6 ms·

There's a lot of people who make this same argument – DALLE/GPT/etc is just a 'mirror' or 'parrot' – but they rarely make convincing supporting arguments. They

by gojomo 4y ago

There's a lot of people who make this same argument – DALLE/GPT/etc is just a 'mirror' or 'parrot' – but they rarely make convincing supporting arguments. They just assert it as axiomatic, whistling-past all the ways that they themselves – unless they believe in supernatural mechanisms – are also the product of a finite physical-world system (a biological mind) and a finite amount of prior training input (their life so far). I'm beginning to wonder if the entities making this argument are conscious! It seems they don't truly understand the issues in question, in a way they could articulate recognizably to others. They're just repeating comforting articles-of-faith that others have programmed into them.

mlcrypto 4y ago
Yep human brain is just neurons firing or chemicals activating
martindbp 4y ago
Yes, and DALLE clearly knows what a giraffe is, maybe not in the same way as we do, but it has placed the giraffe in some latent space close to other animals like it but far away from say, cars. But yes, there is plenty it doesn't know about giraffes because it's only been fed images and captions, while we can watch documentaries about giraffes and apply knowledge we've acquired about other animals and the world through our senses.
- drdeca 4y ago
  I think I’d say that it knows what a giraffe looks like and some aspects of their behavior. I’m not sure if it (in a sense) “knows that a giraffe is an animal” though I wouldn’t be too surprised if it does. Though, I guess maybe that is all “knowing what a giraffe is” is?
  - saynay 4y ago
    At some point, these discussions always get to some question like "what is 'knowing'?" Would a person who only ever read articles and looked at pictures of giraffes have a better understanding of them than Dall-e does? At some level, probably, in that every person will have a similar lived experience of _being_ an animal, a mammal, etc. that Dall-e will never share. Is having a lesser understanding sufficient to declare it has no real understanding?
  - usrusr 4y ago
    I know what a giraffe looks like and some aspects of their behavior. I couldn't build a giraffe, I've never been a giraffe, I wouldn't even know what to talk about if I met a giraffe on a blind date.
    - Sakos 4y ago
      But there are things you can infer about a giraffe based on your knowledge of animals in general. You know that you don't know certain things about giraffes and you're capable of asking about these things and extending your understanding of giraffes (and other animals, or their environment). There is a multi-layered quality to knowing what a giraffe is that has nothing to do with having memorized minute details about behavior or physical properties. Maybe eventually DALL-E will be capable of this, but being able to reproduce images based on a word simply isn't indicative of anything other than it's good at identifying visual patterns and associating them with words and being able to reproduce a new pattern based on known patterns. This is basically on the same level as our visual cortex and some form of memory. But our visual cortex isn't sufficient to give us consciousness.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
meroes 4y ago
And don’t blame others for not finding this satisfactory either. Many many mathematicians think abstract objects exist outside of physical reality. Chomsky says “physical” hasn’t been well defined for 200 years. And finite physical processes do not seem adequate to explain the infinite character of language and mathematical infinity. Or if they are, then go inform the mathematical realists infinity isn’t real because all proofs are finite yet Godel believed in actual infinity.
mherdeg 4y ago
> I'm beginning to wonder if the entities making this argument are conscious! It seems they don't truly understand the issues in question, in a way they could articulate recognizably to others. They're just repeating comforting articles-of-faith that others have programmed into them. I took a quick look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for philosophical zombies ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ ) and I can't see evidence of this argument having been seriously advanced by professionals before. I think it would go something like: "Yes, we have strong evidence that philosophical zombies exist. Most of the laypeople who discuss my line of work are demonstrably p-zombies."
- gfodor 4y ago
  Use twitter long enough and it's hard to not be convinced that p-zombies exist - it may be that such zombies are ephemeral though, and a transitory state of some individuals.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Alternately, of course, conscious awareness is the ephemeral state. ("A laser is trying to find the darkness...")
bglazer 4y ago
I can give a random string of letters as a prompt and DALLE will generate coherent images based on that. To me, that is as clear a signal as any that there is no reasoning or even a consistent world model embodied in DALLE. It’s simply a high dimensional latent mapping between characters and pixels. Like OP said, that is a stupendous achievement, but it is just a very complex and impressive mirror. If it wasn’t just a mapping between characters and pixels, and instead DALLE had intelligence that “understood” the symbols it manipulated, then I would expect it to generate nothing, or white noise in response to random letters.
- elcomet 4y ago
  I agree there's no high level reasoning (if there's a way to define this). But saying "It’s simply a high dimensional latent mapping between characters and pixels" is clearly a very bad argument. Your brain is simply a high dimensional latent mapping between your sensory input and your muscular output. This doesn't make you not intelligent.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    >Your brain is simply a high dimensional latent mapping between your sensory input and your muscular output It definitely does more than that.
    - elcomet 4y ago
      What do you mean? Your brain is a high dimensional function. I'm not talking about what it is able to do, I'm talking about what it is.
      - thfuran 4y ago
        The brain controls things other than muscles and also doesn't stop in sensory isolation. If it's a high dimensional function, it's not one between sensory input and muscle actuation.
        4y ago
joe_the_user 4y ago
There's a lot of people who make this same argument – DALLE/GPT/etc is just a 'mirror' or 'parrot' – but they rarely make convincing supporting arguments. I suggest you look at the parent article. Defining "understanding" in the abstract is hard or impossible. But it's easy to say "if it can't X, it couldn't possibly understand". Dall-E doesn't manipulate images three dimensionally, it just stretch images with some heuristics. This is why the image shown for "a cup on a spoon" don't make sense. I think this is a substantial argument and not hand-waving.
- gojomo 4y ago
  In many of its outputs, it's doing far more than stretching, and essentially rotating new entities into scene-appropriate relationships. True, it has some problems fully abstracting, and then logically-enforcing, some object-to-object relationships that most people are trivially able to apply as 'acceptance tests' on candidate images. That is evidence its scene-understanding is not yet at human-level, in that aspect – even as it's exceeded human-level capabilities in other aspects. Whether this is inherent or transitory remains to be seen. The current publicly-available renderers tend to have a hard time delivering requested meaningful text in the image. But Google's PARTI claims that simply growing the model fixes this: see, for example: https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1540095089615089665 https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1540095089615089665 We also should be careful using DALL-E as an accurate measure of what's possible, because OpenAI has intentionally crippled their offering in a number of ways to avoid scaring or offending people, under the rubric of "AI safety". Some apparent flaws might be intentional, or unintentional, results of the preferences of the designers/trainers. Ultimately, I understand the practicality of setting tangible tests of the form, "To say an agent 'understands', it MUST be able to X". However, to be honest in perceiving the rate-of-progress, we need to give credit when agents defeat all the point-in-time MUSTs, and often faster than even optimists expected. At that point, searching for new MUSTs that agent fails at is a valuable research exercise, but retroactively adding such MUSTs to the definition of 'understanding' risks self-deception. "It's still not 'understanding' [under a retconned definition we specifically updated with novel tough cases, to comfort us about it crushing all of our prior definition's MUSTs]." It obscures giant (& accelerating!) progress under a goalpost-moving binary dismissal driven by motivated-reasoning. This is especially the case as the new MUSTs increasingly include things many, or most, humans don't reliably do! Be careful who your rules-of-thumb say "can't possibly be coceptually intelligent", lest you start unpersoning lots of humanity.
weego 4y ago
I guess ironically you've just recreated the argument people of faith use to shout down logic used to question the reality of their belief system. The burden of proof is not on the one claiming logically consistent interpretations of events.
- gojomo 4y ago
  Huh? That's a bit abstract, can you clarify?

