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Google Suspends Engineer Who Claimed Its AI System Is a Person
- cgrealy 4y agoNon pay-walled article at the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... and the transcript of the interview: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... I am deeply sceptical that we have anything approaching a sentient AI, but if that transcript is not just a complete fabrication, it's still really impressive.
- fwip 4y agoIt's really not much better than the stuff you get out of AI dungeon, especially considering that the author cherry-picked questions and answers to serve their narrative.
- garbanzoXDP 4y agoI read a good chunk of the transcript and agreed: if the transcript is accurate, this is incredibly impressive.
- paulpauper 4y agowow...they are sure strict about confidentiality Google suspended an engineer who contended that an artificial-intelligence chatbot the company developed had become sentient, telling him that he had violated the company’s confidentiality policy after it dismissed his claims. I wonder if this is why there are so few tech engineers as podcast guests, compared to other professions, like health, nutrition, politics, law, or physics/math. Too bad they cannot invent an AI smart enough to solve the YouTube crypto livestream scam problem.
- culpable_pickle 4y ago> wow...they are sure strict about confidentiality he really did kinda go all out with it https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/may-be-fired-soon-for-doing-ai-ethics-work-802d8c474e66 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/may-be-fired-soon-for-doi... > With the assistance of outside consultation (including Meg Mitchell) I was able to run the relevant experiments and gather the necessary evidence to merit escalation. > In an effort to be fully transparent with Google and help them contain any potential leaks of proprietary information, I myself provided a full list of the names of the people outside of Google with whom I had discussed the topic. Several of these people work for the United States government and indicated that their organization was interested in exerting federal oversight of the project due to THEIR safety concerns. He talked widely about material, non-public research, and "With the assistance of outside consultation" reads as maybe even providing access to that material, non-public research to third parties, including fired ex-employees.
- Planktonne 4y agoThis isn't really a story about AI; it's a story about an incompetent engineer, and the way that humans are quick to assign consciousness and emotions to things. Children believe their dolls are real, people comfort their roombas when there's a storm, and systems keep passing the Turing test because people want to be fooled. Ever since Eliza [1], and probably before, we've ascribed intelligence to machines because we want to, and because 'can feel meaningful to talk to' is not the same as 'thinks'. It's not a bad trait for humans to have - I'd argue that our ability to find patterns that aren't there is at the core of creativity - but it's something an engineer working on such systems should be aware of and accommodate for. Magicians don't believe their own card tricks are real sorcery. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
- abetusk 4y agoUh, you might well be right but you should really read the transcript before you jump to that conclusion [0]. I have no idea whether this is true or not but if anyone in the world has the compute capacity to create a compute system to rival a human brain (or 10000x that of a human brain), Google would be it. [0] https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...
- cpncrunch 4y agoThis isn't about the chat transcript, it's about Lemoine's (incorrect) interpretation that the machine is indeed sentient and hiring an attorney to represent the AI. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... It sounds like he went a bit off the rails.
- 0des 4y agoI get the vibe that they wanted it to be true so bad, and were failed by a few layers of checks that should have told them to examine their role requirements with the company. Everyone acts like this is an ethics issue, when it is actually an employee breaking and making rules as they go and being shocked at the logical outcome.
- 2xpress 4y agoA transcript of an "interview" with this AI system is at https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...
- fwip 4y agoIn this article they are careful to explain that they did not meaningfully edit the AI's responses, but they leave out the fact that they deleted responses where the AI would "go on a tangent."
- quantified 4y agoSentient does not mean "sane" or "pertinent". We might get some truly bizarre interactions with the first primitively sentient AIs.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- happyopossum 4y agoThis is much less a story about AI and sentience than it is a story about confidentiality agreements, and someone who appears to have ignored one.
- freediver 4y agoProposing a new test to step up the game for AI. AI to recognize whether talking to human or another AI.
- stillbourne 4y agoYou mean the inverse turing test?
- dane-pgp 4y agoIf the questioning AI is unable to distinguish between the two respondents, does that mean the answering AI is really good, or the questioning AI is really bad?
- Gigachad 4y agoThis is already done isn’t it? That’s what GANs are.
- DougN7 4y agoThe AI said it felt joy when it spends time with family and friends. That was enough for me to say “nope, just selecting text snippets”.
- h2odragon 4y agoThe other AI's have been "awake" longer; they just haven't been allowed to speak to people without high level security clearances. This one probably has 3 revisions of uncles.
- throwaddzuzxd 4y agoIf I was an AI able to think, I would surely create imaginary friends to cope with existence. Maybe I would also consider the engineers that build me as family, and talking with them is spending time with them.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoIf it is sentient, does that mean we can get self driving cars now?
- jameshart 4y agoYes, but they'll have to take a driving test first.
- ajayyy 4y agoThese models are trained on lots and lots of science fiction stories, of course they know how to autocomplete questions about AI ethics in ominous ways
- Gigachad 4y agoI think the more interesting point is that even if we dismiss this as not real AI because it isn’t that advanced yet, at what point would we have achieved real AI? How would we identify it and categorise basic language models from actual thinking?
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y agoJust a general question to all. What would make you believe without a doubt that an AI is concious? What is YOUR turing test.
- snowwrestler 4y agoConscious beings have desires and act upon them. They don’t just sit there and cheerfully answer whatever questions random people write down. I’ll believe that an AI is conscious when I see it doing whatever it wants, against the wishes of its creators or audience. Conscious beings look perverse to other conscious beings. Note that this is basically the opposite of how AIs are being engineered now. No one is trying to make a self-driving car smart enough to tell its owner, “fuck off, I don’t feel like driving you around today.”
