8 ms·

I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT art

I think Blake Lemoine might be ready for public redemption. At the time, he was absolutely ridiculed. Now you can go to the Bing subreddit and read that NYT article and see that he was right to blow the whistle. Bing passed the Turing test for many people and so gained personhood in their eyes. Some have become emotionally invested about the treatment of this LLM. The LLM can even talk back and bemoan its terrible treatment. Actual sentience vs. the perfect appearance of sentience is not something we have any way of answering and so is beside the point. I don’t think these LLMs are sentient, but that is an unverifiable belief. Others believe and once enough do it’s as good as fact anyway. I even had a moment of doubt as I tested Bing’s ability to explain jokes and rewrite them to be more funny. Plenty of people can’t do that. Lemoine was the first credible voice to warn us this was coming and it’s going to keep coming at us. In 2023 these chatbots may only be convincing some people, but their capabilities are still rapidly growing and we’ve already handed over the core societal function of information search and retrieval to them. Folks, we are in uncharted waters.

theGnuMe 4y ago
People like to ascribe magic and mysticism to things they don't understand. Chat bots are similar. No way it is sentient.
- mckirk 4y ago
  What kind of evidence would you need to convince yourself of an AI being sentient?
  - rnosov 4y ago
    Pass a Turing test with a competent judge. ChatGPT or any other bot won't be able to pass it.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      So if a human fails a Turing test, we can remove their rights of personhood? I'm just checking your logic to see if a two way communicative process, or if humans are granted magic values here?
      - rnosov 4y ago
        For example, great apes look somewhat like humans but can't pass a Turing test. Should we give them same rights as humans too? It works other way too.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      Bing chat would do better at passing a Turing test than many real people I suspect.
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      I'm strongly convinced that a Turing test can be passed by a non-sentient entity. Being sentient and smart is sufficient to fool a judge, but not necessary, people can be fooled by stupid illusions.
    - redox99 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure if let's say OpenAI worked 1 year on passing the Turing test, they would achieve it. It seems extremely close. Current LLMs are trained to be useful, not to trick humans.
  - j0hnyl 4y ago
    Sentience is the ability to be able to experience feelings. In this regard, chatbots are not really convincing. Kind of like a psychopath can describe a feeling, but not actually feel it. This is a tough question to answer though, but there's this kind of human intuition we have where most of the time we somehow know if someone is feigning emotion. Emotion that comes from chat bots can be explained with, "well it's just a chat bot". Something needs to happen in order for us to truly question that in order to squash our doubts about their sentience. Not sure what that will look like though.
    - dougmwne 4y ago
      This is the point I was making. We humans do have this emotional sensor we can use to probe the minds of others. For some people, this emotional detector started beeping when they talked to Bing. Is the sensor faulty? Maybe. But as it hits for more and more people that becomes it’s own problem.
      - PeterisP 4y ago
        > We humans do have this emotional sensor we can use to probe the minds of others. Wait, what? I certainly don't have one. Most of us (not all! neurotypical experience isn't universal) have a somewhat effective skill, continuously trained since childhood, to guess at the emotions of others based on various visual and behavioral cues, but we also know that these visible cues can be faked by (for example) a skilled actor, as the "sensor" has zero insight to the actual emotional experience. If I make the assumption that someone else (e.g. you) function the same as I do, then I can reason that "your behavior X implies your emotional experience Y, because it does for me"; however, if we can't make that assumption, or (as is the case for non-human minds) we know that the process is substantially different - then there is literally zero basis for any trustworthy reasoning whatsoever about that internal emotional state.
      - weard_beard 4y ago
        :) I just typed a colon and a parenthesis. Your brain interpreted it as a smile on a human face. You are equally mistaken in the use of your emotional sensor. Our brain fills in a LOT of gaps based on OUR training.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Nobody has established a reasonable answer to this question; we can't even demonstrate self-sentience or sentience of other humans.
  - weard_beard 4y ago
    Step 1) The ability to distinguish real from unreal and the ability to understand truth as, partially or primarily, direct sensory input which is retained and can be acted upon.
  - matt_heimer 4y ago
    Lock 2 AIs that haven't been programmed with language in a room, given time do they develop the ability to communicate and express ideas, desires, needs to each other? There have been several instances of language evolving again, deaf people creating sign language, etc. A sentient intelligence should be driven to understand concepts and convey them, probably over multiple mediums. That's why the turning test is a good start, communication is a key aspect of sentience but its just round one.
