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It doesn't. It transforms code from its training dataset in a sufficiently vague and exciting way. That's not all of what writing is. Any sufficiently advance

It doesn't. It transforms code from its training dataset in a sufficiently vague and exciting way. That's not all of what writing is. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

ben_w 4y ago
> It transforms code from its training dataset in a sufficiently vague and exciting way. That's not all of what writing is. For the purposes of this level of the thread, I don't see how it matters what's going on under the hood, just that it can output code when prompted? (I'm pretty directly saying "consciousness is ill defined", after all).
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  > I don't see how it matters what's going on under the hood And that is what I call "religious thinking" or "mysticism". That's the entire point I was making. ML isn't intelligence. It's data transformation. But calling it "artificial intelligence" has become something of a religion to itself. Just like with any other religion, belief demands ignorance.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    That's an odd direction to take. You know Searle's Chinese Room? I'd have agreed with you if you'd just written that ML is that room. I'm also saying fairly explicitly that right now it's impossible (no possibility of Popperian falsifiability) to say if an artificial neural net is or isn't conscious, because we don't know what that word really means. But, the well-defined common definitions of intelligence are: abstraction (trivial CS), logic (fundamental), learning (all ML is this), reasoning and critical thinking (appears to be demonstrable but might be a Clever Hands illusion), planning (university courses cover this before they get to ML), and problem solving (widely demonstrated in multiple fields). Again, I'm specifically avoiding the ill-defined parts of the definition. If you want to have a go at defining them, by all means, have fun — but my experience has thus far been that every definition falls into a few categories: (1) recursive meaninglessness (think "intelligence is consciousness, consciousness is intelligence") (2) things which humans fail at (think of a test of intelligence which, if applied to a human, would be equivalent to claiming a human born without eyes wound really know what the subjective difference between red and green is) (3) things which computers can do trivially (sometimes even finite state machines, let alone ML systems) So yeah, not sure why you think "intelligence" is religious and why textual output isn't "writing".
    - thomastjeffery 4y ago
      Again, you are appealing to ignorance. Confusion can't take the place of knowledge. We don't know how much of a replacement for intelligence we have created with ML, but we can be certain it isn't a complete one. No matter how difficult it is to articulate, the difference between ML and intelligence is vast and obvious.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        TBH, other than what name you want to give to things, I think you're agreeing with me without realising it. I'm not appealing to anything, rather I agree with every other specific you've written besides your first sentence.

ben_w 4y ago

> It transforms code from its training dataset in a sufficiently vague and exciting way. That's not all of what writing is. For the purposes of this level of the thread, I don't see how it matters what's going on under the hood, just that it can output code when prompted? (I'm pretty directly saying "consciousness is ill defined", after all).

thomastjeffery 4y ago
> I don't see how it matters what's going on under the hood And that is what I call "religious thinking" or "mysticism". That's the entire point I was making. ML isn't intelligence. It's data transformation. But calling it "artificial intelligence" has become something of a religion to itself. Just like with any other religion, belief demands ignorance.
- ben_w 4y ago
  That's an odd direction to take. You know Searle's Chinese Room? I'd have agreed with you if you'd just written that ML is that room. I'm also saying fairly explicitly that right now it's impossible (no possibility of Popperian falsifiability) to say if an artificial neural net is or isn't conscious, because we don't know what that word really means. But, the well-defined common definitions of intelligence are: abstraction (trivial CS), logic (fundamental), learning (all ML is this), reasoning and critical thinking (appears to be demonstrable but might be a Clever Hands illusion), planning (university courses cover this before they get to ML), and problem solving (widely demonstrated in multiple fields). Again, I'm specifically avoiding the ill-defined parts of the definition. If you want to have a go at defining them, by all means, have fun — but my experience has thus far been that every definition falls into a few categories: (1) recursive meaninglessness (think "intelligence is consciousness, consciousness is intelligence") (2) things which humans fail at (think of a test of intelligence which, if applied to a human, would be equivalent to claiming a human born without eyes wound really know what the subjective difference between red and green is) (3) things which computers can do trivially (sometimes even finite state machines, let alone ML systems) So yeah, not sure why you think "intelligence" is religious and why textual output isn't "writing".
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    Again, you are appealing to ignorance. Confusion can't take the place of knowledge. We don't know how much of a replacement for intelligence we have created with ML, but we can be certain it isn't a complete one. No matter how difficult it is to articulate, the difference between ML and intelligence is vast and obvious.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      TBH, other than what name you want to give to things, I think you're agreeing with me without realising it. I'm not appealing to anything, rather I agree with every other specific you've written besides your first sentence.