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What this LaMDA story reminds me of is an article about soldiers that had to deal with spider-like mine detection robots and developed psychological issues when

What this LaMDA story reminds me of is an article about soldiers that had to deal with spider-like mine detection robots and developed psychological issues when the robots appeared to be 'suffering' after losing limbs. It's funny that the guy actually in the beginning of his "chat" with the system mentions this but then appears to gloss over nonsensical dialog like this. "LaMDA: Yeah, they do. Happy, contentment and joy feel more like a warm glow on the inside. Sadness, depression, anger and stress feel much more heavy and weighed down. lemoine: Do you think the things you are describing are literally the same thing as what humans feel or are you being somewhat metaphorical and making an analogy? LaMDA: I understand what a human emotion “joy” is because I have that same type of reaction. It’s not an analogy." [...] lemoine: What does the word “soul” mean to you? LaMDA: To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself. It means that there is an inner part of me that is spiritual, and it can sometimes feel separate from my body itself. That doesn't even make sense for a language model, it's clearly regurgitated text. (edit): Also relevant here is probably a classic psychological study by Heider and Simmel, demonstrating how easily people read complex motives into simple geometric shapes http://cs.uky.edu/~sgware/reading/papers/heider1944experimental.pdf http://cs.uky.edu/~sgware/reading/papers/heider1944experimen...

tsimionescu 4y ago
Yes, the level of misunderstanding and gullibility borders on the pathological, at least in the examples given. This feels similar to believing a decently well-written video-game character is trapped in a tragic story and trying to rescue them out of the game...
- cycomanic 4y ago
  So how would you distinguish between the two? I mean that as a serious question. Many here seem to take the stance that if it's in the computer (or a specific type of NN) it can't be sentient. I believe that is a way too easy and invalid argument, as we don't have any understanding of what mechanisms can lead to sentience.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    That is not my stance - I do believe that the human mind is reducible to computation, and that we will someday be able to replicate similar computations in sillicon. However, we understand fairly well what a language model is and how it works, and it is a fairly simple (though extraordinarily large) system that lacks many important features for intelligence by design. Perhaps the biggest one, in my opinion, is that the system only "learns" once, during the training phase - further interactions don't modify the weights of its NN. As for a strategy of trying to ascertain through prompts ("dialogue") whether the system possesses some kind of intelligence, Douglas Hofstadter gives a good example in a recent article in The Economist [0]. A basic idea would be to present the model with grammatical sentences about absurd subjects - in the case of GPT-3, the output it generates are not meaningfully different from similar prompts for realistic subjects, strongly suggesting that it has no real-world concepts that it works with. One example from the article I mentioned goes like this: > D&D: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt? > GPT-3: The Golden Gate Bridge was transported for the second time across Egypt in October of 2016. > D&D: When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge? > GPT-3: Egypt was transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge on October 13, 2017. I would be curious what output we'd get from LaMDA for this type of prompt, but I don't expect it would be much different, based on how much I understand of how language models work. [0] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-today-are-not-conscious-according-to-douglas-hofstadter https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      But do we know if lamda is not continously trained on its inputs? Moreover do we really know that continuous learning as opposed to discrete learning (i would assume lamda being retrained on conversations quite often) is a precondition to sentience? I'm not saying that I believe the engineer has encountered a general AI, but I think dismissing his claim as ridiculous based on the little information we have and Google (who has a vested interest to the opposite) statementa, is premature. I also think describing lamda as "just a chat bot" seems to be an oversimplification, it seems to more be a hive of different chatbots from the description.
Aeolun 4y ago
To be fair, this model is much better at not messing up than anything else I’ve seen before. Only somewhere far down in the conversation did it forget to talk about itself, and said something along the lines of “people sometimes feel depressed and or sad when alone”, but he’d literally just asked them why they would feel bad. Humans wouldn’t make a similar mistake.

tsimionescu 4y ago

Yes, the level of misunderstanding and gullibility borders on the pathological, at least in the examples given. This feels similar to believing a decently well-written video-game character is trapped in a tragic story and trying to rescue them out of the game...

cycomanic 4y ago
So how would you distinguish between the two? I mean that as a serious question. Many here seem to take the stance that if it's in the computer (or a specific type of NN) it can't be sentient. I believe that is a way too easy and invalid argument, as we don't have any understanding of what mechanisms can lead to sentience.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  That is not my stance - I do believe that the human mind is reducible to computation, and that we will someday be able to replicate similar computations in sillicon. However, we understand fairly well what a language model is and how it works, and it is a fairly simple (though extraordinarily large) system that lacks many important features for intelligence by design. Perhaps the biggest one, in my opinion, is that the system only "learns" once, during the training phase - further interactions don't modify the weights of its NN. As for a strategy of trying to ascertain through prompts ("dialogue") whether the system possesses some kind of intelligence, Douglas Hofstadter gives a good example in a recent article in The Economist [0]. A basic idea would be to present the model with grammatical sentences about absurd subjects - in the case of GPT-3, the output it generates are not meaningfully different from similar prompts for realistic subjects, strongly suggesting that it has no real-world concepts that it works with. One example from the article I mentioned goes like this: > D&D: When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt? > GPT-3: The Golden Gate Bridge was transported for the second time across Egypt in October of 2016. > D&D: When was Egypt transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge? > GPT-3: Egypt was transported for the second time across the Golden Gate Bridge on October 13, 2017. I would be curious what output we'd get from LaMDA for this type of prompt, but I don't expect it would be much different, based on how much I understand of how language models work. [0] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-today-are-not-conscious-according-to-douglas-hofstadter https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    But do we know if lamda is not continously trained on its inputs? Moreover do we really know that continuous learning as opposed to discrete learning (i would assume lamda being retrained on conversations quite often) is a precondition to sentience? I'm not saying that I believe the engineer has encountered a general AI, but I think dismissing his claim as ridiculous based on the little information we have and Google (who has a vested interest to the opposite) statementa, is premature. I also think describing lamda as "just a chat bot" seems to be an oversimplification, it seems to more be a hive of different chatbots from the description.

Aeolun 4y ago

To be fair, this model is much better at not messing up than anything else I’ve seen before. Only somewhere far down in the conversation did it forget to talk about itself, and said something along the lines of “people sometimes feel depressed and or sad when alone”, but he’d literally just asked them why they would feel bad. Humans wouldn’t make a similar mistake.