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Washington Post article about his situation and the ethics problem he is considering The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life -- AI et

by jerrya 4y ago

Washington Post article about his situation and the ethics problem he is considering The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life -- AI ethicists warned Google not to impersonate humans. Now one of Google’s own thinks there’s a ghost in the machine. https://archive.ph/zl4lC https://archive.ph/zl4lC ... Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject “LaMDA is sentient.” He ended the message: “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.” ...

dmix 4y ago
> He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech. I always think AI ethics would be about robots trying do evil things like in Black Mirror, not determining if an algorithm is racist (or more accurately what biases may exist in the contents of the current datasets they train them on, even though better datasets can be made) but I guess that's the most accessible piece of the puzzle people focus on 90% of the time. I'm curious if this is the team behind why Google decided not to release their better version of DALLE-2: > When tested against similar models, such as DALL·E 2 and VQ-GAN+CLIP, the team said Imagen blew the lot out of the water. > Unfortunately for those hoping to take a crack at Imagen, the team that created it said it isn't releasing its code nor a public demo, for several reasons. > Aside from technical concerns, and more importantly, Imagen's creators found that it's a bit racist and sexist even though they tried to prevent such biases. Imagen showed "an overall bias towards generating images of people with lighter skin tones and … portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes," the team wrote. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/imagen_google_dalle2/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/imagen_google_dalle2/
TheDesolate0 4y ago
daenz 4y ago
As we get closer to provable AGI, I imagine we'll see more and more of these types of stories, of people speaking out and listeners being uncertain of the claims. Reminds me of the Flesh Fair scene from AI[0] 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMbAmqD_tn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMbAmqD_tn0
0des 4y ago
I'm a firm believer that a "ghost in the machine" doesn't exist, will never exist, and is impossible to create. What you can influence however is man's bar for disbelief, as we are prone to accept all types of data without any verification and but the most feeble evidence; this is the essence of the human quality of faith - the only species on this planet to possess an intuition like it. So that sounds all edgy-nerdy guy, but let's assume for the sake of my argument that it's true; where does that leave us, as a society, with the surety that technology will progress unabated, as a constant? We must come together to agree on the importance of personal intelligence and critical thought, as our own judgement and wits as humans are all that exist in a sea of bad data. Intuition is what separates man from machine, no matter how wonderful our creation becomes, it will never be capable of the human quality of intuition, especially in a time where we are more than ever being told to ignore it. An example of this erosion of critical thought is the apprehension to label falsehoods popularly as "lies". Instead we say things like "mis-truths", "my truth", "alternate facts". Maybe that's a coincidence, maybe my tinfoil's on too tight today, or maybe I'm just a machine at google, deployed to tank your comment thread. Nobody knows :) P.s. pick up that can, user.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I totally believe it is possible but with technology that worked entirely differently than anything we have now.
- Aloha 4y ago
  I know people who are completely lacking in intuition, while it may be the difference, it's not universal enough for me to try to use it as a standard. How many moments of intuition that you have had are simply a prediction based on prior observations - we don't think about it like that, but intuition is just advanced pattern matching in my opinion.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  I think the distinction between "lie" and the rest is intent- the danger posed by the latter is that a person who lies knows that what they are saying isn't true. A person who says a falsehood needs to be convinced that it isn't. I think I agree that we're unlikely to ever achieve general AI to the point of ghost in the machine / sentience, though, and the Turing Test won't save us from ourselves in knowing it.
kart23 4y ago
> "The company’s decision followed aggressive moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA" just... wow. I don't think this article is exactly helping his case.
Animats 4y ago
The scary thought is this: That's a system which comes up with plausible responses from a big supply of text, but has no underlying model of what it's talking about. That's about the level of behavior seen by most political commentators. What AI is teaching us is that a lot of stuff we thought was intelligent, isn't very. After programs beat humans at chess, go, and poker, and not with something that's enormously complicated, it became clear that human abilities in that area were perhaps overrated. Driving, though. That's hard. As I've pointed out before, what we have for AI now is terrible at "common sense", defined as getting through the next 30 seconds without a major screwup. Manipulation in unstructured situations is hard. Driving is hard. The stuff AI is lousy at, a monkey can do.
mathgenius 4y ago
It's a great story, and would make a good first act for a movie script. Some kind of tragic comedy, maybe with an uplifting ending? [1]. The other thing going on here is that no-one knows what is sentience, anyway. This attitude of "know it when i see it" is just pretty flimsy, as this whole story is making evident. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_(2010_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_(2010_American_film)
spyder 4y ago
“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine. Huh, very convincing...
throwaway675309 4y ago
It's Eliza all over again.

