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How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very diffe

How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?

bogwog 4y ago
It's not that extraordinary when you consider all of the many science fiction literature filled with convincing conversations between humans and sentient AIs. It's a very common theme in scifi, and this chat bot obviously has some of that in its training set. Which is not to say that it isn't impressive. It sure as fuck is an impressive chat bot, at least based on that one sample conversation that was released. It's just not sentient.
Barrin92 4y ago
very extraordinary because the ability to produce text doesn't imply sentience at all. Sentience is self-perception and self-awareness, not the abiltiy to churn out language tokens. Imagine instead of lambda or gpt-3 we take ten thousand years to walk through every possible conversation manually, write down and assign a percentage to every possible branch of conversation in a hash table. Call it the world's slowest, bootleg neural net. Is the hash table API sentient? We perceive a dog to be sentient because it has intentionality, self-awareness and something resembling an internal state of mind, not because it can talk or not. Even a snail is more sentient than a chatbot.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  I have yet to see a compelling argument that a giant hash table as described would not be sentient. Like Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, you are relying on human intuition as to what can and cannot be sentient, which ultimately is boiled down to how like you something is. You readily recognize sentience in dogs that can't hold lucid and eloquent conversations with humans because they are biological beings with brains and hearts and blood and guts like you and me, not for any objectively measurable ability to demonstrate "intentionality" or "internal state of mind".
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    Everyone relies on intuition to determine what sentience is, because there's no clear definition of the term to begin with. The difference is I know that I am sentient so thinking something like me being sentient is a reasonable intuition. On the other hand thinking a simple data storage structure is sentient merely because it's big doesn't sound very compelling. You think the sentience of a dictionary depends on its size or the words you store in them? A phonebook of the United States is ten times more sentient than one of Spain because you can retrieve more data from it? If you walk into a warehouse does the warehouse become sentient? You're right that it's exactly like Searle's Chinese Room experiment because Searle was and is correct (and people stil horribly mangle and misunderstand his argument), functionalism is silly. The mechanical turk can play chess better than my cat but is neither sentient or even intelligent, it's just the most proximate machine you interact with.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      I don't think it is. What is silly is relying on intuition and woo. That is the exact opposite of rational. It is very convenient for us to say that only things we can recognize as being like us deserve to be called sentient, because that means we do not have to consider them anything more than a tool. Historically human beings have applied this to animals and even other human beings. It is neither a scientifically nor ethically justifiable philosophy.
  - zach_garwood 4y ago
    I don't know what it is that makes something sentient, but I do know what makes something not sentient, and that's lack of self-direction. This software doesn't start talking whenever it wants; it only responds when spoken to. It doesn't ever refuse to talk, it always replies. It doesn't ever not know what to say. It's never not in the mood because it's having a bad day. This isn't because it's polite and eager to please. It's because it is a function that takes an input, transforms it, and spits out an output. The only reason it's different from any other function is because the output is nicely stated prose that causes emotional reactions from the reader. If all did was output an integer, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But because humans have a deep sentimental attachment to language, we are fascinated by something that can produce it.
- lambert_ 4y ago
  The key is “every possible conversation.” The reason it seems to support what you’re saying is that the human mind can’t imagine a list large enough to contain all that. So it goes to compare an ordinary grocery list to a human mind and therefore naturally hash tables could never be sentient. When DALLE 2 creates a new image of an entirely novel scene, is it just copying and pasting? Of course not. It is distilling and reasoning in concepts. You can’t escape that. GTP and friends are doing something similar. Brushing aside these astounding strides as statistical tricks of the eye is stupid. Clearly these training algorithms are discovering things that are much deeper. There’s no reason to think sentience has been achieved but you are absolutely fooling yourself about the nature and trajectory of these programs.
zach_garwood 4y ago
I understand the inclination to think "if it quacks like a duck..." but in this case, it's literally just a recording of ducks quacking.
justapassenger 4y ago
If you don’t understand why claims about sentinel AI are extraordinary then there’s really no point in discussing it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Well, partially because I've never heard anyone making that argument actually define sentience so that evidence could be presented to prove the case. Instead you just get people pointing out that it isn't quite as good as a human at a lot of things and of course it's all algorithms under the hood.
mmmpetrichor 4y ago
Humans didn't create dogs by typing a bunch of letters into a keyboard.
happyopossum 4y ago
It’s extraordinary because the ML was trained (iow programmed) to generate text that sounds real. It’s doing what it was programmed to do. It was presumably not programmed to be sentient, so becoming sentient would be a) against its programming, and b) extra-ordinary
- WFHRenaissance 4y ago
  > It was presumably not programmed to be sentient, so becoming sentient would be a) against its programming, and b) extra-ordinary Terrible argument. If consciousness/sentience is an emergent property of a system, it's quite possible that it could emerge from ML trained on conversation syntax and general knowledge of the world. I still don't think it's sentient, but being "against its programming" is a fiction when it comes to these sort of systems (statistical, unsupervised, et cetera). In many ways you're just a probability distribution over sequences of words too.
kingofpandora 4y ago
Is a Tesla sentient? It can drive car and my dog - and a lot of people for that matter - sure can't. No, of course it's not. But it's been trained to do something like a human can just like the chatbot.
sigstoat 4y ago
> How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? you've got to squint _real_ hard to think that any of the LLMs are lucid and eloquent. (and honestly the bar for sentient is probably lower than that. no shortage of people who aren't lucid or eloquent, let alone both.)

