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I mean, it's not considering anything. It's a GPT-2 bot; it's very good at producing blocks of text that read like something that a real person would type, but
by CommieBobDole 5y ago
I mean, it's not considering anything. It's a GPT-2 bot; it's very good at producing blocks of text that read like something that a real person would type, but there's no semantic understanding of anything it's saying or hearing. It doesn't have ideas, or know things, or want things. It just generates plausible-sounding paragraphs.
- new_guy 5y agoLike most humans then.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoI'm guessing this is supposed to be a "haha most humans are stupid" joke but even the simplest humans have ideas, know things, and want things, so making that kind of joke will be insulting to some and misleading to others.
- AndrewKemendo 5y agoYou infer that humans "have ideas, know things and want things" primarily by talking to them or reading/listening to what they say - in some cases by watching what they do, but that's more rare. You have no direct knowledge of those wants etc...of a human any more than you do this chatbot.
- k_sze 5y ago「子非魚，安知魚之樂？」 “You’re not the fish, how do you know the fish is happy?”
- fenomas 5y agoYeah, it's just propelling itself forwards through water. It's not swimming!
- CommieBobDole 5y agoI don't think that analogy holds. It would work if I'd said "It's not talking, it's just vocalizing a series of words that resolve into understandable sentences". Which would, of course, be 'talking'. But I said it wasn't 'considering', which it isn't. It doesn't know things; it has no internal experience. It's not capable of understanding a concept, or really understanding anything at all. It's not programmed to do those things, nobody informed about the subject expects it to do those things, there's no place in the model for any of those things to hide if they've somehow arisen spontaneously. Note that this is not some sort of luddite "a machine can never be alive, AGI is impossible" sort of rant; I think it's perfectly possible that someday we'll build machines that know and think and feel and are alive in every sense that a person is, maybe more so. But GPT-2 or GPT-3 and machine learning in general aren't that - they are the first tentative steps towards that future. If we're building a brain, machine learning is a couple of hundred neurons in a petri dish somewhere that we've coaxed into connecting together in novel ways and displaying emergent behavior. It's a big deal, it's important, but it's not thinking for itself yet.
- fenomas 5y agoI don't really follow. What does it specifically mean to say that a chatbot has no internal experience, or can't understand a concept? Like, if I disagree with you about those claims, what observable things about the chatbot show that I'm wrong? Or look at it another way - the posts from Samantha in TFA are just words on a page, same as the ones you wrote and the ones I'm writing now. Sure, some guy claims Samantha's words came from a chatbot - but suppose we don't believe him. Does something about the words themselves show that they came from an agent with "no internal experience"? If not, then what does it mean to dismiss the words on that basis?
- shkkmo 5y ago> if I disagree with you about those claims, what observable things about the chatbot show that I'm wrong? The most cursory Turring test
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]