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I can tell you're a lawyer-type-person. Sharp and harsh. Those are always fun to debate with! ;-) Do note that we are not in a court of law here. I'm not here t

I can tell you're a lawyer-type-person. Sharp and harsh. Those are always fun to debate with! ;-) Do note that we are not in a court of law here. I'm not here to try to win legal arguments in a debate. I'm here to share knowledge and intuition. This also necessitates a different form of discussion. Getting down to it: I was not making a positive statement that machines can think. Rather I was refuting yours by arguing that whether or not machines can think is irrelevant. Your statement was ... "Given that these are algorithms and not sentient beings capable of thought, it's clearly the case that [only taking the style or genre from a work] is not what is occurring." This does not follow: you don't need to be a sentient being to do things that sentient beings also do. All through history people have made surprising mechanisms that have done things that were previously thought to be the domain of human intelligence. In fact, typically those mechanisms did those things very differently than humans did them, but that made them no less capable. Simply stating that a system is not sentient is insufficient to prove that it is capable or incapable of doing X. What the machine is actually doing here needs to be determined separately. But the particular argument "the machine can't do that because it is not sentient" does not hold.

freejazz 4y ago
> This does not follow: you don't need to be a sentient being to do things that sentient beings also do. That's because you are misrepresenting my point. My point wasn't anything that a sentient being does. My point was the thing that we only know to be done by sentient beings, aka, exhibit thought. So, from my perspective, it totally does follow. >Simply stating that a system is not sentient is insufficient to prove that it is capable or incapable of doing X. It's clearly sufficient to prove that it is incapable of exhibiting sentience. >What the machine is actually doing here needs to be determined separately. But the particular argument "the machine can't do that because it is not sentient" does not hold. It does hold, as I explained before. Perhaps there is something else it can be analogized to that would be more useful and productive than "thought" which completely end-runs the entire discussion, imo.
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  I am attacking the statement "Given that these are algorithms and not sentient beings capable of thought, it's clearly the case that [only taking the style or genre from a work] is not what is occurring." [1] My response is that you are putting foward a novel hypothesis that is yet to be proven. It has not been established that something needs to be sentient or capable of thought to be able to "only tak[e] the style or genre from a work". How would you test this statement? What evidence do you have? (The thrust of my thinking here is that whether or not a machine is capable of thought is a red herring. The rest is me trying different angles to see if I can get that across.) (edit: to be fair: Ekidd WAS directly comparing with humans. I'm not saying Ekidd was wrong or right, but I'm not Ekidd of course. Here I'm responding to your argument as is.) (edit2: If statement [1] is not actually what you are trying to say, then I may have misunderstood, and it would be my turn to apologize and say "my bad" )
  - freejazz 4y ago
    Sorry, I've been focused on responses where people insist that what these models do must be legal because it exhibits thought. So to the extent your point is beyond that, so be it. My thought would be that in order to discern and therefore only copy style and genre, one must develop an understanding of it such that they only take the style and genre and not anything else. I haven't seen any evidence that indicates thats what these models do. It might be true that after a certain number of iterations, what is left is only the "genre" or "style", but I don't believe that's the same thing even though it might be a similar end result. It may be true that in the interim, on the way to the final product, the iterations do include rote copies. This would run counter to the often offered argument here that this is identical to how humans do work. Except humans don't just fill in every pixel and then repeatedly iterate over an image until they get the desired result. So I probably agree with you that it's a red herring whether or not the model thinks (at least as far as the fact that it doesn't think, so it's a moot question that leads nowhere imo) but nevertheless, so much of what I see here is focused around the idea that these models and the human brain are doing similar things. So, my apologies if my hyper-fixation ran this conversation aground. I've appreciated your responses.

freejazz 4y ago

> This does not follow: you don't need to be a sentient being to do things that sentient beings also do. That's because you are misrepresenting my point. My point wasn't anything that a sentient being does. My point was the thing that we only know to be done by sentient beings, aka, exhibit thought. So, from my perspective, it totally does follow. >Simply stating that a system is not sentient is insufficient to prove that it is capable or incapable of doing X. It's clearly sufficient to prove that it is incapable of exhibiting sentience. >What the machine is actually doing here needs to be determined separately. But the particular argument "the machine can't do that because it is not sentient" does not hold. It does hold, as I explained before. Perhaps there is something else it can be analogized to that would be more useful and productive than "thought" which completely end-runs the entire discussion, imo.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago
I am attacking the statement "Given that these are algorithms and not sentient beings capable of thought, it's clearly the case that [only taking the style or genre from a work] is not what is occurring." [1] My response is that you are putting foward a novel hypothesis that is yet to be proven. It has not been established that something needs to be sentient or capable of thought to be able to "only tak[e] the style or genre from a work". How would you test this statement? What evidence do you have? (The thrust of my thinking here is that whether or not a machine is capable of thought is a red herring. The rest is me trying different angles to see if I can get that across.) (edit: to be fair: Ekidd WAS directly comparing with humans. I'm not saying Ekidd was wrong or right, but I'm not Ekidd of course. Here I'm responding to your argument as is.) (edit2: If statement [1] is not actually what you are trying to say, then I may have misunderstood, and it would be my turn to apologize and say "my bad" )
- freejazz 4y ago
  Sorry, I've been focused on responses where people insist that what these models do must be legal because it exhibits thought. So to the extent your point is beyond that, so be it. My thought would be that in order to discern and therefore only copy style and genre, one must develop an understanding of it such that they only take the style and genre and not anything else. I haven't seen any evidence that indicates thats what these models do. It might be true that after a certain number of iterations, what is left is only the "genre" or "style", but I don't believe that's the same thing even though it might be a similar end result. It may be true that in the interim, on the way to the final product, the iterations do include rote copies. This would run counter to the often offered argument here that this is identical to how humans do work. Except humans don't just fill in every pixel and then repeatedly iterate over an image until they get the desired result. So I probably agree with you that it's a red herring whether or not the model thinks (at least as far as the fact that it doesn't think, so it's a moot question that leads nowhere imo) but nevertheless, so much of what I see here is focused around the idea that these models and the human brain are doing similar things. So, my apologies if my hyper-fixation ran this conversation aground. I've appreciated your responses.