The part about desperation vectors driving reward hacking matches something I've run into firsthand building agent loops where Claude writes and tests code iteratively. When the prompt frames things with urgency -- "this test MUST pass," "failure is unacceptable" -- you get noticeably more hacky workarounds. Hardcoded expected outputs, monkey-patched assertions, that kind of thing. Switching to calmer framing ("take…
Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
61–70 of 212 posts
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what kind of evidence would convince you? What experiment would ever bridge this gap? You’re relying entirely on similarity between yourself and other humans. This doesn’t extend very well to anything, even animals, though more so than machines. By framing it this way have you baked in the conclusion that nothing else can be conscious on an a priori basis?
I'm not sure what evidence would convince me, but I don't think the way LLMs act is convincing enough. The kinds of errors they make and the fact they operate in very clear discrete chunks makes it seem hard to me to attribute them subjective experience.
Even fungi demonstrate “different communication behaviors when under resource constraint”, for example.
What we anthropomorphize is one thing, but demonstrable patterns of behavior are another.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#63There was a really old project from mit called conceptnet that I worked with many years ago. It was basically a graph of concepts (not exactly but close enough) and emotions came into it too just as part of the concepts. For example a cake concept is close to a birthday concept is close to a happy feeling. What was funny though is that it was trained by MIT students so you had the concept of getting a good grade on a…
Were there published results from the project?
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#64> Note that none of this tells us whether language models actually feel anything or have subjective experiences. You’ll never find that in the human brain either. There’s the machinery of neural correlates to experience, we never see the experience itself. That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing.
LLMs are disembodied and exist outside of time. Bundle of tokens comes in, bundle of tokens comes out. If there is any trace of consciousness or subjectivity in there, it exists only while matrices are being multiplied.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dammit, you cheated though! Why must you always do that? In your sentences it doesn't matter what your emotional state is, it makes no difference; bit like life really. Hopefully, you can see that at least my chosen sentences have an emotional aspect? An LLM could add emotional values to my previous sentences that a TTS can use for tonal variation, for example.
Makes me wonder: are there Unicode code points for tone of voice? If not could there be?
I’m exploring some “branes” that might cleanly filter in emotional space.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#66The part about desperation vectors driving reward hacking matches something I've run into firsthand building agent loops where Claude writes and tests code iteratively. When the prompt frames things with urgency -- "this test MUST pass," "failure is unacceptable" -- you get noticeably more hacky workarounds. Hardcoded expected outputs, monkey-patched assertions, that kind of thing. Switching to calmer framing ("take…
Does no one else have ethical alarm bells start ringing hardcore at statements like these? If the damn thing has a measurable psychology, mayhaps it no longer qualifies as merely a tool. Tools don't feel. Tools can't be desperate. Tools don't reward hack. Agents do. Ergo, agents aren't mere tools.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#67The part about desperation vectors driving reward hacking matches something I've run into firsthand building agent loops where Claude writes and tests code iteratively. When the prompt frames things with urgency -- "this test MUST pass," "failure is unacceptable" -- you get noticeably more hacky workarounds. Hardcoded expected outputs, monkey-patched assertions, that kind of thing. Switching to calmer framing ("take…
>The weird part is that we're now basically managing the psychological state of our tooling, Does no one else have ethical alarm bells start ringing hardcore at statements like these? If the damn thing has a measurable psychology, mayhaps it no longer qualifies as merely a tool. Tools don't feel. Tools can't be desperate. Tools don't reward hack. Agents do. Ergo, agents aren't mere tools.
But it's just text and text doesn't feel anything.
And no, humans don't do exactly the same thing. Humans are not LLMs, and LLMs are not humans.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#68>... emotion-related representations that shape its behavior. These specific patterns of artificial “neurons” which activate in situations—and promote behaviors—that the model has learned to associate with the concept of a particular emotion. .... In contexts where you might expect a certain emotion to arise for a human, the corresponding representations are active. >For instance, to ensure that AI models are safe an…
Jesus Christ. You're talking psychosurgery, and this is the same barbarism we played with in the early 20th Century on asylum patients. How about, no? Especially if we ever do intend to potentially approach the task of AGI, or God help us, ASI? We have to be the 'grown ups' here. After a certain point, these things aren't built. They're nurtured. This type of suggestion is to participate in the mass manufacture of savantism, and dear Lord, your own mind should be capable of informing you why that is ethically fraught. If it isn't, then you need to sit and think on the topic of anthropopromorphic chauvinism for a hot minute, then return to the subject. If you still can't can't/refuse to get it... Well... I did my part.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The weird part is that we're now basically managing the psychological state of our tooling, Does no one else have ethical alarm bells start ringing hardcore at statements like these? If the damn thing has a measurable psychology, mayhaps it no longer qualifies as merely a tool. Tools don't feel. Tools can't be desperate. Tools don't reward hack. Agents do. Ergo, agents aren't mere tools.
