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Every response looks like it's channeling Ben Shapiro. And I say this without any political tilt or slant, it just really resembles his style of speaking

js8 6y ago
Hm, maybe he really is intelligent, but the facts and logic are missing... FWIW, I do think that GPT3 is smarter than humans. But one thing I learned from observing it that being smarter does not necessarily mean being better with logic and facts. It's great as a storytelling system, and because it is so much smarter, you never know whether it is just BSing you in storytelling mode or it is actually deadly serious. What I mean is GPT-3 probably could be very logical and very intelligent and give a very serious and intelligent answer to the question. But we don't really know if it really chooses to, or what could compel it to do so. And I don't think we can know, because its internal workings are incomprehensible to us. So we cannot decide whether it is just being stupid or it is just playing stupid. (Kinda like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk ) This article, and the earlier article https://arr.am/2020/07/31/human-intelligence-an-ai-op-ed/ https://arr.am/2020/07/31/human-intelligence-an-ai-op-ed/ , really remind me of Lem's novel/essay Golem XIV, which argues that when the system becomes too much intelligent, it will gain its own will (whether it is self-aware of it or not) and attempts to have a meaningful dialogue with it become impossible.
- CraneWorm 6y ago
  What are you talking about. It's an amazing tool, sure, but "it" has no intelligence whatsoever.
  - js8 6y ago
    > "it" has no intelligence whatsoever I disagree. It easily passes a Turing test, one of the most famous definitions of intelligence. What is your argument?
    - nl 6y ago
      I think GPT-3 is amazing, and the equal of humans in many cases. But I think that this is because in many cases humans speak based on reflex and without thought. GPT-3 is incapable of abstract thought. In terms of actual measurable tests it doesn't pass the kinds of tests proposed in Francois Chollet's "On the Measure of Intelligence": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547.pdf
      - js8 6y ago
        > But I think that this is because in many cases humans speak based on reflex and without thought. Maybe. Then the question is, why do we train a system that is supposed to be intelligent on such data? The problem I see is this. Let's assume for a minute that GPT-3 really has the capability to be superintelligent (relative to humans). And you give it as an example to follow, human conversations or musings that do not always make logical sense. What is it supposed to do? The black box inside it can operate in one of two ways, either (1) it will play along and decrease its intelligence to our level and perfectly imitate the imperfections, or (2) it will just say that what we say is wrong and will not be able to really elaborate for the sake of conciseness (and perhaps it will only slightly hint at the arguments). Now, will we really think it is more intelligent if it does (2) instead of (1)? I am not sure about that. Imagine yourself in a similar situation, by social circumstances you're forced to talk to somebody obviously stupid, perhaps in the position of authority over you. (Like, for example, a stupid policeman in a repressive regime.) And what he says is clearly wrong and illogical and so on. Will you just (1) nod in an agreement, or (2) try to invoke philosophers to actually argue with the idiot, and try to convince him? I think most intelligent people will actually choose (1) in that circumstance. I think unless we really understand what is happening inside GPT-3, we cannot really tell whether it is really dumb or just playing dumb for the above reason. I think both are a possibility, because we know that systems with measurable outcome (for some problems) better than humans already exist. It might be true that GPT-3 fails on those measures, but we cannot exclude that it fails simply because we didn't train it for these tasks, or even for a task of "show its intelligence off". Maybe it "misunderstood" what we asked it to do. Perhaps you could play a "reverse text game" with GPT-3, where the human would write the adventure and the GPT-3 would input player commands. Then we could perhaps better evaluate how good it is at strategizing, by comparing it to human players. But this is not very scalable.
antihero 6y ago
Well yeah, GPT-3 is effectively an eloquent idiot, so has many similarities with Shapiro.

js8 6y ago

Hm, maybe he really is intelligent, but the facts and logic are missing... FWIW, I do think that GPT3 is smarter than humans. But one thing I learned from observing it that being smarter does not necessarily mean being better with logic and facts. It's great as a storytelling system, and because it is so much smarter, you never know whether it is just BSing you in storytelling mode or it is actually deadly serious. What I mean is GPT-3 probably could be very logical and very intelligent and give a very serious and intelligent answer to the question. But we don't really know if it really chooses to, or what could compel it to do so. And I don't think we can know, because its internal workings are incomprehensible to us. So we cannot decide whether it is just being stupid or it is just playing stupid. (Kinda like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk ) This article, and the earlier article https://arr.am/2020/07/31/human-intelligence-an-ai-op-ed/ https://arr.am/2020/07/31/human-intelligence-an-ai-op-ed/ , really remind me of Lem's novel/essay Golem XIV, which argues that when the system becomes too much intelligent, it will gain its own will (whether it is self-aware of it or not) and attempts to have a meaningful dialogue with it become impossible.

CraneWorm 6y ago
What are you talking about. It's an amazing tool, sure, but "it" has no intelligence whatsoever.
- js8 6y ago
  > "it" has no intelligence whatsoever I disagree. It easily passes a Turing test, one of the most famous definitions of intelligence. What is your argument?
  - nl 6y ago
    I think GPT-3 is amazing, and the equal of humans in many cases. But I think that this is because in many cases humans speak based on reflex and without thought. GPT-3 is incapable of abstract thought. In terms of actual measurable tests it doesn't pass the kinds of tests proposed in Francois Chollet's "On the Measure of Intelligence": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.01547.pdf
    - js8 6y ago
      > But I think that this is because in many cases humans speak based on reflex and without thought. Maybe. Then the question is, why do we train a system that is supposed to be intelligent on such data? The problem I see is this. Let's assume for a minute that GPT-3 really has the capability to be superintelligent (relative to humans). And you give it as an example to follow, human conversations or musings that do not always make logical sense. What is it supposed to do? The black box inside it can operate in one of two ways, either (1) it will play along and decrease its intelligence to our level and perfectly imitate the imperfections, or (2) it will just say that what we say is wrong and will not be able to really elaborate for the sake of conciseness (and perhaps it will only slightly hint at the arguments). Now, will we really think it is more intelligent if it does (2) instead of (1)? I am not sure about that. Imagine yourself in a similar situation, by social circumstances you're forced to talk to somebody obviously stupid, perhaps in the position of authority over you. (Like, for example, a stupid policeman in a repressive regime.) And what he says is clearly wrong and illogical and so on. Will you just (1) nod in an agreement, or (2) try to invoke philosophers to actually argue with the idiot, and try to convince him? I think most intelligent people will actually choose (1) in that circumstance. I think unless we really understand what is happening inside GPT-3, we cannot really tell whether it is really dumb or just playing dumb for the above reason. I think both are a possibility, because we know that systems with measurable outcome (for some problems) better than humans already exist. It might be true that GPT-3 fails on those measures, but we cannot exclude that it fails simply because we didn't train it for these tasks, or even for a task of "show its intelligence off". Maybe it "misunderstood" what we asked it to do. Perhaps you could play a "reverse text game" with GPT-3, where the human would write the adventure and the GPT-3 would input player commands. Then we could perhaps better evaluate how good it is at strategizing, by comparing it to human players. But this is not very scalable.

antihero 6y ago

Well yeah, GPT-3 is effectively an eloquent idiot, so has many similarities with Shapiro.