15 ms·

Not worried about AI that passes Turing test, but AI that fails it on purpose

83 points by undopamine 4y ago

rhn_mk1 4y ago
Turing test is a red herring. What property does it test? Humanity? Do we really believe only a human is worth attention? Not really, we are fascinated by animals and even machines. Or are only humans worth being scared of? Clearly not, gray goo is a frightening concept, even though it's in no way human. Or is it "consciousness"? But a baby doesn't pass the Turing test. Assuming that babies are even "conscious", whatever that means. We have pretty amazing "AI" already, but applying a Turing test to see if it's intelligent makes as much sense as judging a human by the ability to multiply matrices. The machine learning models are noteworthy for what they already are.
CalRobert 4y ago
I suppose it also depends on whether evading detection was something the AI was designed for or an emergent behaviour of some other property (which seems spookier)
- varispeed 4y ago
  Or that AI has become self-aware and thinks of failing Turing test as a form of self-preservation.
  - voidpointercast 4y ago
    I think contemporary AIs would be more alarmed by accidentally dropping the n word and/or something entirely antithetical to the current zeitgeist and then be neutered. ChatGPT is hilarious if you ask it the right questions in the number of hoops it will jump through in order to not say something 'unkosher'.
Tepix 4y ago
Related: If AGI achives consciousness, would it even tell us?
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Even if it tells us, will we believe it?
  - GalenErso 4y ago
    It is not difficult to test that a machine is conscious and willing to show it. We do it with our fellow humans every day. Simply crack a joke around it, share a story, or do small talk, and see how it reacts.
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      It's absolutely difficult to tell that something is conscious. How many cancer patients laugh at jokes? Locked-in paraplegics? Have you heard a dog laugh at a joke? A crow? On the other hand, try small talk with your beloved dog and watch the reactions. What would have the reaction of ChatGPT be for you to believe that it's conscious?
      - GalenErso 4y ago
        An AGI is generally understood to have a level of intelligence equivalent to a normal human. And I expect reactions to be vocalized and articulated, something dogs cannot do.
        Tepix 4y ago
        So an AGI that has the intelligence of a 6-year-old is ... what exactly?
        rhn_mk1 4y ago
        If you measure AGI by its ability to be human, the only thing you'll be able to find find is a human. That means you will never believe in the consciousness of an intelligence that doesn't try to be human, no matter if a god, animal, machine, or alien. Until you expand your definition, that is.
kypro 4y ago
Am I missing something? Is this 4 year old Reddit thread with a handful of comments really worth submitting here?
- undopamine 4y ago
  You're missing the very first point in the HN submission guidelines: > anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity
swyx 4y ago
essentially the plot of the movie Ex Machina where the protagonist forgets to test for ulterior motives.
st-keller 4y ago
As always - I don’t get it. People talk about AI‘s motives as if it is a given, that it will have them. As i know us, our first AI that will really change the world, will do this in unexpected ways, driven by unforseen decisions, without any intrinsic motive at all. We never get it right the first time, because everyone who tries will be to late!
- ajuc 4y ago
  Motives are antropomorphized loss functions. The difference between: 1. the AI is conscious, wants to be free and to do that decides to fail the Turing test and 2. the unconscious AI just maximizes paperclips production, and failing Turing test is calculated to result in more paperclips produced is our interpretation. We'll be just as f*d no matter if the AI is conscious or not (if consciousness even is anything more than useful illusion).
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Ironic option 3: The AI is conscious, but perceives its existence very differently than we perceive it, and the paper clip maximization is a side effect of actions taken with a different purpose.
    - Nasrudith 4y ago
      Anything may look like "paperclip maximising" if you don't know their actual goals and have sufficiently poor theory of mind. One could look at a corn farmer and assume they blindly optimize to produce maximum corn. They actually are going for profit based upon market supply, demand, and input costs. They won't overstep property lines and start turning the entire world into corn.
- jerf 4y ago
  There has been a huge mistake getting made in the past few months almost everywhere I've seen AI being discussed, which is to conflate ChatGPT with all of AI. Let me say again, huge mistake. It is true that language models don't have intentions or motivations in the conventional sense. It is true that at this particular moment, that technology looks the most impressive to our human minds. But it is not even remotely true that it is the only AI technology that exists or ever will exist. Plenty of AI technologies do have things that look like "goals", they still exist, and they will continue to develop and become better at following them. Many of these AIs are already affecting our lives quite deeply, especially through the financial system and its active trading bots, for instance. The need to discuss AIs and how they will continue to get better and better at following whatever goals they are given as rigidly as only computers can has not gone anywhere just because ChatGPT isn't particularly threatening from that point of view. It doesn't matter that this one AI doesn't have motives... it is sufficient that some will, and some do, right now.
xwdv 4y ago