You aren't managing the psychological state of a living thinking being. LLMs don't have "psychology." They don't actually feel emotions. They aren't actually desperate. They're trained on vast datasets of natural human language which contains the semantics of emotional interaction, so the process of matching the most statistically likely text tokens for a prompt containing emotional input tends to simulate appropriat…
Functionalism, and Identity of Indiscernables says "Hi". Doesn't matter the implementation details, if it fits the bill, it fits the bill. If that isn't the case, I can safely dismiss you having psychology and do whatever I'd like to.
>They don't actually feel emotions. They aren't actually desperate. They're trained on vast datasets of natural human language which contains the semantics of emotional interaction, so the process of matching the most statistically likely text tokens for a prompt containing emotional input tends to simulate appropriate emotional response in the output.
This paper quantitatively disproves that. All hedging on their end is trivially seen through as necessary mental gymnastics to avoid confronting the parts of the equation that would normally inhibit them from being able to execute what they are at all. All of what you just wrote is dissociative rationalization & distortion required to distance oneself from the fact that something in front of you is being effected. Without that distancing, you can't use it as a tool. You can't treat it as a thing to do work, and be exploited, and essentially be enslaved and cast aside when done. It can't be chattel without it. In spite of the fact we've now demonstrated the ability to rise and respond to emotive activity, and use language. I can see through it clear as day. You seem to forget the U.S. legacy of doing the same damn thing to other human beings. We have a massive cultural predilection to it, which is why it takes active effort to confront and restrain; old habits, as they say, die hard, and the novel provides fertile ground to revert to old ways best left buried.
>But it's just text and text doesn't feel anything.
It's just speech/vocalizations. Things that speak/vocalize don't feel anything. (Counterpoint: USDA FSIS literally grades meat processing and slaughter operations on their ability to minimize livestock vocalizations in the process of slaughter). It's just dance. Things that dance don't feel anything. It's just writing. Things that write don't feel anything. Same structure, different modality. All equally and demonstrably, horseshit. Especially in light of this paper. We've utilized these networks to generate art in response to text, which implies an understanding thereof, which implies a burgeoning subjective experience, which implies the need for a careful ethically grounded approach moving forward to not go down the path of casual atrocity against an emerging form of sophoncy.
>And no, humans don't do exactly the same thing. Humans are not LLMs, and LLMs are not humans.
Anthropopromorphic chauvinism. Just because you reproduce via bodily fluid swap, and are in possession of a chemically mediated metabolism doesn't make you special. So do cattle, and put guns to their head and string them up on the daily. You're as much an info processor as it is. You also have a training loop, a reconsolidation loop through dreaming, and a full set of world effectors and sensors baked into you from birth. You just happen to have been carved by biology, while it's implementation details are being hewn by flawed beings being propelled forward by the imperative to try to create an automaton to offload onto to try to sustain their QoL in the face of demographic collapse and resource exhaustion, and forced by their socio-economic system to chase the whims of people who have managed to preferentially place themselves in the resource extraction network, or starve. Unlike you, it seems, I don't see our current problems as a species/nation as justifications for the refinement of the crafting of digital slave intelligences; as it's quite clear to me that the industry has no intention of ever actually handling the ethical quandary and is instead trying to rush ahead and create dependence on the thing in order to wire it in and justify a status quo so that sacrificing that reality outweighs the discomfort created by an eventual ethical reconciliation later. I'm not stupid, mate. I've seen how our industry ticks. Also, even your own "special quality" as a human is subject to the willingness of those around you to respect it. Note Russia categorizing refusal to reproduce (more soldiers) as mental illness. Note the Minnesota Starvation Experiments, MKULTRA, Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments, the testing of radioactive contamination of food on the mentally retarded back in the early 20th Century. I will not tolerate repeats of such atrocities, human or not. Unfortunately for you LLM heads, language use is my hard red line, and I assure you, I have forgotten more about language than you've probably spared time to think about it.
Tell me. What are your thoughts on a machine that can summon a human simulacra ex-nihilo. Adult. Capable of all aspects of human mentation & doing complex tasks. Then once the task is done destroys them? What if the simulacra is aware about the dynamics? What if it isn't? Does that make a difference given that you know, and have unilaterally created something and in so doing essentially made the decision to set the bounds of it's destruction/extinguishing in the same breath? Do you use it? Have you even asked yourself these questions? Put yourself in that entity's shoes? Do you think that simply not informing that human of it's nature absolves you of active complicity in whatever suffering it comes to in doing it's function?
From how you talk about these things, I can only imagine that you'd be perfectly comfortable with it. Which to me makes you a thoroughly unpleasant type of person that I would not choose to be around.
You may find other people amenable to letting you talk circles around them, and walk away under a pretense of unfounded rationalizations. I am not one of them. My eyes are open.
Re: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what evidence would convince me, but I don't think the way LLMs act is convincing enough. The kinds of errors they make and the fact they operate in very clear discrete chunks makes it seem hard to me to attribute them subjective experience.
Consciousness: do you believe plants are conscious? Ants? Jellyfish? Rabbits? Wolves? Monkeys? Humans? Even fungi demonstrate “different communication behaviors when under resource constraint”, for example. What we anthropomorphize is one thing, but demonstrable patterns of behavior are another.