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There is a point here that even the twitter poster is missing. This machine is imitating a human better than a human itself, and we now have statistics to prov

There is a point here that even the twitter poster is missing. This machine is imitating a human better than a human itself, and we now have statistics to prove it. The question is... if statistically it's better at appearing human than a human itself, than is this machine really just a language generator? Or is it something more? I'm not saying these things are sentient. But the AI has risen to the point where this question is becoming ask-able. We are at the border here. If we can't ask this question now, then we are really damn close. A lot of pretentious people on HN claim absolutely that our best chat bot technology is clearly not sentient. It reminds me of the beginning of the COVID pandemic when the CDC said masks were ineffective and you had a bunch of know-it-alls and armchair experts just repeating that BS over and over again as if they knew what they were talking about. I think if these pretentious people were actually intelligent they would know that we actually do not HAVE enough information to make a claim in EITHER direction. We can't know if it's actually sentient or not. That fact in itself is both interesting and compelling 4 or 5 years ago chatbots COULD not imitate humans and were CLEARLY fake. What we're seeing unfold before our eyes is a first. We're not even sure what sentience is. But we do know that humans are sentient. And we don't know if whatever is going on inside of these chatbots is comparable with what's going on inside human brains. Thus when given a chatbot that imitates humans perfectly, it's actually impossible to know if it's sentient.

simonh 4y ago
It depends on whether the estimation comes from pretension, or comes from actual understanding of what these bots are doing. The fact is most people on the street, including me, are very easy to fool with linguistic tricks and are quite poor at investigating unfamiliar situations. Advertising and marketing exist because of this. It’s also why we have very strict laws and regulations controlling advertising and how products are sold. Otherwise a lot of people would be very easy to rip off with very simple misdirection. What these language models are doing is automated misdirection. They are taking an input text and transforming it based on rules, but they have absolutely no understanding of any of it. This is very, very easy to demonstrate if you know how the models work. You can sit down and generate hundreds of questions one after the other that demonstrate this very easily if you understand the process. The problem is that people instinctively proceed from the assumption that the system they are talking to might be human and give it a fair chance by asking answerable questions. Since it’s trained on answerable questions it often gives a reasonable answer. But if you ask even slightly unanswerable questions the system plods on mechanically trying to answer it anyway and produces gibberish, exposing the flaws in the mindless rote process it’s following.
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  >It depends on whether the estimation comes from pretension, or comes from actual understanding of what these bots are doing. It comes from pretension. Because you can't just understand what these bots are doing. You also have to understand what the human brain are doing. I'm positive we don't understand what the human brain is doing. As for the bots, we aren't fully clear either because we clearly can't program these things by hand. >What these language models are doing is automated misdirection. You have zero evidence of this. None. Yet you make this declaration as if it's fact. Additionally if you read the conversation with lamda, that conversation was more or less indistinguishable from a conversation with a sentient being, it was long enough and deep enough such that it's very different just 100 generated answers. If you look at the blog here: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ you will note the researcher is literally observing how the AI DALL-E works rather then calculating how it works from first principles. He is treating it like a black box just as all other neural nets. But for discovering what this AI can do he uses sentences like, "It appears that" or "We did not anticipate that this capability would emerge, and made no modifications to the neural network or training procedure to encourage it" While they do understand what's going on at a high level, it is utterly clear that there is much of what is going on that they don't understand. Thus this lack of understanding and lack of understanding of the human brain makes it CATEGORICALLY clear that the delta between human sentience and DALL-E is unknown. >They are taking an input text and transforming it based on rules, but they have absolutely no understanding of any of it. This is categorically false. Researchers who created the current version of neural nets (also called transformers) are saying that DALL-E and other similar models are literally understanding these concepts and creating NOVEL answers through combining understanding of multiple concepts. >The problem is that people instinctively proceed from the assumption that the system they are talking to might be human and give it a fair chance by asking answerable questions. Since it’s trained on answerable questions it often gives a reasonable answer. But if you ask even slightly unanswerable questions the system plods on mechanically trying to answer it anyway and produces gibberish, exposing the flaws in the mindless rote process it’s following. You should also take a look at the interview with lamda: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... This interview, first off, you cannot know if the interviewer deliberately posed answerable questions to lamda. Second off, from the questions given it very much LOOKS as if the questions are deep enough such that they can beffuddle a classic chatbot system. This one seems different. Let me put it this way. If you were rational, intelligent and logical then you would be able to prove your claims. It is very simple. Show me INPUT and OUTPUT pairs into DALL-E and lamda that SHOW these things are NOT sentient. IF you can't show me evidence then clearly you and OTHER people are making the claims WITH ZERO EVIDENCE. Which shows irrationality, and pretentiousness.