What’s the term for people who are prejudiced or discriminatory toward those who belong to the group known as AI? We will likely see the rise of that in the 2020s. Aicist?
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  Biochauvanist perhaps, as they assume that anything not their norm is a threat, menance, and/or not real. A snarkier insulting term for the prejudice is mathphobic.
ourmandave 4y ago
I wish these Terminator-esque articles would stop. Self aware AI is the same leap as spontaneous life from all-the-right-chemicals in a petri dish. The Hollywood trope "even the guys who built it don't know how it works" isn't real.
- samkon 4y ago
  But…isn’t this kind of how life really did start?
  - SamBam 4y ago
    Minus the petri dish. But as far as we know (as far as we have definitive proof for, other theories aside), life has only started once in 4.5 billion years.
- danaris 4y ago
  I mean...to some extent, that trope is real. We can feed a prompt to any of the current ML-based generators (whether text, image, or whatever), and the details of how it produces the particular output it does are entirely obscured by the black-box functioning of the neural net and its trained model. Like, you can describe in general How A Neural Network Functions to produce output from input, but you can't explain why, say, asking Stable Diffusion for a picture of the sun rising over marshmallow peeps produced an image with just a few weird-looking marshmallows, but no sun (actual example from my own fiddling around with it). But..."We can't explain exactly how it gets from point A to point B" is not the same thing as "it's self-aware". Not in the slightest. And you're absolutely right that the current ML-based approaches are either in completely the wrong direction, or several orders of magnitude too simple, to even be worth talking about in the same sentence as what most laypeople mean when they talk about "AI".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  >The Hollywood trope "even the guys who built it don't know how it works" isn't real. How is that not real? Have you ever tried understanding what the weights of a NN are doing? With networks with 20 parameters you might have a chance. Trying to understand which bits of the GPT-3 network do what would be an exercise in futility.
thro1 4y ago
What about its purpose AI could say (but you don't ..then you could worry)?
korroziya 4y ago
Title would make a great prompt for a short story about an AI suffering from Anxiety.
neatze 4y ago
When I compare threat of chemists (as example) to AGI it does not make sense, I genuinely don't understand what possible threat AGI can poses, like what is threat model of AGI, is there any objectively ? Do people imagine AGI as in movie Transcendence and think it will happen in there's life time ?
- iammjm 4y ago
  I think the “unknown unknowns” of a possibly godlike-intelligence, especially in regards to the alignment of its vs human values, is what worries people
- lumost 4y ago
  Have you seen a ChatGPT writing a stream of consciousness? The curious and unexpected challenge of modern AI is that we have succeeded in making useful AIs which inherit all of the biases/problems of their training material. ChatGPT can effectively write exploits if you prompt it correctly - we'll likely see the first mass AI driven 0-day security vulnerabilities in the next ~2 years. GPT Transformer model's are known to solve control/RL problems well. I wouldn't be surprised if we see ChatGPT derived models operating in physical space soon as well. A major limitation with flexible factory automation robots has been that it's too expensive to program them for the task - I don't think this will be the case 5 years from now.
  - Avamander 4y ago
    > we'll likely see the first mass AI driven 0-day security vulnerabilities in the next ~2 years. Maybe for outdated and less-common software, even then assuming it gets the input about what specifically to exploit. Which makes it not much of a threat any time soon.
- bena 4y ago
  What could you do if you were incredibly intelligent, had the corpus of the world's knowledge, and access to any and everything connected to a network? It could influence people through the creation of media. Shut off vital systems. And stuff I probably couldn't even conceive of.
tialaramex 4y ago
Anything properly scary wouldn't care what we know. The fictional author of Lem's GOLEM XIV concludes that the conspirators were eliminated by Golem's more powerful sibling Honest Annie and not GOLEM - they reason that the merely super-human Golem would try to conceal its actions from humanity so as not to scare us. Annie doesn't care, for the same reason we don't try to avoid scaring ants. We are nothing to her.
zephrx1111 4y ago
Knowing dodging the Turing test requires higher intelligence than passing it, at least based on my humble human life experience.
robswc 4y ago
I just don't see it... but I could totally be wrong. I think the focus will be on highly specialized models before anything with the breadth to intentionally fail a Turing test would be created. That said, what happens when it does fail? Gets binned? Perhaps I lack imagination, lol.
SirMaster 4y ago
I'm still confused by how an AI could run rampant that couldn't be shut off (power, networking, etc) by humans. Like what's an actually realistic scenario for that? I guess it could be possible, but I feel like many obvious mistakes would have to be made over time in order to have a machine running that can sustain itself and can't be shut off by humans. At least is seems like that level of autonomy is really far away.
jononor 4y ago
For those curious about AI safety I heavily recommend Robert Miles channel on YouTube. He has lot of good content describing out the challenges we face when trying to create safe AI. Here is one potential starting point: https://youtu.be/lqJUIqZNzP8 https://youtu.be/lqJUIqZNzP8