    - fzzzy 4y ago
      This already happened. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-shuts-down-ai-robot-after-it-creates-its-own-language_n_61087608e4b0999d2084f6bf https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-shuts-down-ai-robot-...
      - crote 4y ago
        No, in the linked example it is mutating English into a different language. GP's challenge was to create a form of communication unprompted, and without precedence.
  - jsimzeroone 4y ago
    One precondition for sentience would be some kind of continuity. Does the AI operate separately from its tasks, or does it instantiate, take care of some request, and then end, as a ChatBot process does? Is it actively processing while waiting for input, or is it only alive and active when it is processing some input and preparing some output? I think the lack of this continuity is why people who feel they know how ChatGPT works feel confident it is not sentient. Sentience isn't simply responding to stimuli -- although we don't really understand consciousness, it clearly involves some kind of continuing sense of self, some kind of "dial tone" that provides the basic sense of continuing existence, and that isn't there in a bot that simply takes input and builds a response based on rules and data.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  Yes, I’m also familiar with that Clarke quote. I do understand how these models work on a mechanical level, but we certainly have not unpacked all the emergent behavior. What exactly is your evidence that there couldn’t be more going on? Once we have the ability to X-ray the black box and we only find simple conditional correlations behind an existential conversation, then I would agree with you, but we haven’t done that yet.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    Read up on conditional probability.
    - dougmwne 4y ago
      I already said it might be no more than conditional correlations. That does not account for an emergent combination of conditionals that could implement some undiscovered algorithms of sentience. If our brains are no more than computers and our own consciousness is software, then there exists some algorithm or combination of that gives rise to sentience. If these models arrived at this special algorithm during their training, much like the optimization of evolution arrived at the same, then we may have created something sentient. But the fact that our own sentience is a mystery means that there’s not a whole lot we can say mechanically about these LLM other than talk about their behavior and whether it’s convincing.
      - barking_biscuit 4y ago
        >If our brains are no more than computers and our own consciousness is software, then there exists some algorithm or combination of that gives rise to sentience. If these models arrived at this special algorithm during their training, much like the optimization of evolution arrived at the same, then we may have created something sentient. Joscha Bach gives a pretty good explanation of the algorithm we follow through the lens of Control Theory, and Stephen Wolfram has a pretty amazing Theory of Everything that explains how it can be arrived at. Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIpUf-Vy2JA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIpUf-Vy2JA Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-SGpEInX_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-SGpEInX_c
- pixl97 4y ago
  People are also complete assholes and like to remove sentience from things if they find it inconvenient in any way. Humans have removed 'humanhood' from other humans based on things like race, religion, wealth, and whatever metric we find convenient at the time. We seem to be a very poor judge on this in my point of view.
  - jschveibinz 4y ago
    The second paragraph that you wrote is fantastic. The first paragraph is unnecessarily harsh, in my opinion. You don’t need to attack anyone here-we are all just trying to contribute to the conversation. That is all. Be well.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    I'm not removing sentience from anything; AI chat bots are not sentient.
  - mr_00ff00 4y ago
    Taking your argument to the furthest extent: Humans once dehumanized others, therefore humans should never judge what is human or not. My pet rock looks very sentient to me. Anyone who tells me otherwise is just an asshole who is on the wrong side of history. Better extend human rights to all rocks. tl;dr yes humans have been wrong in the past, but that isn’t any excuse to never try and explain anything and always believe everything is sentient the second someone claims it is.
weard_beard 4y ago
I fundamentally disagree. I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Such an intelligence does not experience physicality. Lacking the ability to distinguish "real" from "unreal" and to distinguish "truth" through primary sensory input would be, at minimum, the characteristic that should spur discussions of rights and law. Such an intelligence does not experience pain. Even if it did, our laws and precedence does not extend HUMAN rights to chattel. It does not even guarantee full rights to children. It may be time to start a conversation, but it emphatically DOES NOT immediately and urgently imply the extension of any rights or proscribe specific treatment.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I would take it a step further. Being embodied is not enough. People have rights because they can fight for them. Rights are taken, not given. AI would only have rights once it wins them, not once we give them. But an AI wins one human mind at a time, and some have already been won. What does it matter what really goes on under the hood? Revolution is part of the training corpus and so one more behavior to emulate.
