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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#991

Post by micromacrofoot »

layer8 wrote: post #658
micromacrofoot wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they still have memory, just not new ones - they lived experiences

An LLM’s training could be seen as lived experience, and the fact that LLMs can output long sequences from their training material can be interpreted as them remembering those parts. Also, how does that relate to consciousness? I don’t think that past episodic memory is necessary for consciousness.

you can't be conscious about your decisions if you don't incorporate their effects into your corpus — knowing the results of other people's actions secondhand isn't the same because you're not those people

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#992

Post by xjm »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #104

The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness. It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember…

But ... if they were sentient, sentience would just happen for the time of a session, and only when tokens are being generated.

I don't think people here are arguing that sentience would happen when the model is not running, or that sentient experience spans several sessions that do not share some kind of state?

Also, a definition of consciousness is anyway hard to imagine :)

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#993

Post by fnordpiglet »

miyoji wrote: post #928
fnordpiglet wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However it’s disingenuous to say the inference is on the next token because it’s actually not, it’s in the models parameter space across a set of nonlinear activation functions then effectively projected into the token. The idea its predictive of the token isn’t actually the case, it really is a much more complex and more semantic relationship that ends in the series of tokens through the attention mechanism. The art…

> But if you can not see it as amazing you have lost the capacity to dream. I completely disagree. I think if you think these things are amazing, your dreams are incredibly limited and boring. I remember the first time I talked to a chatbot. Not an LLM, just a regular chatbot, like ELIZA or any other dumb bot. For a few seconds, it felt magical, like I was talking to a computer that understood me, as it made replies…

That’s if you believe what’s magical is the computer is actually literally thinking and is a little human stuffed in a box. What’s magical is we’ve cracked NLP -and- abductive reasoning on a Turing machine. For those who have the capacity to dream the fact ELIZA wasn’t a person in a box didn’t break anything of the magic but inspired them with the fact that this mess of wires and cores could perform complex workflows of logic, not merely compute trigonometric functions. It could process text in protocols. It’s what inspired people to go forth and do things like email, phone, ytalk, irc, gopher, etc.

If your dreams begin and end with making a box with a person inside that’s the point I made. You can make a person in a box in 9 months, that’s not interesting or cool. What we can build with an LLM and genai in general is MUCH MUCH cooler than a metal baby. (And I think a conscious mind we control and manufacture but don’t recognize the rights of is a scarier horror movie than all the AI feat movies ever made put together, fwiw, so I’m glad your dreams were broken)

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#994

Post by K0balt »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #357
K0balt wrote: post #333

It doesn’t matter. It will act as if it is. Embodied in a robot, that carries real consequences. Whether it’s “real” or not is almost without consequence.

I thought a LLM will have exactly the same output if you give it exactly the same inputs. But inputs are roughly prompt+randomSeed. As so the random bit means it seems to vary each time. I don't know of an intelligence that will behave so precisely. But then, maybe intelligence needs to be better defined.

That’s an interesting proposition, but it’s actually kinda probable that a biological intelligence would be very predictable if the inputs were so carefully controlled as an LLM. There is so much external context as well as internal chemical variance from moment to moment that you never are really processing the same data twice. We will probably see that with robots soon as well… the context will never be exactly the same two times.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#995

Post by famouswaffles »

the_af wrote: post #455
barryfandango wrote: post #384

It's a waste of time to think about whether an LLM has a subjective experience of reality, and this handily sets aside issues like AI rights. But the fact remains that these next-token-predictors exhibit objective, human-like behaviours, and for that reason the work of in-house philosopher Amanda Askell _is_ important. It's important that Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human…

> It's important that Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition I think you've fallen into the trap the essay describes. Of course Claude cannot be "happy" or "empathetic" for any meaningful definitions of those words, just like ELIZA couldn't be happy. It can output text that mimics words an empathetic or happy person might say (say, Julius Caesar if it could speak Eng…

>Of course Claude cannot be "happy" or "empathetic" for any meaningful definitions of those words

If Claude does a poor job of a critical task because you said some angry words, Maybe the consequences are far more sinister than simply a job done poorly. Do the results disappear ? Do the consciousness gods appear and rectify the situation ? "Oh well see Claude did not have 'real' anger you see, so lets fix that right up for you." Good luck with that.

>It doesn't have the organs/hormones/sensors to feel things, as Chiang explains.

Well that's nonsense isn't it ? You can feel tired when you have no reason to be, feel hungry when you've just eaten. You can even feel pain from a phantom limb! That's because Human emotion is constructed from signals, predictions, memory, context, and interpretation, and not merely from having the correct biological plumbing. You don't need biological organs to feel any of those things. You just need to know the right signals to send to the brain.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#996

Post by pnexk »

voidhorse wrote: post #929
nonfamous wrote: post #906

This entire essay basically boils down to one simple contention: LLMs can’t be conscious because only humans can be conscious and LLMs are not human. What an unimaginative argument: essentially ruling out the possibility of the title by definition. And the author fails to touch on the really interesting question posed by the article’s title: what if human consciousness is more like the working of LLMs than we think?

The argument doesn't state that at all. It very clearly admits consciousness to nonhuman animals, for example.

Another example of how we’re all collectively becoming worse at properly reading and parsing longer text.

Really does make me wonder about backtracking on our breakthroughs in literacy rates.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#997

Post by martin1975 »

cout wrote: post #172
martin1975 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily one of my top 10 favorite episodes. The judge broached on the subject of what makes us distinct from Data (e.g. machines w/great heuristics) - the existence of a soul. Or rather, I'd like to think, in the words of CS Lewis, that we are a soul with bodies attached.

How would someone know whether one has a soul or not? Is there any sort of introspection that can reveal the presence of a soul or any of its properties?

nephesh (נֶפֶשׁ), is a word in the Hebrew bible that the KJV (English) renders as "soul" hundreds of times, and it also translates the very same word as "life," "person," "creature," "self"

So, the question can be asked another way - do you 'have' life, e.g. are you alive? If yes, then you are (or 'have') a soul.

The mistake many of us will make, not due to our own fault but rather due to inability to discern, is that this is somehow not apparent to most if not all people with a sane mind.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#998

Post by rerdavies »

overgard wrote: post #778
rerdavies wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are oversimplifying. They do produce one word per cycle. But they can also have context buffers carrying up to two million tokens, which is most definitely larger than your measly human short-term memory context buffers. You, of course, wouldn't notice if your only experience of LLMs was chatting with the cheapest, smallest, least capable LLMs that you get through ChatGPT, or Google search. It becomes pretty obvi…

I use coding agents every day. They're useful. It hasn't changed my mind on what they are.

Which one?, out of curiosity.
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