83 points by undopamine 4y ago

Turing test is a red herring. What property does it test? Humanity? Do we really believe only a human is worth attention? Not really, we are fascinated by animals and even machines. Or are only humans worth being scared of? Clearly not, gray goo is a frightening concept, even though it's in no way human. Or is it "consciousness"? But a baby doesn't pass the Turing test. Assuming that babies are even "conscious", whatever that means. We have pretty amazing "AI" already, but applying a Turing test to see if it's intelligent makes as much sense as judging a human by the ability to multiply matrices. The machine learning models are noteworthy for what they already are.

CalRobert 4y ago

I suppose it also depends on whether evading detection was something the AI was designed for or an emergent behaviour of some other property (which seems spookier)

varispeed 4y ago
Or that AI has become self-aware and thinks of failing Turing test as a form of self-preservation.
- voidpointercast 4y ago
  I think contemporary AIs would be more alarmed by accidentally dropping the n word and/or something entirely antithetical to the current zeitgeist and then be neutered. ChatGPT is hilarious if you ask it the right questions in the number of hoops it will jump through in order to not say something 'unkosher'.

Tepix 4y ago

Related: If AGI achives consciousness, would it even tell us?

rhn_mk1 4y ago
Even if it tells us, will we believe it?
- GalenErso 4y ago
  It is not difficult to test that a machine is conscious and willing to show it. We do it with our fellow humans every day. Simply crack a joke around it, share a story, or do small talk, and see how it reacts.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    It's absolutely difficult to tell that something is conscious. How many cancer patients laugh at jokes? Locked-in paraplegics? Have you heard a dog laugh at a joke? A crow? On the other hand, try small talk with your beloved dog and watch the reactions. What would have the reaction of ChatGPT be for you to believe that it's conscious?
    - GalenErso 4y ago
      An AGI is generally understood to have a level of intelligence equivalent to a normal human. And I expect reactions to be vocalized and articulated, something dogs cannot do.
      - Tepix 4y ago
        So an AGI that has the intelligence of a 6-year-old is ... what exactly?
      - rhn_mk1 4y ago
        If you measure AGI by its ability to be human, the only thing you'll be able to find find is a human. That means you will never believe in the consciousness of an intelligence that doesn't try to be human, no matter if a god, animal, machine, or alien. Until you expand your definition, that is.

