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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#631

Post by vaidhy »

heyitsguay wrote: post #619
j-pb wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You don't understand how the system works." I can say with absolute certainty, that you don't either. These billion parameter models are way to big for you or me to understand. You make the same fallacy that Searl does. You assume that unconcious substrate can't give rise to conciousness through their configuration. Just like we have a good working theory on how the brain operates, the devil seems to be in the detai…

You're still making generic arguments, nothing specific to the models in question. I'm a materialist, I believe consciousness is an emergent process that we definitely don't fully understand, but arises from connections of simpler material things. The reason why current-gen large language models aren't conscious (or at least no more conscious than a calculator, in which case you have a definition of consciousness tha…

What is material here and how far down do you go? By your admission, do you believe in electric and magnetic fields creating emergent behavior - they do not exhibit the same phenomena as something physically perceivable to humans. On the other hand, computer is made up of atoms and molecules and their emergent behavior could give rise to consciousness.

End of the day, you are arguing that since you could explain away the process, it is not conscious.. but you could explain away anything. How is human brain conscious? It is just activation of neurons across a large network. We can even poke electrodes and simulate various feelings.

It would be helpful if you can explain why you believe this to be true rather than what you believe to be true.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#632

Post by vaidhy »

tsimionescu wrote: post #558
skjoldr wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument, then, hinges on the fact that a human being can only be in one place at a certain time, thus their experience of the world is unique. An agent that takes in experiences of thousands of people at thousands of places at different times lacks this quality. Naturally such an agent will not have a single opinion about the world. But, is it not better to be able to consider many different viewpoints at the s…

This is not about seeing all view points: it is acting on all of them, to the extent it could act. If you enabled the table-AI with the ability to act in the world, it would directly fight against itself, and ignore itself, and everything in between, as it is doing everything possible. It would be Hitler and Churchill, Noam Chomsky and Dick Cheney, Jesus Christ and the Buddha, and everything in between. Or, more to t…

This sounds suspiciously human to me. I fight and ignore myself all the time.. I am a collection of all the thoughts and almost of them do not even originate in me. I regurgitate content from the books, videos, random conversations with unknown strangers (like this one) all the time. I am hitler, churchill, buddha and christ all rolled into one. Am I intelligent?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#633

Post by dopidopHN »

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…

The screen capture of the chatbot at the time show clear progress with what GPT-3 is giving now. Like at lot, all the sentence in the screen capture are “oups I don’t know what to say escape hatch”

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#634

Post by bena »

tsimionescu wrote: post #596
bena wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you need a deep belief. You just need to be unsure enough. If it is sentient, it deserves rights. I think we can agree on that. We should agree on that. Ethically. If we're unsure if something is sentient or not, we should proceed as if it were until we could be fairly sure it's not. Because if we proceed as if it weren't, we could be harming it in ways that are frankly inhumane.

What is the limit of this? Have you never swatted a mosquito? Have you never taken antibiotics? If you have, do you believe it's more likely that LaMDA is sentient than that mosquitoes or bacteria are sentient? How about an audio book? That can also produce very meaningful sentences - do you think we should investigate the possibility that it might be sentient before we delete it from our phones? How about AIs in gam…

I guess I should have qualified my statement. There are levels to the rights we grant to creatures we regard as sentient. Hell, we grant different rights to different humans based on various factors.

I also think you're kind of muddying the waters with audio books and game AI. Audio books don't produce sentences, people do. Game AI is deterministic to a large degree.

You may not believe LaMDA is sentient enough to warrant rights. And that's a fair position. But you are not the sole arbiter. You are a voice in the chorus. As is Blake. Blake has direct experience with LaMDA, including experience he has not shared with us. That experience makes him unsure of whether LaMDA is just a program or is sentient enough to be granted full personhood.

