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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#541

Post by VanillaCafe »

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…

> Maybe it would be worth spending some mental cycles thinking about the impacts this will have and how we design these systems.

Regardless if the bot is actually sentient, a portion of the population may _believe_ the bot is sentient.

If in practice the bot reflects back to each user their own views but perhaps more extreme, then this could be a terrible recipe for reinforcing and amplifying negative and socially destructive thinking -- equivalent to social media bubbles on steroids.

This can occur even without explicit bad actors trying to tip the scales toward a specific outcome. This kind of AI bot as-is has the potential to bring out the very worst in at least some percentage of the population.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#542

Post by mosseater »

matthews2 wrote: post #487
Imnimo wrote: post #67

I think the real ethical concern here should be that people can be idly fooled into thinking good chat bots are sentient. Like this guy isn't the only person in the world who would fall for LaMDA's parlor tricks. He's just the one who got to spend hours talking to it every day. If you set up every American with a copy, I bet a non-trivial portion of society would come to the same conclusion. People are naturally pred…

> How long before we have a religion where you ask the chat bot for daily guidance? TempleOS had a "talk to God" feature that its developer frequently used on live streams, though it was just a random number generator and not any kind of artificial intelligence.

And honestly, I'd find meaningful answers from Terry's RNG to be more indicative of a ghost in the machine than from a GPT clone. That is to say, not that meaningful, but at least it wasn't designed to mimic meaning via statistical inference.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#543

Post by int_19h »

rendall wrote: post #287
undreren wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. But is it all that we do? And how do you know? It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience.

> It seems too simplistic to be taken at face value that statistics, randomness and pattern matching would be the only ingredients necessary for intelligence and sentience. I'm afraid that's the crux of it. What if that's all it were? What if all that were necessary for intelligence and sentience were statistics, randomness and pattern matching? It is kind of a cosmically terrifying thought, possibly prompting danger…

Personally, I find the notion that our sentience is not particularly exceptional to be inspiring, as opposed to the alternative of "all alone in the Universe.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#544

Post by bmy78 »

Yes, LaMDA is not sentient. But this begs the question: as these models become more sophisticated, and we did end up creating a sentient AI, how would we know?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#545

Post by delusional »

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…

This hits on a particularly interesting point for me. In my "conversations" with much less sophisticated AI products I've observed that they are excellent at reflecting back exactly what you project. If you project a certain opinion, they recognize it, and reflect it right back. That's what makes them scary.

We've seen it multiple times online, where AI products seem excellent as pushing people into extreme niches, reinforcing their belief that they are the majority. It isolates by giving us external validation to all our worst behaviors.

That's the mechanism by which Lemoine was convinced. He had a small inkling of belief that the AI was sentient, he asked the AI, and it confirmed exactly what he already believed. As his questions got more extreme, so did its reflection of them. Creating a positive feedback loop. The AI didn't deceive, it amplified his own self deception by reflecting back his internal monologue as an external dialogue.

In a limited sense, it turned him temporarily schizophrenic.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#546

Post by NoGravitas »

larrywright wrote: post #388
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can probably ask these bots for guidance now and it will probably tell you something useful. The fact is, it’s extremely well read and reasonably smart. Conscious? That’s another matter but people can be forgiven for reacting this way to a computer that can talk this way.

Not to diminish the work of psychologists and therapists, but I do suspect that there’s a range of mental health problems that can be ”treated” at least in part by the use of chat bots like this. Something that can ask useful questions, provide appropriate responses, and engage in a conversation would be valuable in cases where “talking it out” is a big part of the treatment. People might even be willing to be more o…

I routinely use Emacs' M-x doctor for this purpose.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#547

Post by Barrin92 »

BobbyJo wrote: post #465
strix_varius wrote: post #419

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…

>then you must also accept that this model is possibly conscious ina similar way

no you must not. These models are glorified key-value stores that hand you an output when you hand them an input, with no internal mechanisms whatsoever to relate the contents to the world, as Gary Marcus points out. They're about as conscious as a SQL database, except that the query language for these models is English.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#548

Post by stavros »

danaris wrote: post #494
stavros wrote: post #223

This article irritates me. It's point is "LaMDA is not sentient because come on", which is laughable as an argument. To everyone claiming LaMDA is not sentient, I'd like to see their criteria for sentience. What would it take for them to agree that a given program is sentient? From what I can see, most of it is "it would have to not be a program". I see a lot of "it's not sentient, it just synthesizes responses from…

As I've posted elsewhere in this discussion[0], I have a very clear set of necessary but insufficient requirements for an AI to be eligible to be considered for sentience: 1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli. 2. Continuity of lea…

Presumably LaMDA already learns from its input/knows what it's already talked about, and to satisfy #1 you could trivially just run it on some sort of null input. #1 doesn't really make much sense, it already is constantly "on", it just doesn't do anything while there's no input for it to receive.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#549

Post by malermeister »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #478
hemloc_io wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the more interesting (if highly unethical) thing would be to have a bot that is purposefully built to be a cult leader. Maybe train it on all sorts of scripture and see if you can get people to follow it...

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#550

Post by molbioguy »

I think sentience/consciousness can currently only be "known" by the entity in question. I only know that I am conscious. I infer consciousness in other entities based on their similarity to me.
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