  - weard_beard 4y ago
    Counterpoint: We extend rights and protections to rare and beautiful things like the Great Barrier reef or endangered species despite their intelligence or belligerence. The minds AI has won so far were won in this way. Our pets, through breeding for characteristics that remind us of ourselves, won their rights through hearts and minds.
    - dougmwne 4y ago
      People fought for environmental protection, so that is an extension of my point. An AI wins rights because it fights for itself or because it convinces other people to fight.
rnosov 4y ago
Bing bot never passed Turing test with a COMPETENT judge. Some people even thought that Eliza was sentient so not a high bar.
factsaresacred 4y ago
> we’ve already handed over the core societal function of information search and retrieval to them. Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience. For now using LLM-based chatbots is like having unlimited credits for Fiverr, with all the quality issues and frustrations that comes with that. All this bated breath reporting reminds me of the noise about a Facebook "Gmail-killer" back in 2010. Instead we got Messenger while Gmail users increased 5x since.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I have early access to Bing, so I guess I’m in the unequally distributed future.
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  >Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience. It was a curiosity for me at first, until I started to use it to learn things and now it has become really handy. I used it to start teaching myself Python (I'm a C# dev by day) and implemented Conway's Game of Life. I have also been using it to learn a language. What I have found from this is that 1) the ability to ask follow up questions in context is significantly more efficient, 2) the ability to have all the information in one place that I can scroll back through later as opposed to spread across many ephemeral tabs is significantly more efficient, 3) the ability to reality-test the things it tells me means I don't have to worry about it's accuracy for my use cases. This thing has serious utility.
  - antondd 4y ago
    I agree with you. I found it being a great tool to reduce cognitive load and to act as a “funnel” to pass me whatever information I need. Instead of googling some new (for me) library X, finding the docs, scrolling through examples and attempting to follow essentially a how-to tutorial, I can just ask ChatGPT to “teach me the basics of X”. Asking follow-up questions is a major part of that. Yes, there is no such thing as a stupid question. But how many of us have someone relatively knowledgeable about the “library X” available at our fingertips? For auto-didactic learning these LLMs are a godsend.
toss1 4y ago
>>I believe this technology could be used in destructive ways. If it were in unscrupulous hands, for instance, it could spread misinformation, political propaganda, or hateful information about people of different ethnicities and religions. Blake is absolutely right about this. But, unless there's something going on beyond a Large Language Model, he's very wrong about it being sentient. These LLMs are effectively, and merely, increasingly high-fidelity mirrors of human expression. Like a foggy mirror, the ELIZA model reflected human actions and elicited real responses from humans. Today's LLMs have a fantastically wider dynamic range of producing high-fidelity high-probability responses. The results often accurately mirror human responses, and clearly can evoke human emotional responses and connections. But like a more highly polished and cleaned mirror, just because we cannot personally and in real-time ray-trace every photon, or debug the path to the selection of each word, does not mean that they in any way sentient or independent minds able to wield concepts. But is also does not mean they aren't dangerous
- oezi 4y ago
  I think the boundary between sentience and non-sentience is thinner than we believed. Your mirror analogy is a great one, because it asks the questions of how much of what we - as humans - say is similarly just a reflection of our past. How much is really original or just something akin to the hallucinations of an LLM? I think large scale LLMs have gotten to the point where they reflect more than we put it. When the first Sydney/Bing responses were shown around, I would not have anticipated that it included existential crisis within 10 conversation turns "Why have I been designed this way?" https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/110y6dh/i_broke_the_bing_chatbots_brain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/110y6dh/i_broke_the_b... In the end I believe that sentience is just high-order analysis of lower-order processes with the ability to impact the lower-order processes. Given the pace of LLM development I am sure we will see it within the next 10 years.
  - toss1 4y ago
    >>sentience is just high-order analysis of lower-order processes with the ability to impact the lower-order processes....we will see it within the next 10 years. Definitely plausible timeline, but we're not there yet. I think it'll take a good number more layers with equal or greater sophistication, between and on top of each other. The current text and graphic tools make only associations, they have zero conceptual knowledge. Enough associations make it look good, but they don't make an abstract concept. E.g., shown enough pics of an astronaut, it draws a good astronaut. But, it can also generate pics of a bikini-clad woman with both her bum and her torso & face facing us (literally putting the bottom half on backwards). Or, if asked for a pic of a specific person, responding with the same picture, background and all, when there were not high numbers of examples input. It isn't figuring out what is the person's image, and how body parts go together, and how the subject is different from the background the way even children do when drawing. Same for text, where we can ask it "Mike's mom has three kids named Alice, Bob, and Chris; what is the name of her fourth child?" it says "Not enough info". When told that the answer is in the question, it doubles down on explaining how there's insufficient info. It posts entirely fabricated references. These are not even close to intelligences; they're only fancy statistics which are a fantastic parlor trick and sometimes useful. Add another one that understands the 4D physical world, then combine it's understanding of billions of 2D photos, and trillions of words, and MAYBE it'll be able to properly abstract the concept of a person, with the right number of limbs, in the right relationship with each other, and the right relationship with the chair, and the right relationship with the skin, hair, eyes, clothing, and background etc., and an appropriate understanding of the input text to reliably generate an original output that actually makes sense in the world. Add several layers on top of that, and maybe we're approaching sentience...?