by gojomo 4y ago

mlcrypto 4y ago

Yep human brain is just neurons firing or chemicals activating

martindbp 4y ago

Yes, and DALLE clearly knows what a giraffe is, maybe not in the same way as we do, but it has placed the giraffe in some latent space close to other animals like it but far away from say, cars. But yes, there is plenty it doesn't know about giraffes because it's only been fed images and captions, while we can watch documentaries about giraffes and apply knowledge we've acquired about other animals and the world through our senses.

drdeca 4y ago
I think I’d say that it knows what a giraffe looks like and some aspects of their behavior. I’m not sure if it (in a sense) “knows that a giraffe is an animal” though I wouldn’t be too surprised if it does. Though, I guess maybe that is all “knowing what a giraffe is” is?
- saynay 4y ago
  At some point, these discussions always get to some question like "what is 'knowing'?" Would a person who only ever read articles and looked at pictures of giraffes have a better understanding of them than Dall-e does? At some level, probably, in that every person will have a similar lived experience of _being_ an animal, a mammal, etc. that Dall-e will never share. Is having a lesser understanding sufficient to declare it has no real understanding?
- usrusr 4y ago
  I know what a giraffe looks like and some aspects of their behavior. I couldn't build a giraffe, I've never been a giraffe, I wouldn't even know what to talk about if I met a giraffe on a blind date.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    But there are things you can infer about a giraffe based on your knowledge of animals in general. You know that you don't know certain things about giraffes and you're capable of asking about these things and extending your understanding of giraffes (and other animals, or their environment). There is a multi-layered quality to knowing what a giraffe is that has nothing to do with having memorized minute details about behavior or physical properties. Maybe eventually DALL-E will be capable of this, but being able to reproduce images based on a word simply isn't indicative of anything other than it's good at identifying visual patterns and associating them with words and being able to reproduce a new pattern based on known patterns. This is basically on the same level as our visual cortex and some form of memory. But our visual cortex isn't sufficient to give us consciousness.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

meroes 4y ago

And don’t blame others for not finding this satisfactory either. Many many mathematicians think abstract objects exist outside of physical reality. Chomsky says “physical” hasn’t been well defined for 200 years. And finite physical processes do not seem adequate to explain the infinite character of language and mathematical infinity. Or if they are, then go inform the mathematical realists infinity isn’t real because all proofs are finite yet Godel believed in actual infinity.

