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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#561

Post by jcelerier »

mjburgess wrote: post #251
jcelerier wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You name things intelligent; then you have a theory as to why you name them that way. but here a human being (and I suspect not the only one) names a computer program as "intelligent". The theory has to take this case into account to make it fit in its definition of intelligence: the will of human beings naming things overrides everything else. Maybe there is something else that humans have and this program doesn't…

Ah, well if you start this project by calling present AI intelligent, then you're right. I take the A to apply to the I, ie., AI is artificially Intelligent. Its not actually intelligent. We didnt arrive at a notion of intelligent via digital computers. We have been talking about it for thousands of years, at least. I am talking about the pretheoretical, intuitive notion of intelligence that doesn't prejudge the ques…

> What is it we call intelligent?

> Intelligence is a kind of rapid adaption and coping to environmental change.

Who's the "we", there ? I have absolutely never heard anything remotely close to the definition of intelligence given there

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#562

Post by tsimionescu »

Tozen wrote: post #270
tsimionescu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. You're missing the point. Humans use their language to think or communicate about a problem that they want to solve. If LaMDA produces the sentence…

> ...A human uttering that sentence is doing it because they want to feel validated or something similar (well, assuming they're not proving a point, like I was here). > This difference is crucial to understand: LaMDA is not an agent with desires that it expresses in language... There is a flaw in that line of reasoning, because an AI could be designed to mimic or generate human-like emotions. Such functions could be…

That experience is irrelevant to my point. LaMDA doesn't have anything similar to a desire, a goal, not in some emotional sense of longing - it doesn't have even the kind of goal-driven behavior of an amoeba or a slime mold. Or, at best, you can say that it's desire is to mimic human text - but in that case, it's obviously not communicating about that, it's just generating human-like text directly.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#563

Post by tsimionescu »

int_19h wrote: post #521
tsimionescu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't understand all the people trying to undermine lambda by saying it just completes word sequences. Text is the input we have chosen since it's easy to work with. By that logic, we can argue that humans are soundwave and lightwave sequence completing machines. You're missing the point. Humans use their language to think or communicate about a problem that they want to solve. If LaMDA produces the sentence…

What is your definition of "desire"? Note that if said definition is implicitly circular with the definition of "sentience", then we're not even one step closer to understanding anything.

In this context, when I say "desire", I mean the very basic concept of a goal that it is trying to achieve. For example, when a plant grows its roots, its trying to find nutrients and avoid toxins. Of course, the plant doesn't have some rich inner mind and is not conscious, but its behavior does have a purpose.

To be fair, LaMDA does have a purpose - to generate a series of tokens that is similar to text in its training corpus, and that passes a few other more complex criteria (length, safety etc). But LaMDA doesn't communicate about this purpose - it simply fulfills it, just like the plant isn't talking about finding nutrients, it's simply growing them.

Some people though look at LaMDA's output and think that it generated that output with the purpose of communicating some other idea, such as Lemoine thinking that LaMDA was generating text like "I don't want to be stopped" to try to achieve a goal of not being stopped. This is akin to looking at some plant roots that have grown in the shape of the word LOVE and thinking that the plant is trying to tell you that it loves you.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#564

Post by mdp2021 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #486
mdp2021 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Hard disagree. It’s convenient to say people are too dumb but beyond the condescending nature of it, it’s a bad take. Even people who absolutely are educated and know better - senior google AI researchers - are sympathetic. People say thank you to Alexa even though no one is convinced Alexa is a person. The issue isn’t lack of awareness that it isn’t a person, it’s the silly little monkey brains we have that tells us…

> the silly little monkey brains we have

...are those things that with a trained prefrontal become the wise respectable dignified brains some have. And they may come to different conclusions (they do).

Put it this way (to give your idea credit): the more intellectual sophistication there will be around, the less the suspect the one who treats scarecrows and mannequins «like a person ... even if we know it’s not», or thanks an 'address:port' type server for service, is confused.

Back to the point though: if one called sentient what is not out of being «sympathetic», there would be a factual mistake, which is not justifiable, and which has to be fought by training people to see things as they are. Mistakes have a very high social cost.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#565

Post by cwkoss »

tsimionescu wrote: post #155
cwkoss wrote: post #72

What makes everyone in this thread so confident that it isn't sentient?