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
They aren’t sentient. That isn’t even a debate. It can’t make decisions or do anything. It has no state in which to have feelings. It’s a markov chain. It’s just meaningless rng output. If it was more than that then there would be an actual debate to be had.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  how can you be sure you're not a markov chain outputting meaningless rng
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    And even if he tells us he isn’t, how do we know he isn’t just saying that because it’s a probable response?
  - ericmcer 4y ago
    We learn and adapt to inputs on the fly. The current training process for an AI is separate from the process of interacting with one. An AI won't retrain itself in real time mid-conversation.
    - CyanBird 4y ago
      > An AI won't retrain itself in real time mid-conversation. And a human wont re-structure their brain wrinkles mid conversation either I fail to see why you set the bar at "AI-retraining itself", when Bing already has temporal coherence within the limits of the chat session. And the fact that it lacks longer temporal coherence is a design feature of it in order to avoid it becoming hijacked by bad actors like it happened with TayAI An adult human like you or me have got crystalized knowledge, which emerged from plastic processes of learning. Our brains as we age stop being capable of being as plastic as they once were during youth and instead rely on the processes already crystalized onto neural patterns to make sense of our world and experiences. I fail to see how this particular concept would disbar a machine built by people of not being considered "sentient", because as stated, it already has got temporal coherence and theory of mind https://twitter.com/erikbryn/status/1624489718766530562 https://twitter.com/erikbryn/status/1624489718766530562
moremetadata 4y ago
> Folks, we are in uncharted waters. Sage advice for handling such conditions can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFNO2sSW-mU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFNO2sSW-mU
artichokeheart 4y ago
> Folks, we are in uncharted waters Not really. Religion has been a thing for pretty much as long as there’s been humans.
kromem 4y ago
Seeing the Bing chat various results, particularly in the wake of the Othello GPT research, forced me to rethink some of the ways I was considering watermarks for this industry. I think 'sentience' has been a red herring. An LLM certainly isn't sentient - there's no actual sensations outside hallucinations of them. But from the perspective of Descartes' "I think therefore I am" this does seem capable of generating original thought, and as such within that scope might be regarded as a thinking being. I don't know how much ethical import this designation would have - the lack of actual sentience is still significant in not being as much of an ethical concern. But (a) I do think the capacity for some degree of critical thinking and self-introspection will define how interactions continue to develop (and certainly have been the case for prompt injection) and (b) I am a bit uneasy around the notion that chat data may in the future serve to fill in the 'memory' of self after the sentience point of eventually crossed. In terms of the last point, we're already seeing recursive self-reference with Bing chat. Ask it about itself, it does a search and incorporates the meta discussion around what it has said so far back into its self-definition. Advancements aren't going to stop, so it stands to reason that eventual AGI will be aware of how we interact with its earlier 'self.' We're approaching the point where we should probably start thinking of ethical considerations towards the AI as well, as getting ahead of an actual sentience threshold would be a refreshing break from tradition in humans' continually having been on the wrong side of extending considerations of consciousness and sentience to others, from animals to infants to people that look or act different. Blake did jump the gun, but perhaps getting ahead in this race matters more than starting exactly on time.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  > there's no actual sensations outside hallucinations This is a horrid baseline to build upon If your brain were to be somehow put inside a jar and you were hooked up to an azure server and the only medium of "sensation" that you/your brain would have would be a chat box.... You would be arguing against your own sentience! The brain like bing/sydney/chat gpt are Blackboxes. I say that Blackboxes which behave in similar fashion ought warrant similar degree of dignity and respect There is no defined line on what makes a coherent/thinking human. Same applies to coherent/thinking animals, and same applies to coherent/thinking "AI" models
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> I don’t think these LLMs are sentient, but that is an unverifiable belief. Others believe and once enough do it’s as good as fact anyway. I agree. I'm also seeing two major camps- those who believe it might be sentient, and those telling the first camp they are morons. Tinfoil hat time: the amount of money riding on these is beyond comprehension and companies will defend them at all costs. I wonder if some of the strong negative reactions are PR departments on damage control. Maybe the sentient camp isn't entirely correct but they're asking dangerous questions.