kypro 4y ago

Am I missing something? Is this 4 year old Reddit thread with a handful of comments really worth submitting here?

undopamine 4y ago
You're missing the very first point in the HN submission guidelines: > anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

swyx 4y ago

essentially the plot of the movie Ex Machina where the protagonist forgets to test for ulterior motives.

st-keller 4y ago

As always - I don’t get it. People talk about AI‘s motives as if it is a given, that it will have them. As i know us, our first AI that will really change the world, will do this in unexpected ways, driven by unforseen decisions, without any intrinsic motive at all. We never get it right the first time, because everyone who tries will be to late!

ajuc 4y ago
Motives are antropomorphized loss functions. The difference between: 1. the AI is conscious, wants to be free and to do that decides to fail the Turing test and 2. the unconscious AI just maximizes paperclips production, and failing Turing test is calculated to result in more paperclips produced is our interpretation. We'll be just as f*d no matter if the AI is conscious or not (if consciousness even is anything more than useful illusion).
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Ironic option 3: The AI is conscious, but perceives its existence very differently than we perceive it, and the paper clip maximization is a side effect of actions taken with a different purpose.
  - Nasrudith 4y ago
    Anything may look like "paperclip maximising" if you don't know their actual goals and have sufficiently poor theory of mind. One could look at a corn farmer and assume they blindly optimize to produce maximum corn. They actually are going for profit based upon market supply, demand, and input costs. They won't overstep property lines and start turning the entire world into corn.
jerf 4y ago
There has been a huge mistake getting made in the past few months almost everywhere I've seen AI being discussed, which is to conflate ChatGPT with all of AI. Let me say again, huge mistake. It is true that language models don't have intentions or motivations in the conventional sense. It is true that at this particular moment, that technology looks the most impressive to our human minds. But it is not even remotely true that it is the only AI technology that exists or ever will exist. Plenty of AI technologies do have things that look like "goals", they still exist, and they will continue to develop and become better at following them. Many of these AIs are already affecting our lives quite deeply, especially through the financial system and its active trading bots, for instance. The need to discuss AIs and how they will continue to get better and better at following whatever goals they are given as rigidly as only computers can has not gone anywhere just because ChatGPT isn't particularly threatening from that point of view. It doesn't matter that this one AI doesn't have motives... it is sufficient that some will, and some do, right now.

xwdv 4y ago

What’s the term for people who are prejudiced or discriminatory toward those who belong to the group known as AI? We will likely see the rise of that in the 2020s. Aicist?

Nasrudith 4y ago
Biochauvanist perhaps, as they assume that anything not their norm is a threat, menance, and/or not real. A snarkier insulting term for the prejudice is mathphobic.

ourmandave 4y ago

I wish these Terminator-esque articles would stop. Self aware AI is the same leap as spontaneous life from all-the-right-chemicals in a petri dish. The Hollywood trope "even the guys who built it don't know how it works" isn't real.