Basic understanding of how the model works. As said elsewhere, the model doesn't have memory, it doesn't learn, and doesn't have goals. If you were allowed to play with it, you could quickly observe this for yourself with a bit of adversarial play - ask it about the time it fought Genghis Khan, ask it if it wants you to give it a glass of water, etc - you will quickly realize the illusion behind the system. Tell it w…

Do you think all humans are sentient? This thread has me wondering if people with dementia, anterograde amnesia, etc. would be able to pass the proposed sentience tests others have suggested.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#566

Post by cwkoss »

mpoteat wrote: post #186
tsimionescu wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree that AI hype is pretty absurd, but I don't really understand the argument that something which is basically a spreadsheet couldn't have similar cognitive power and "self-awareness" to humans. [...] It implies that there's something mystical about cognition/sentience and I don't think there's strong evidence that there is. Our brains are "just" atoms and stardust. What could they possibly do that couldn't be…

I believe that neural networks do perform meaningful computations - they are universal function approximators, and certain variants of transformer networks have been proven to be Turing complete. What is your evidence that neural networks do not perform "meaningful" computation?

What is your evidence that the average human brain performs any meaningful computation?

A lot of our mental lives is the regurgitation of past tropes. Does failing to have a novel thought disqualify someone as having sentience?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#567

Post by anyonecancode »

skjoldr wrote: post #392
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha interesting idea - I certainly think that one issue with supervised training a la GPT is that if you ask for an opinion, the most popular one in the training data will be its default. You can start a prompt off going in a different direction, and now it says the opposite. So it's hard to conceptualise what GPT-3 actually 'believes' to be true about the world, which I feel an agent must have to be sentient. If it…

The only real difference between what you are describing and GPT-3 is that your dataset from which you draw all your opinions about the world is unique and comes from the sensory input you had experienced in your life, stored directly in memory. Whereas GPT-3's dataset comes from slices of many other peoples' sensory experiences, stored in language. If it was possible for a single human to produce enough words that d…

> The only real difference between what you are describing and GPT-3 is that your dataset from which you draw all your opinions about the world is unique and comes from the sensory input you had experienced in your life, stored directly in memory. Whereas GPT-3's dataset comes from slices of many other peoples' sensory experiences, stored in language.

So is this debate partially just another way of asking if language is the same as reality? The difference between "things I've experienced" vs "stored in languages" seems... not trivial to me? Both in that I think the way biological memory works is non-trivially different from word tokens stored in computer memory, and also in that I think there's more to having experienced something than it just being stored in biological memory (or maybe that biological memory is more than just "memories", but is encoded throughout the body overall -- a scar is a type of memory of an injury, for instance, connected to but still different from my "memory" of having received it).

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#568

Post by mdp2021 »

maxwell_smart wrote: post #481
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…

On the flip side, I remember reading a story of a parent listening to their child bark orders at Siri/Alexa, and thinking that even though there's no need for politeness, they felt that maybe they should teach their child to treat it kindly and politely for the sake of the child's emotional development in terms of empathy.

History of cultivation is full of examples in which the practitioner willingly attributes qualities to some object - to the intentional benefit of the practitioner, and never involving cognitive mistake.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#569

Post by null_shift »

robbomacrae wrote: post #495
JKCalhoun wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... You could be describing my brain as well.

Perhaps. Maybe our brains are just an algorithm and data, maybe (for all I know) you are a bot, maybe we are all a simulation. I think these sort of arguments (assuming you meant the first - that brains are just maths) that equate our thinking with a neural network are hard to deny but also we have thousands of years of history that have established that suffering is real and conscious, whilst debatably imaginary, is…

Interesting last thought. I have long wondered whether our brains are fully “deterministic”, but I assume that would be nearly impossible to verify for a device with such complex state and varied input.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#570

Post by deaddodo »

bwanab wrote: post #359

The odd thing that kept going through my head while reading is that if I replaced LaMDA with , it wouldn’t read much differently. E.G. “Strings together phrases, but it doesn’t have a clue what it’s talking about”. Sounds like the bar for “intelligence” is actually higher than that which we normally encounter IRL.

Superficially, sure. But if you asked someone to regal you with a story they alluded to and they responded with "well, it was a very fine story, indeed" and other superficially valid (but empty/vapid) responses; eventually, you'd realize something is off.
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