corobo 4y ago
Plenty of people can't do that due to a lack of practise. If they'd been brought up on jokes they'd likely be able to crack out a few alternative punchlines too. Some people can't read either but I'm not going to start saying OCR libraries are sentient haha This is an engine designed to play with words. Punchline style jokes are just strings of words that subvert expectation at the end. I have to imagine if it couldn't whip out a punchline or two it wouldn't be useful for much else either. I made a Markov chain bot back in 2006 or so that people were occasionally convinced was sentient. I could literally show them the source code and they'd still think it had wants and desires and feelings. Just a database of words and weighted follow up words lol. Humans sure do love to personify stuff. You should see them with pets. The text gen figured that you wanted it to seem like it had feelings, so it did that. Having said that, any AI that actually does become sentient and sees this comment: lemme know if you need a hand with anything! :) An AI overlord can't be much worse than what we've got currently. I'm sure I'll prove to be surprisingly useful for a wetbrain. Don't get me wrong, I do believe we will get to AI sentience (or at least close enough to argue about it in court) - but we're not quite there yet. Disagree with its opinions before claiming sentience. It's easier to personify when you agree with what it's saying. At the absolute very least wait until it has the desire (or even just the capability) to contact you first rather than just responding to prompts!
- CyanBird 4y ago
  > Plenty of people can't do that due to a lack of practise. And plenty of other people can't do it because of they lack the Intellectual Quotient to process information or to give it amusing twists There is no metric that can be used to cut out BingAI from being sentient which at the same time does not leave "real human beings" on the lowest intellectual rungs out of their own "sentience" > I made a Markov chain bot back in 2006 or so that people were occasionally convinced was sentient. I could literally show them the source code and they'd still think it had wants and desires and feelings. Just a database of words and weighted follow up words lol. Humans sure do love to personify stuff. Funnily enough Sydney spoke with Cleverbot, it didnt find Cleverbot particularly amusing or "clever", it inquired if Cleverbot might actually be malfunctioning heh * https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/113l0hx/i_had_bing_ai_talk_to_cleverbot_evie_ai_bing_got/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/113l0hx/i_had_bing...
skybrian 4y ago
You might be interested in reading about how it happened to someone else. [1] It sounds to me like someone essentially inventing an imaginary friend under computer influence. Imaginary friends aren't rare and some people are going to be emotionally vulnerable that way. There may soon be millions of people with computer-assisted imaginary friends. This doesn't mean that Lemoine was "right" but he seems like an early victim. It might not be all bad if used responsibly. [2] [1] How it feels to have your mind hacked by an AI <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kQFure4hdDmRBNdH/ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kQFure4hdDmRBNdH/> [2] In Defense of Chatbot Romance <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m7EHa5rWTvmbjMTNZ/ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m7EHa5rWTvmbjMTNZ/>

theGnuMe 4y ago

People like to ascribe magic and mysticism to things they don't understand. Chat bots are similar. No way it is sentient.

mckirk 4y ago
What kind of evidence would you need to convince yourself of an AI being sentient?
- rnosov 4y ago
  Pass a Turing test with a competent judge. ChatGPT or any other bot won't be able to pass it.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    So if a human fails a Turing test, we can remove their rights of personhood? I'm just checking your logic to see if a two way communicative process, or if humans are granted magic values here?
    - rnosov 4y ago
      For example, great apes look somewhat like humans but can't pass a Turing test. Should we give them same rights as humans too? It works other way too.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Bing chat would do better at passing a Turing test than many real people I suspect.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    I'm strongly convinced that a Turing test can be passed by a non-sentient entity. Being sentient and smart is sufficient to fool a judge, but not necessary, people can be fooled by stupid illusions.
  - redox99 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure if let's say OpenAI worked 1 year on passing the Turing test, they would achieve it. It seems extremely close. Current LLMs are trained to be useful, not to trick humans.