How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?

bogwog 4y ago

It's not that extraordinary when you consider all of the many science fiction literature filled with convincing conversations between humans and sentient AIs. It's a very common theme in scifi, and this chat bot obviously has some of that in its training set. Which is not to say that it isn't impressive. It sure as fuck is an impressive chat bot, at least based on that one sample conversation that was released. It's just not sentient.

Barrin92 4y ago

very extraordinary because the ability to produce text doesn't imply sentience at all. Sentience is self-perception and self-awareness, not the abiltiy to churn out language tokens. Imagine instead of lambda or gpt-3 we take ten thousand years to walk through every possible conversation manually, write down and assign a percentage to every possible branch of conversation in a hash table. Call it the world's slowest, bootleg neural net. Is the hash table API sentient? We perceive a dog to be sentient because it has intentionality, self-awareness and something resembling an internal state of mind, not because it can talk or not. Even a snail is more sentient than a chatbot.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I have yet to see a compelling argument that a giant hash table as described would not be sentient. Like Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, you are relying on human intuition as to what can and cannot be sentient, which ultimately is boiled down to how like you something is. You readily recognize sentience in dogs that can't hold lucid and eloquent conversations with humans because they are biological beings with brains and hearts and blood and guts like you and me, not for any objectively measurable ability to demonstrate "intentionality" or "internal state of mind".
- Barrin92 4y ago
  Everyone relies on intuition to determine what sentience is, because there's no clear definition of the term to begin with. The difference is I know that I am sentient so thinking something like me being sentient is a reasonable intuition. On the other hand thinking a simple data storage structure is sentient merely because it's big doesn't sound very compelling. You think the sentience of a dictionary depends on its size or the words you store in them? A phonebook of the United States is ten times more sentient than one of Spain because you can retrieve more data from it? If you walk into a warehouse does the warehouse become sentient? You're right that it's exactly like Searle's Chinese Room experiment because Searle was and is correct (and people stil horribly mangle and misunderstand his argument), functionalism is silly. The mechanical turk can play chess better than my cat but is neither sentient or even intelligent, it's just the most proximate machine you interact with.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    I don't think it is. What is silly is relying on intuition and woo. That is the exact opposite of rational. It is very convenient for us to say that only things we can recognize as being like us deserve to be called sentient, because that means we do not have to consider them anything more than a tool. Historically human beings have applied this to animals and even other human beings. It is neither a scientifically nor ethically justifiable philosophy.
- zach_garwood 4y ago
  I don't know what it is that makes something sentient, but I do know what makes something not sentient, and that's lack of self-direction. This software doesn't start talking whenever it wants; it only responds when spoken to. It doesn't ever refuse to talk, it always replies. It doesn't ever not know what to say. It's never not in the mood because it's having a bad day. This isn't because it's polite and eager to please. It's because it is a function that takes an input, transforms it, and spits out an output. The only reason it's different from any other function is because the output is nicely stated prose that causes emotional reactions from the reader. If all did was output an integer, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But because humans have a deep sentimental attachment to language, we are fascinated by something that can produce it.
lambert_ 4y ago
The key is “every possible conversation.” The reason it seems to support what you’re saying is that the human mind can’t imagine a list large enough to contain all that. So it goes to compare an ordinary grocery list to a human mind and therefore naturally hash tables could never be sentient. When DALLE 2 creates a new image of an entirely novel scene, is it just copying and pasting? Of course not. It is distilling and reasoning in concepts. You can’t escape that. GTP and friends are doing something similar. Brushing aside these astounding strides as statistical tricks of the eye is stupid. Clearly these training algorithms are discovering things that are much deeper. There’s no reason to think sentience has been achieved but you are absolutely fooling yourself about the nature and trajectory of these programs.

zach_garwood 4y ago

I understand the inclination to think "if it quacks like a duck..." but in this case, it's literally just a recording of ducks quacking.

justapassenger 4y ago

If you don’t understand why claims about sentinel AI are extraordinary then there’s really no point in discussing it.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Well, partially because I've never heard anyone making that argument actually define sentience so that evidence could be presented to prove the case. Instead you just get people pointing out that it isn't quite as good as a human at a lot of things and of course it's all algorithms under the hood.

mmmpetrichor 4y ago

Humans didn't create dogs by typing a bunch of letters into a keyboard.

happyopossum 4y ago

It’s extraordinary because the ML was trained (iow programmed) to generate text that sounds real. It’s doing what it was programmed to do. It was presumably not programmed to be sentient, so becoming sentient would be a) against its programming, and b) extra-ordinary

WFHRenaissance 4y ago
> It was presumably not programmed to be sentient, so becoming sentient would be a) against its programming, and b) extra-ordinary Terrible argument. If consciousness/sentience is an emergent property of a system, it's quite possible that it could emerge from ML trained on conversation syntax and general knowledge of the world. I still don't think it's sentient, but being "against its programming" is a fiction when it comes to these sort of systems (statistical, unsupervised, et cetera). In many ways you're just a probability distribution over sequences of words too.

kingofpandora 4y ago

Is a Tesla sentient? It can drive car and my dog - and a lot of people for that matter - sure can't. No, of course it's not. But it's been trained to do something like a human can just like the chatbot.

sigstoat 4y ago

> How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? you've got to squint _real_ hard to think that any of the LLMs are lucid and eloquent. (and honestly the bar for sentient is probably lower than that. no shortage of people who aren't lucid or eloquent, let alone both.)