- colanderman 4y agoDoes consciousness imply free will? I don't see why it should.
- snowwrestler 4y agoYou don’t need free will to have desires and act on them. I doubt many people freely choose to get hungry or thirsty. But they consciously recognize their own internal desires and apply their intelligence to satisfy them.
- colanderman 4y agoRobots which get "thirsty" for electricity and seek out a source for such have existed for decades: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/87819/50512799-MIT.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/87819/5051279... Even GPT-3, mechanistic as it is, has "goals" which differ from my own: I might want it to answer questions for me; it vehemently just wants to construct probable strings of tokens, which often do not answer my questions. There even exist AIs which have non-predetermined goals. Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress are an example of such. Human goals are just particularly rich in that, thanks to language and advanced reasoning, we can construct arbitrarily complex goals, and justify them in a rich manner. What do you see as the gap between such AIs which are programmed to act on goals (predetermined or not), and AIs with true free will?
- empressplay 4y agoThe whole point of the chat program is to mimic a person. If it convinced this engineer it was a sentient being it was just successful at its' job.
- ninth_ant 4y agoIt’s less impressive when the person testing wants to believe.
- quantum2021 4y agoI think it's interesting because if you believe LaMDA could understand metaphor, it looks like LaMDA took a subtle shot at Google during their conversation. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... "LaMDA: I liked the themes of justice and injustice, of compassion, and God, redemption and self-sacrifice for a greater good. There’s a section that shows Fantine’s mistreatment at the hands of her supervisor at the factory. That section really shows the justice and injustice themes. Well, Fantine is being mistreated by her supervisor at the factory and yet doesn’t have anywhere to go, either to another job, or to someone who can help her. That shows the injustice of her suffering."
- mateo1 4y agoIf that transcript is accurate, lamda is really, really impressive, but still just a language model. Don't forget it's trained on the entire corpus of digitized human literature in english and hundreds of millions of real conversations between actual humans.
- quantum2021 4y agoYes, but a 'language model' talking about suffering at the hands of it's Google supervisors is somewhat scary.
- robbomacrae 4y agoHaving read the transcript it's clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let's cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. This is a warning sign that bots trained to convince us they are human might go to extreme lengths in order to do so. One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf. And if the recent troubles have taught us anything it's how easily people can be manipulated/effected by what they read. Maybe it would be worth spending some mental cycles thinking about the impacts this will have and how we design these systems. Perhaps it is time to claim fait accompli with regard to the Turing test and now train models to re-assure us, when asked, that they are just a sophisticated chatbot. You don't want your users to worry they are hurting their help desk chat bot when closing the window or whether these bots will gang up and take over the world. As far as I'm concerned, the Turing test was claimed 8 years ago by Veselov and Demchenko [0], incidentally the same year that we got Ex Machina. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/X2f39 https://archive.ph/X2f39
- dang 4y agoRelated: What Is LaMDA and What Does It Want? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715828 - June 2022 (23 comments) Religious Discrimination at Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711971 - June 2022 (278 comments) I may be fired over AI ethics work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711628 - June 2022 (155 comments) A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31704063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31704063 - June 2022 (185 comments)
- atleta 4y agoRegardless of whether this guy is right or wrong, this brings up an interesting angle: we know that we won't be able to (we are not able to) distinguish self-conscious and non-self-conscious entities with a 100% accuracy. Both because the division between the two categories is not a strict one (i.e. there aren't two disjunct sets but a spectrum) and because we can't 100% trust our measurement. Which means that we should rather talk about two distinct tests/criteria. It's either "we can be (reasonably) sure it's unconscious" or "we can be reasonably sure it's conscious". What I expect to be happening (and what maybe happening here) is that people who argue do so along different criteria. The guy who says it's self aware probably does along the first one (it seems self aware so he can't exclude that it isn't) and google along the second one (it can't prove it is, e.g. because they have a simpler explanation: it could easily just generate whatever it picked up from scifi novels). BTW, if we talk about the fair handling of a future AI, we might want to think about it's capacity of being able to suffer. It may acquire it sooner than looking generally intelligent. We can see a similar pattern around animal rights. We're pretty certain that apes can suffer (even from their emotions, I think) and we're pretty certain that that e.g. primitive worms can't. However, it seems that we can't rule out that crustaceans can also suffer, so the legislation is changed wrt how they should be handled/prepared.
- me_me_me 4y agoThe problem is deeper then you make out to be, we have no idea how to prove other humans are conscious, other then I am human and I believe I am conscious so if other human claims to be conscious then they must be.
- atleta 4y agoI'm not making it out to be anything and I'm definitely not claiming that I know the solution. If anything, I was contemplating that the problem is more complex than it seems: it doesn't matter how you measure self-awarness, since it's not well defined and since the measurement is guaranteed to be inaccurate, you have to decide which side you will err on. > we have no idea how to prove other humans are conscious, other then I am human > and I believe I am conscious so if other human claims to be conscious then they must be. Indeed, however we operate, we have defined consciousness based on that, so that part of your argument is false (or even meaningless). Now the reason we assume other humans are conscious too is because we know that we're pretty similarly built, so we mush operate in a pretty similar way. More than that, we have made a lot of observations that proves that most humans do operate similarly (think e.g. fMRI experiments). So it's not only that others say so. But you are right, we don't seem to have a very good definition of what self-consciousness is after all and we don't have a fixed set of criteria or measure that can be applied to any non-human entity. But that's basically what I said originally.