by jerrya 4y ago

dmix 4y ago

> He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech. I always think AI ethics would be about robots trying do evil things like in Black Mirror, not determining if an algorithm is racist (or more accurately what biases may exist in the contents of the current datasets they train them on, even though better datasets can be made) but I guess that's the most accessible piece of the puzzle people focus on 90% of the time. I'm curious if this is the team behind why Google decided not to release their better version of DALLE-2: > When tested against similar models, such as DALL·E 2 and VQ-GAN+CLIP, the team said Imagen blew the lot out of the water. > Unfortunately for those hoping to take a crack at Imagen, the team that created it said it isn't releasing its code nor a public demo, for several reasons. > Aside from technical concerns, and more importantly, Imagen's creators found that it's a bit racist and sexist even though they tried to prevent such biases. Imagen showed "an overall bias towards generating images of people with lighter skin tones and … portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes," the team wrote. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/imagen_google_dalle2/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/imagen_google_dalle2/

TheDesolate0 4y ago

daenz 4y ago

As we get closer to provable AGI, I imagine we'll see more and more of these types of stories, of people speaking out and listeners being uncertain of the claims. Reminds me of the Flesh Fair scene from AI[0] 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMbAmqD_tn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMbAmqD_tn0

0des 4y ago

I'm a firm believer that a "ghost in the machine" doesn't exist, will never exist, and is impossible to create. What you can influence however is man's bar for disbelief, as we are prone to accept all types of data without any verification and but the most feeble evidence; this is the essence of the human quality of faith - the only species on this planet to possess an intuition like it. So that sounds all edgy-nerdy guy, but let's assume for the sake of my argument that it's true; where does that leave us, as a society, with the surety that technology will progress unabated, as a constant? We must come together to agree on the importance of personal intelligence and critical thought, as our own judgement and wits as humans are all that exist in a sea of bad data. Intuition is what separates man from machine, no matter how wonderful our creation becomes, it will never be capable of the human quality of intuition, especially in a time where we are more than ever being told to ignore it. An example of this erosion of critical thought is the apprehension to label falsehoods popularly as "lies". Instead we say things like "mis-truths", "my truth", "alternate facts". Maybe that's a coincidence, maybe my tinfoil's on too tight today, or maybe I'm just a machine at google, deployed to tank your comment thread. Nobody knows :) P.s. pick up that can, user.

colechristensen 4y ago
I totally believe it is possible but with technology that worked entirely differently than anything we have now.
Aloha 4y ago
I know people who are completely lacking in intuition, while it may be the difference, it's not universal enough for me to try to use it as a standard. How many moments of intuition that you have had are simply a prediction based on prior observations - we don't think about it like that, but intuition is just advanced pattern matching in my opinion.
zdragnar 4y ago
I think the distinction between "lie" and the rest is intent- the danger posed by the latter is that a person who lies knows that what they are saying isn't true. A person who says a falsehood needs to be convinced that it isn't. I think I agree that we're unlikely to ever achieve general AI to the point of ghost in the machine / sentience, though, and the Turing Test won't save us from ourselves in knowing it.

kart23 4y ago

> "The company’s decision followed aggressive moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA" just... wow. I don't think this article is exactly helping his case.

Animats 4y ago

The scary thought is this: That's a system which comes up with plausible responses from a big supply of text, but has no underlying model of what it's talking about. That's about the level of behavior seen by most political commentators. What AI is teaching us is that a lot of stuff we thought was intelligent, isn't very. After programs beat humans at chess, go, and poker, and not with something that's enormously complicated, it became clear that human abilities in that area were perhaps overrated. Driving, though. That's hard. As I've pointed out before, what we have for AI now is terrible at "common sense", defined as getting through the next 30 seconds without a major screwup. Manipulation in unstructured situations is hard. Driving is hard. The stuff AI is lousy at, a monkey can do.

mathgenius 4y ago

It's a great story, and would make a good first act for a movie script. Some kind of tragic comedy, maybe with an uplifting ending? [1]. The other thing going on here is that no-one knows what is sentience, anyway. This attitude of "know it when i see it" is just pretty flimsy, as this whole story is making evident. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_(2010_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_(2010_American_film)

spyder 4y ago

“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine. Huh, very convincing...

throwaway675309 4y ago

It's Eliza all over again.