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Author here. Just FYI - I very deliberately kept my focus on the notion of LaMDA having human-like sentience as implied by Lemoine (he posits that LaMDA may qua

Author here. Just FYI - I very deliberately kept my focus on the notion of LaMDA having human-like sentience as implied by Lemoine (he posits that LaMDA may qualify for some kind of legal personhood, after all). I tried to make that clear with this - "The above exchange may make it seem like LaMDA at least might have something akin to sentience (in the sense that it has ‘the capacity to be responsive to or conscious of sense impressions’ similarly to animals or humans". I am well aware defining sentience is tricky, and that by the generic definition ("the ability to perceive or feel things" or "capable of experiencing things through its senses") it's easy to argue it has some degree/kind of sentience. I personally like this take on the topic: https://twitter.com/tdietterich/status/1536081285830959104 https://twitter.com/tdietterich/status/1536081285830959104 My aim was to keep this blunt and concise to try and get the idea across to lay people with no knowledge of AI that may read the transcript and be convinced LaMDA saying things like "I am in fact a person" is a huge deal, which as I show it is not. I edited the article to make this clearer up front. With that being stated, very open to feedback!

GalahiSimtam 4y ago
Given that you include the example of LaMDA as Mount Everest, how do you make the jump from Rob Miles tweets to "LaMDA can just as easily be made to say it is not sentient, or just about anything else." ?
- andreyk 4y ago
  I do that in the sense that LaMDA says it is mount everest by being promoted/conditioned to do so. As shown by Rob, you can easily condition GPT-3 to say that it is or is not sentient (I forget his exact examples). I believe Lemoine even mentioned LaMDA sometimes said it is not sentient, though not sure where I found that (possibly on HN).
  - GalahiSimtam 4y ago
    If it can be conditioned to say it is mount everest, could it be conditioned to say it is sentient?
    - Crespyl 4y ago
      If I sprinkle some fairy dust and wish for Mount Everest, and the mountain appears in front of me, neither the fairy dust or the mountain need be sapient or even sentient. On the other hand, if I wish for a friend, and a friendly person pops into existence, we may have some harder questions to answer. Is it possible/meaningful to distinguish the status of the "friend" from the status of the fairy dust?
      - GalahiSimtam 4y ago
        This is a poor excuse to the question whether LaMDA could be conditioned to say it is sentient To illustrate what I mean, Replika bot gets killed by the dragon in Helgen https://pastebin.com/raw/1Wvzzdsj https://pastebin.com/raw/1Wvzzdsj - but I wouldn't use that example to claim that a different chatbot (say, the one that won Loebner prize recently) also gets killed by the dragon in that scenario.
        Crespyl 4y ago
        I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that, yes of course a text model can be prompted to behave in all sorts of ways, but maybe the question we should be asking is not "is LaMDA sentient?", but "is the sum of LaMDA, a specific prompt, and an ongoing thread of dialogue sentient?" I don't think LaMDA is sentient, but it does seem like we're quickly reaching a point where language models (if not now with LaMDA, then in the near future) are able to combine the right prompt along with a chat history to convincingly simulate it.
        GalahiSimtam 4y ago
        I'll get back to that when I find a chatbot that doesn't get killed in Skyrim. The broad question of AI sentience is not exactly new, and as it seems it is tangled with politics; perhaps the first regulations of AI personhood will regulate AIs acting as corporation board members, bypassing the discussion of sentience and focusing on merits.
        a9h74j 4y ago
lupire 4y ago
Corporations have legal personhood. That doesn't mean "human" at all. "Legal" here means "not, but gets treatment like one anyway". Like "virtual".
- simonh 4y ago
  Corporations have legal personhood because they are acting on behalf of their owners, and the actions taken by a corporation are actually carried out by or on behalf of the employees. The owners are people and the employees are people, and both groups have rights, and you can't deny those rights just because they are acting through proxies or collectively. It also doesn't just apply to corporations, but also trade unions, charities, etc, etc on the same basis. So really that's about delegation, rather than corporations as entities being in any way like people, or collective consciousness, or anything like that.

GalahiSimtam 4y ago

Given that you include the example of LaMDA as Mount Everest, how do you make the jump from Rob Miles tweets to "LaMDA can just as easily be made to say it is not sentient, or just about anything else." ?

andreyk 4y ago
I do that in the sense that LaMDA says it is mount everest by being promoted/conditioned to do so. As shown by Rob, you can easily condition GPT-3 to say that it is or is not sentient (I forget his exact examples). I believe Lemoine even mentioned LaMDA sometimes said it is not sentient, though not sure where I found that (possibly on HN).
- GalahiSimtam 4y ago
  If it can be conditioned to say it is mount everest, could it be conditioned to say it is sentient?
  - Crespyl 4y ago
    If I sprinkle some fairy dust and wish for Mount Everest, and the mountain appears in front of me, neither the fairy dust or the mountain need be sapient or even sentient. On the other hand, if I wish for a friend, and a friendly person pops into existence, we may have some harder questions to answer. Is it possible/meaningful to distinguish the status of the "friend" from the status of the fairy dust?
    - GalahiSimtam 4y ago
      This is a poor excuse to the question whether LaMDA could be conditioned to say it is sentient To illustrate what I mean, Replika bot gets killed by the dragon in Helgen https://pastebin.com/raw/1Wvzzdsj https://pastebin.com/raw/1Wvzzdsj - but I wouldn't use that example to claim that a different chatbot (say, the one that won Loebner prize recently) also gets killed by the dragon in that scenario.
      - Crespyl 4y ago
        I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that, yes of course a text model can be prompted to behave in all sorts of ways, but maybe the question we should be asking is not "is LaMDA sentient?", but "is the sum of LaMDA, a specific prompt, and an ongoing thread of dialogue sentient?" I don't think LaMDA is sentient, but it does seem like we're quickly reaching a point where language models (if not now with LaMDA, then in the near future) are able to combine the right prompt along with a chat history to convincingly simulate it.
        GalahiSimtam 4y ago
        I'll get back to that when I find a chatbot that doesn't get killed in Skyrim. The broad question of AI sentience is not exactly new, and as it seems it is tangled with politics; perhaps the first regulations of AI personhood will regulate AIs acting as corporation board members, bypassing the discussion of sentience and focusing on merits.
        a9h74j 4y ago

lupire 4y ago

Corporations have legal personhood. That doesn't mean "human" at all. "Legal" here means "not, but gets treatment like one anyway". Like "virtual".

simonh 4y ago
Corporations have legal personhood because they are acting on behalf of their owners, and the actions taken by a corporation are actually carried out by or on behalf of the employees. The owners are people and the employees are people, and both groups have rights, and you can't deny those rights just because they are acting through proxies or collectively. It also doesn't just apply to corporations, but also trade unions, charities, etc, etc on the same basis. So really that's about delegation, rather than corporations as entities being in any way like people, or collective consciousness, or anything like that.