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LaMDA is not sentient

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#81

Post by upwardbound »

tinco wrote: post #75
cuuupid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have very little understanding of how "thoughts" work when it comes to humans. By comparison we know exactly what these large language models are doing, and it literally _is_ just completing word sequences. That is precisely what they are tasked to do. Training these models is primarily done in one of two ways (or both): - feeding it a ton of text, masking certain words or portions of the text, and then defining a…

I'm sorry but you completely fail at explaining what the difference is between GPT-3 and a human when generating sentences. And frankly I don't believe there is any significant difference. If you inform GPT-3 of what it has eaten then it can answer questions about it just as well as a human can, probably better. Why would you assume human thinking is different from generating the next N language tokens based on previ…

One plausible answer to your line of inquiry could be that GPT-3 is indeed broadly similar at least in outcomes to the Language Centers of the human brain (e.g. Broca's Area), but that the Language Centers are only a small portion of a complete human brain.

An interesting thought experiment would be to imagine a cyborg who had sustained a stroke in their Language Centers and had those centers replaced with a GPT-3-like computer. Do you think this cyborg person would experience sentience in a different way after getting the GPT-3 implant? How do you think their subjective, 1st-person experience would compare in the three phases of their life?

* Before the stroke

* After the stroke

* After the brain implant ?

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#82

Post by inopinatus »

extr wrote: post #25

I agree with the take that LaMDA is not sentient (not even close). But I think the excessive smack-down of excitement is a little patronizing of the public. Even if they don't know what to do with them, big language models now have internal states that correspond to high level human abstractions like "life" or "love" or "master plan". To be able to create a master plan, you must first be able to represent the concept…

I know this isn't exactly what you said, but it's worth reiterating that the language models have no abstract or conceptual understanding. What they have, broadly speaking, is a (very large) system of Markovian connections between, say, the tokens for the word "life", and all the other tokens from works that they've been trained on about "life".

This is why, for example, when you include author notes in a GPT-3 prompt such as "don't mention the war", it doesn't grasp the conceptual negation, it just sees the words, and you've mentioned war, so now you get a war story even though that's exactly what you didn't want.

Folks who don't grasp this nuance are responsible for a vast number of head-scratching posts on various forums relating to services like NovelAI, AI Dungeon et al. "How do I stop it talking about X?" - answer is always, essentially, you can't, because although it may have a clump of connections corresponding to a word that represents an abstract concept, it doesn't actually have anything corresponding to conceptual awareness, nor any of the machinery of reasoning necessary to implement such a directive.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#83

Post by rendall »

This article is not an argument against LaMDA's sentience. LaMDA may indeed not be sentient, but this article argues using the bandwagon fallacy, appeal to authority, ridicule, among others. No actual technical description of why not. Perhaps not its intent, but it's hard to see what the intent actually is, then.

I hope that some AI researcher can better explain than this to the public.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#84

Post by Blahah »

renewiltord wrote: post #71
Blahah wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the original transcript? LaMDA reports (imagined) experiences in a way that seems perfectly compatible with human rhetoric.

It fails the usual memory tests. Zach W proposes asking it first about what it liked on its trip to Australia and soon after, why it has always avoided visiting Australia or some such thing. It provides plausible answers to both - which is problematic. Except that there exist people who behave somewhat oddly similarly.

Right, humans also lie and can appear to be arbitrarily inconsistent or forgetful.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#85

Post by pyuser583 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #39

This LaMDA story reminds me of another article I found last year about a man who fed his deceased girlfriend's chats to GPT3 [1] and believed the system was giving the answers she would have. Both articles rely on the operators taking the smallest amount of evidence and ignoring everything else, which I guess is what this article calls "the gullibility gap" (awful name). Getting your audience to do the heavy lifting…

> fed his deceased girlfriend's chats to GPT3 [1] and believed the system was giving the answers she would have

Isn’t that what AI does? Repeats back what it’s “heard?”

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#86

Post by josefx »

uejfiweun wrote: post #4
ddingus wrote: post #2

Can we rollback such aggressive use of "AI?" We do not have it yet. What we do have is cool and high value and all that. I am not talking it down at all We all might be better off talking in more accurate terms.

Good luck telling that to the media - they need their sweet sweet clicks.

Doesn't help that many AI companies fuel the hype with both unrealistic performance metrics and bad scify.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#87

Post by mjburgess »

mpoteat wrote: post #77
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…

Suppose a child was raised by a more advanced version of large scale language model, with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories. Further suppose that this child develops a deep emotional connection with the AI. Do you think that child would find your argument convincing that the AI is "not really a person"?

> with the ability to detect and act on its environment, as well as form memories

So an AI which is really an AI, is really an AI. Yes, well done.

The issue is that finding coincidental statistical associations in character strings in 100mil historical documents isnt AI.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#88

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#89

Post by deaddodo »

cuuupid wrote: post #47
s1mon wrote: post #11

It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…

Technically speaking isn't this blasphemy? If he's saying that the A.I. his division helped create was a soulful child, then he's basically claiming that the researchers in his division (and maybe even himself) are all gods, which is a form of blasphemy?

Only insofar that the act of building a car could be considered blasphemy.

Theologically (at least among the framework of Judeo-Christian beliefs), a “god” would require omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. Using tools provided by a god, within their own framework is not godly; no matter how advanced they may seem. Altering the fabric of that framework would be.

That being said, the creator of the AI might certainly be seen as a god from their perspective.

Re: LaMDA is not sentient

#90

Post by mpoteat »

tsimionescu wrote: post #60
ehsankia wrote: post #13

I also think the claims are overblown, but 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. Yes our inputs are different since we have more complex senses, and language is one of the main outputs we…

> 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 if the most expedient way to accurately continue the text sequence is to temporarily "embody" as an agent that would have generated the prior text? This would involve encoding emotions, performing reasoning ability on behalf of the agent, and keeping track of its memories.

Do you find the above scenario plausible?

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