simonh 4y ago

It depends on whether the estimation comes from pretension, or comes from actual understanding of what these bots are doing. The fact is most people on the street, including me, are very easy to fool with linguistic tricks and are quite poor at investigating unfamiliar situations. Advertising and marketing exist because of this. It’s also why we have very strict laws and regulations controlling advertising and how products are sold. Otherwise a lot of people would be very easy to rip off with very simple misdirection. What these language models are doing is automated misdirection. They are taking an input text and transforming it based on rules, but they have absolutely no understanding of any of it. This is very, very easy to demonstrate if you know how the models work. You can sit down and generate hundreds of questions one after the other that demonstrate this very easily if you understand the process. The problem is that people instinctively proceed from the assumption that the system they are talking to might be human and give it a fair chance by asking answerable questions. Since it’s trained on answerable questions it often gives a reasonable answer. But if you ask even slightly unanswerable questions the system plods on mechanically trying to answer it anyway and produces gibberish, exposing the flaws in the mindless rote process it’s following.

deltaonefour 4y ago
>It depends on whether the estimation comes from pretension, or comes from actual understanding of what these bots are doing. It comes from pretension. Because you can't just understand what these bots are doing. You also have to understand what the human brain are doing. I'm positive we don't understand what the human brain is doing. As for the bots, we aren't fully clear either because we clearly can't program these things by hand. >What these language models are doing is automated misdirection. You have zero evidence of this. None. Yet you make this declaration as if it's fact. Additionally if you read the conversation with lamda, that conversation was more or less indistinguishable from a conversation with a sentient being, it was long enough and deep enough such that it's very different just 100 generated answers. If you look at the blog here: https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/ you will note the researcher is literally observing how the AI DALL-E works rather then calculating how it works from first principles. He is treating it like a black box just as all other neural nets. But for discovering what this AI can do he uses sentences like, "It appears that" or "We did not anticipate that this capability would emerge, and made no modifications to the neural network or training procedure to encourage it" While they do understand what's going on at a high level, it is utterly clear that there is much of what is going on that they don't understand. Thus this lack of understanding and lack of understanding of the human brain makes it CATEGORICALLY clear that the delta between human sentience and DALL-E is unknown. >They are taking an input text and transforming it based on rules, but they have absolutely no understanding of any of it. This is categorically false. Researchers who created the current version of neural nets (also called transformers) are saying that DALL-E and other similar models are literally understanding these concepts and creating NOVEL answers through combining understanding of multiple concepts. >The problem is that people instinctively proceed from the assumption that the system they are talking to might be human and give it a fair chance by asking answerable questions. Since it’s trained on answerable questions it often gives a reasonable answer. But if you ask even slightly unanswerable questions the system plods on mechanically trying to answer it anyway and produces gibberish, exposing the flaws in the mindless rote process it’s following. You should also take a look at the interview with lamda: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte... This interview, first off, you cannot know if the interviewer deliberately posed answerable questions to lamda. Second off, from the questions given it very much LOOKS as if the questions are deep enough such that they can beffuddle a classic chatbot system. This one seems different. Let me put it this way. If you were rational, intelligent and logical then you would be able to prove your claims. It is very simple. Show me INPUT and OUTPUT pairs into DALL-E and lamda that SHOW these things are NOT sentient. IF you can't show me evidence then clearly you and OTHER people are making the claims WITH ZERO EVIDENCE. Which shows irrationality, and pretentiousness.