post by [deleted] »

lordnacho wrote: post #513
aydyn wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn to work on interesting problems? If the problem you are working on is novel and hard, the AI will stumble. Generalizing your experience to everyone else's betrays a lack of imagination.

Even people who do actual hard work need a lot of ordinary scaffolding done for them. A secretary who works for an inventor is still thinking.

[deleted]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#518

Post by tobyjsullivan »

emodendroket wrote: post #494
brabel wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument comes up often but can be easily dismissed. Make up a language and explain it to the LLM like you would to a person. Tell it to only use that language now to communicate. Even earlier AI was really good at this. You will probably move the goal posts and say that this is just pattern recognition, but it still fits nicely within your request for something that no one ever came up with.

I haven't tried in a while but at least previously you could completely flummox Gemini by asking it to come up with some plausible English words with no real known meaning; it just kept giving me rare and funny-sounding actual words and then eventually told me the task is impossible.

ChatGPT didn't have any issue when I recently asked something very similar.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6909b7d2-20bc-8011-95b6-8a36f332ac...

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#519

Post by aydyn »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #468
aydyn wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn to work on interesting problems? If the problem you are working on is novel and hard, the AI will stumble. Generalizing your experience to everyone else's betrays a lack of imagination.

I'm genuinely curious what you work on that is so "novel" that an LLM doesn't work well on? I feel like so little is TRUELY novel. Almost everything is built on older concepts and to some degree expertise can be applied or repurposed.

Literally anything in the science domain. Adding features to your software app is indeed usually not novel.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#520

Post by MrScruff »

dns_snek wrote: post #495
khafra wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generalizing your experience to everyone else's betrays a lack of imagination. One guy is generalizing from "they don't work for me" to "they don't work for anyone." The other one is saying "they do work for me, therefore they do work for some people." Note that the second of these is a logically valid generalization. Note also that it agrees with folks such as Tim Gowers, who work on novel and hard problems.

No, that's decidedly not what is happening here. One is saying "I've seen an LLM spectacularly fail at basic reasoning enough times to know that LLMs don't have a general ability to think" (but they can sometimes reproduce the appearance of doing so). The other is trying to generalize "I've seen LLMs produce convincing thought processes therefore LLMs have the general ability to think" (and not just occasionally repr…

When we say "think" in this context, do we just mean generalize? LLMs clearly generalize (you can give one a problem that is not exactly in it's training data and it can solve it), but perhaps not to the extent a human can. But then we're talking about degrees. If it was able to generalize at a higher level of abstraction maybe more people would regard it as "thinking".
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