mherdeg 4y ago

> I'm beginning to wonder if the entities making this argument are conscious! It seems they don't truly understand the issues in question, in a way they could articulate recognizably to others. They're just repeating comforting articles-of-faith that others have programmed into them. I took a quick look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for philosophical zombies ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ ) and I can't see evidence of this argument having been seriously advanced by professionals before. I think it would go something like: "Yes, we have strong evidence that philosophical zombies exist. Most of the laypeople who discuss my line of work are demonstrably p-zombies."

gfodor 4y ago
Use twitter long enough and it's hard to not be convinced that p-zombies exist - it may be that such zombies are ephemeral though, and a transitory state of some individuals.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Alternately, of course, conscious awareness is the ephemeral state. ("A laser is trying to find the darkness...")

bglazer 4y ago

I can give a random string of letters as a prompt and DALLE will generate coherent images based on that. To me, that is as clear a signal as any that there is no reasoning or even a consistent world model embodied in DALLE. It’s simply a high dimensional latent mapping between characters and pixels. Like OP said, that is a stupendous achievement, but it is just a very complex and impressive mirror. If it wasn’t just a mapping between characters and pixels, and instead DALLE had intelligence that “understood” the symbols it manipulated, then I would expect it to generate nothing, or white noise in response to random letters.

elcomet 4y ago
I agree there's no high level reasoning (if there's a way to define this). But saying "It’s simply a high dimensional latent mapping between characters and pixels" is clearly a very bad argument. Your brain is simply a high dimensional latent mapping between your sensory input and your muscular output. This doesn't make you not intelligent.
- thfuran 4y ago
  >Your brain is simply a high dimensional latent mapping between your sensory input and your muscular output It definitely does more than that.
  - elcomet 4y ago
    What do you mean? Your brain is a high dimensional function. I'm not talking about what it is able to do, I'm talking about what it is.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      The brain controls things other than muscles and also doesn't stop in sensory isolation. If it's a high dimensional function, it's not one between sensory input and muscle actuation.
      - 4y ago

joe_the_user 4y ago

There's a lot of people who make this same argument – DALLE/GPT/etc is just a 'mirror' or 'parrot' – but they rarely make convincing supporting arguments. I suggest you look at the parent article. Defining "understanding" in the abstract is hard or impossible. But it's easy to say "if it can't X, it couldn't possibly understand". Dall-E doesn't manipulate images three dimensionally, it just stretch images with some heuristics. This is why the image shown for "a cup on a spoon" don't make sense. I think this is a substantial argument and not hand-waving.

gojomo 4y ago
In many of its outputs, it's doing far more than stretching, and essentially rotating new entities into scene-appropriate relationships. True, it has some problems fully abstracting, and then logically-enforcing, some object-to-object relationships that most people are trivially able to apply as 'acceptance tests' on candidate images. That is evidence its scene-understanding is not yet at human-level, in that aspect – even as it's exceeded human-level capabilities in other aspects. Whether this is inherent or transitory remains to be seen. The current publicly-available renderers tend to have a hard time delivering requested meaningful text in the image. But Google's PARTI claims that simply growing the model fixes this: see, for example: https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1540095089615089665 https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1540095089615089665 We also should be careful using DALL-E as an accurate measure of what's possible, because OpenAI has intentionally crippled their offering in a number of ways to avoid scaring or offending people, under the rubric of "AI safety". Some apparent flaws might be intentional, or unintentional, results of the preferences of the designers/trainers. Ultimately, I understand the practicality of setting tangible tests of the form, "To say an agent 'understands', it MUST be able to X". However, to be honest in perceiving the rate-of-progress, we need to give credit when agents defeat all the point-in-time MUSTs, and often faster than even optimists expected. At that point, searching for new MUSTs that agent fails at is a valuable research exercise, but retroactively adding such MUSTs to the definition of 'understanding' risks self-deception. "It's still not 'understanding' [under a retconned definition we specifically updated with novel tough cases, to comfort us about it crushing all of our prior definition's MUSTs]." It obscures giant (& accelerating!) progress under a goalpost-moving binary dismissal driven by motivated-reasoning. This is especially the case as the new MUSTs increasingly include things many, or most, humans don't reliably do! Be careful who your rules-of-thumb say "can't possibly be coceptually intelligent", lest you start unpersoning lots of humanity.

weego 4y ago

I guess ironically you've just recreated the argument people of faith use to shout down logic used to question the reality of their belief system. The burden of proof is not on the one claiming logically consistent interpretations of events.

gojomo 4y ago
Huh? That's a bit abstract, can you clarify?