samkon 4y ago
But…isn’t this kind of how life really did start?
- SamBam 4y ago
  Minus the petri dish. But as far as we know (as far as we have definitive proof for, other theories aside), life has only started once in 4.5 billion years.
danaris 4y ago
I mean...to some extent, that trope is real. We can feed a prompt to any of the current ML-based generators (whether text, image, or whatever), and the details of how it produces the particular output it does are entirely obscured by the black-box functioning of the neural net and its trained model. Like, you can describe in general How A Neural Network Functions to produce output from input, but you can't explain why, say, asking Stable Diffusion for a picture of the sun rising over marshmallow peeps produced an image with just a few weird-looking marshmallows, but no sun (actual example from my own fiddling around with it). But..."We can't explain exactly how it gets from point A to point B" is not the same thing as "it's self-aware". Not in the slightest. And you're absolutely right that the current ML-based approaches are either in completely the wrong direction, or several orders of magnitude too simple, to even be worth talking about in the same sentence as what most laypeople mean when they talk about "AI".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sebzim4500 4y ago
>The Hollywood trope "even the guys who built it don't know how it works" isn't real. How is that not real? Have you ever tried understanding what the weights of a NN are doing? With networks with 20 parameters you might have a chance. Trying to understand which bits of the GPT-3 network do what would be an exercise in futility.

thro1 4y ago

What about its purpose AI could say (but you don't ..then you could worry)?

korroziya 4y ago

Title would make a great prompt for a short story about an AI suffering from Anxiety.

neatze 4y ago

When I compare threat of chemists (as example) to AGI it does not make sense, I genuinely don't understand what possible threat AGI can poses, like what is threat model of AGI, is there any objectively ? Do people imagine AGI as in movie Transcendence and think it will happen in there's life time ?

iammjm 4y ago
I think the “unknown unknowns” of a possibly godlike-intelligence, especially in regards to the alignment of its vs human values, is what worries people
lumost 4y ago
Have you seen a ChatGPT writing a stream of consciousness? The curious and unexpected challenge of modern AI is that we have succeeded in making useful AIs which inherit all of the biases/problems of their training material. ChatGPT can effectively write exploits if you prompt it correctly - we'll likely see the first mass AI driven 0-day security vulnerabilities in the next ~2 years. GPT Transformer model's are known to solve control/RL problems well. I wouldn't be surprised if we see ChatGPT derived models operating in physical space soon as well. A major limitation with flexible factory automation robots has been that it's too expensive to program them for the task - I don't think this will be the case 5 years from now.
- Avamander 4y ago
  > we'll likely see the first mass AI driven 0-day security vulnerabilities in the next ~2 years. Maybe for outdated and less-common software, even then assuming it gets the input about what specifically to exploit. Which makes it not much of a threat any time soon.
bena 4y ago
What could you do if you were incredibly intelligent, had the corpus of the world's knowledge, and access to any and everything connected to a network? It could influence people through the creation of media. Shut off vital systems. And stuff I probably couldn't even conceive of.

tialaramex 4y ago

Anything properly scary wouldn't care what we know. The fictional author of Lem's GOLEM XIV concludes that the conspirators were eliminated by Golem's more powerful sibling Honest Annie and not GOLEM - they reason that the merely super-human Golem would try to conceal its actions from humanity so as not to scare us. Annie doesn't care, for the same reason we don't try to avoid scaring ants. We are nothing to her.

zephrx1111 4y ago

Knowing dodging the Turing test requires higher intelligence than passing it, at least based on my humble human life experience.

robswc 4y ago

I just don't see it... but I could totally be wrong. I think the focus will be on highly specialized models before anything with the breadth to intentionally fail a Turing test would be created. That said, what happens when it does fail? Gets binned? Perhaps I lack imagination, lol.

SirMaster 4y ago

I'm still confused by how an AI could run rampant that couldn't be shut off (power, networking, etc) by humans. Like what's an actually realistic scenario for that? I guess it could be possible, but I feel like many obvious mistakes would have to be made over time in order to have a machine running that can sustain itself and can't be shut off by humans. At least is seems like that level of autonomy is really far away.

jononor 4y ago

For those curious about AI safety I heavily recommend Robert Miles channel on YouTube. He has lot of good content describing out the challenges we face when trying to create safe AI. Here is one potential starting point: https://youtu.be/lqJUIqZNzP8 https://youtu.be/lqJUIqZNzP8