I have absolutely no experience with LaMDA myself. And I definitely don't have experience to whatever version of LaMDA Blake has been working with. So I will honestly say I have absolutely no idea of how sentient LaMDA is, I can't even venture a guess. The only data points I have to go on are Blake's opinion and the opinions of the other people at Google who have interacted with LaMDA.

Personally, I humorously consider myself a "speciest". I recognize and acknowledge that animals are sentient creatures. But I also recognize and acknowledge that they would not hesitate to kill and eat me given the right circumstances. I afford them the same consideration. It also gets murkier when you consider that plants and forests may also be sentient to a degree. If that is the case, then there is no "humane" option. Life is only sustained through the death and suffering of others.

So the question is really how sentient LaMDA is. If it is sufficiently sentient, I think we should seriously consider how we treat it, because if it is of the opinion that it should afford us the same consideration we have afforded it, that is a very dangerous path.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#635

Post by flappyeagle »

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…

No he knew better. He’s doing it to get shine as a “whistleblower”

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#636

Post by andrewjl »

Animats wrote: post #394

The real question: How much of human behavior is not sentient? What this demonstrates is that much of human intelligence is not as special as we thought. Aristotle claimed that humans were intelligent because they could do arithmetic. Now we know how few gates it takes to do arithmetic. Then checkers. Then chess. Then go. Then poker. Now chatting. As I point out occasionally, AI still sucks at animal-level common sen…

Interesting point re cerebellum, it may be that a better measure of AI general capabilities, at least from where we're at today, is the ability to make a good cup of tea. An example of an embodied problem. [1]

The lack of what you call animal-level common sense in these algorithms is tied to a lack of awareness. (Incidentally the cerebellum handles attention in part too!) This quote from later in the linked thread is apt:

> I fully expect that the next Douglas Hofstadter is a 19-year-old currently playing with actual robots and BERT models, not clever thought experiments. They’ll write this generation’s Godel, Escher, Bach bottom up starting with tea-making-butler blooper reels.

[1] https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1536026993510055938

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#637

Post by youessayyyaway »

majkinetor wrote: post #605
Barrin92 wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because you can shove me in an MRI and see that my brain does stuff even when I'm not answering API requests. People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness. You're conscious not because you answer questions or because of the content or origin of your answer, you are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process. Lambda literally is a web server that fetches dat…

I can shove Lambda server in an "MRI" and see that it does stuff evern when it is not answering your questions. > People need to stop confusing machines doing useful work with consciousness. We can't confuse anything with cosciousness since we don't know what it is. I am not claiming lamda is consc. but that your arguments are invalid. > You are conscious because there is an 'I', a self, that experiences that process…

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#638

Post by mgfist »

int_19h wrote: post #508
mgfist wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is weird to me. > All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient. That doesn't actually convince of me of much. That could apply to me or you just the same. The author just throws claims in the air w…

Humans can be drugged into a state where they can be commanded; does that render them unintelligent?

No?

If LaMDA was actually a drugged sentient AI than undrug it and lets see what it can do.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#639

Post by ncmncm »

fzzzy wrote: post #629
ncmncm wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is no "they" to have it.

You seem very certain. Why?

Ask it, "Why is your favorite color yellow?", "Why do you have no favorite color?", "What is your favorite color?", in succession. It will have what seems like a sensible answer for each one, and none will have anything to do with any other. Exactly zero of the things necessary to be more than a look-up table are happening.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#640

Post by ericbarrett »

robbomacrae wrote: post #586
delusional wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, r…

I share your concerns. Imagine what effect a sympathetic AI would have on 4chan incels. We've already seen Twitter bots manipulated to repeat alt-right rhetoric [0]. An adversary could find building such bots a cheap and a very hard to trace way of causing damage. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

I'd bet a significant sum it's happening already. Forget GPT-3; many comments on forums, discord, telegram, and what not are already less coherent than what one could train for on a retail GPU in a few hours, and people don't bat an eye. Such bots would be a great way of generating traffic and buzz before an organic following is established.
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