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I don't think modern big language models are conscious, mainly because they fail in absurd ways. But TBH, they don't need to. This "golden path" deployed proper
by v4dok 4y ago
I don't think modern big language models are conscious, mainly because they fail in absurd ways. But TBH, they don't need to. This "golden path" deployed properly etc could easily automate a lot of jobs tomorrow.
- nradov 4y agoWhich jobs?
- adrianN 4y agoTaking short news from a news agency and inflating them to an article in a local newspaper.
- H8crilA 4y agoGenerating almost perfect spam.
- marssaxman 4y agoI help moderate a facebook group which gets a lot of attention from spammers - at least 90% of the accounts trying to join are bots. We filter them out by asking a few simple questions, which the bots cannot answer coherently. Someday soon, a spammer will get GPT-3 or something like it into the process, and then... whoo boy, that'll be the end of the group.
- goodside 4y agoHaving spent months talking to GPT-3 on a daily basis, I assure you it is not conscious. It has no perception of time, no awareness of what date it is, no memory of past experiences. It doesn’t want anything — it has no goals. The question “Is it conscious?” isn’t interesting to anyone who spends time with it. I will say, though, that it bugs me when people say it can’t be conscious because it sometimes says stupid things. In most cases, there are known tricks to suppress undesirable behaviors. More to the point, though, if we encountered a human being who gave confabulated answers to questions like “When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt?”, we wouldn’t insist that this human is not conscious — we would just call them brain-damaged or mentally ill. I don’t think modern models are conscious, but as a logical possibility they could be conscious and still say very stupid things all the time.
- lordnacho 4y agoIt's interesting how people who've used GPT-3 seem to be learning how to use it better. That leads to the question of whether you could get GPT-3 to do a task that involves tailoring a query to itself. Ever tried that?
- stevenhuang 4y agoThat only happens when the prompt is constrained to force an answer even if a nonsense question is being asked. If you allow an out, the model knows to refuse answering when it detects a nonsense question.
- pantalaimon 4y agoIt’s a static model, it does not learn after the initial training. That alone rules out any possibility for consciousness imho
- obscur 4y agoI think I heard of people with brain damage who does not keep an internal state, they feel like they continuously wake up and only remember memories from before the brain damage. That would be a kind of parallel to consider, or at least somewhat analogous. I think most of us assume that such people would have phenomenal consciousness / subjective experience / qualia
- plutonorm 4y agoIf failing in bizarre ways precludes consciousness then my kids are most definitely not conscious.