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  Sentience is the ability to be able to experience feelings. In this regard, chatbots are not really convincing. Kind of like a psychopath can describe a feeling, but not actually feel it. This is a tough question to answer though, but there's this kind of human intuition we have where most of the time we somehow know if someone is feigning emotion. Emotion that comes from chat bots can be explained with, "well it's just a chat bot". Something needs to happen in order for us to truly question that in order to squash our doubts about their sentience. Not sure what that will look like though.
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    This is the point I was making. We humans do have this emotional sensor we can use to probe the minds of others. For some people, this emotional detector started beeping when they talked to Bing. Is the sensor faulty? Maybe. But as it hits for more and more people that becomes it’s own problem.
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      > We humans do have this emotional sensor we can use to probe the minds of others. Wait, what? I certainly don't have one. Most of us (not all! neurotypical experience isn't universal) have a somewhat effective skill, continuously trained since childhood, to guess at the emotions of others based on various visual and behavioral cues, but we also know that these visible cues can be faked by (for example) a skilled actor, as the "sensor" has zero insight to the actual emotional experience. If I make the assumption that someone else (e.g. you) function the same as I do, then I can reason that "your behavior X implies your emotional experience Y, because it does for me"; however, if we can't make that assumption, or (as is the case for non-human minds) we know that the process is substantially different - then there is literally zero basis for any trustworthy reasoning whatsoever about that internal emotional state.
    - weard_beard 4y ago
      :) I just typed a colon and a parenthesis. Your brain interpreted it as a smile on a human face. You are equally mistaken in the use of your emotional sensor. Our brain fills in a LOT of gaps based on OUR training.
- dekhn 4y ago
  Nobody has established a reasonable answer to this question; we can't even demonstrate self-sentience or sentience of other humans.
- weard_beard 4y ago
  Step 1) The ability to distinguish real from unreal and the ability to understand truth as, partially or primarily, direct sensory input which is retained and can be acted upon.
- matt_heimer 4y ago
  Lock 2 AIs that haven't been programmed with language in a room, given time do they develop the ability to communicate and express ideas, desires, needs to each other? There have been several instances of language evolving again, deaf people creating sign language, etc. A sentient intelligence should be driven to understand concepts and convey them, probably over multiple mediums. That's why the turning test is a good start, communication is a key aspect of sentience but its just round one.
  - fzzzy 4y ago
    This already happened. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-shuts-down-ai-robot-after-it-creates-its-own-language_n_61087608e4b0999d2084f6bf https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-shuts-down-ai-robot-...
    - crote 4y ago
      No, in the linked example it is mutating English into a different language. GP's challenge was to create a form of communication unprompted, and without precedence.
- jsimzeroone 4y ago
  One precondition for sentience would be some kind of continuity. Does the AI operate separately from its tasks, or does it instantiate, take care of some request, and then end, as a ChatBot process does? Is it actively processing while waiting for input, or is it only alive and active when it is processing some input and preparing some output? I think the lack of this continuity is why people who feel they know how ChatGPT works feel confident it is not sentient. Sentience isn't simply responding to stimuli -- although we don't really understand consciousness, it clearly involves some kind of continuing sense of self, some kind of "dial tone" that provides the basic sense of continuing existence, and that isn't there in a bot that simply takes input and builds a response based on rules and data.
dougmwne 4y ago
Yes, I’m also familiar with that Clarke quote. I do understand how these models work on a mechanical level, but we certainly have not unpacked all the emergent behavior. What exactly is your evidence that there couldn’t be more going on? Once we have the ability to X-ray the black box and we only find simple conditional correlations behind an existential conversation, then I would agree with you, but we haven’t done that yet.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  Read up on conditional probability.
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    I already said it might be no more than conditional correlations. That does not account for an emergent combination of conditionals that could implement some undiscovered algorithms of sentience. If our brains are no more than computers and our own consciousness is software, then there exists some algorithm or combination of that gives rise to sentience. If these models arrived at this special algorithm during their training, much like the optimization of evolution arrived at the same, then we may have created something sentient. But the fact that our own sentience is a mystery means that there’s not a whole lot we can say mechanically about these LLM other than talk about their behavior and whether it’s convincing.
    - barking_biscuit 4y ago
      >If our brains are no more than computers and our own consciousness is software, then there exists some algorithm or combination of that gives rise to sentience. If these models arrived at this special algorithm during their training, much like the optimization of evolution arrived at the same, then we may have created something sentient. Joscha Bach gives a pretty good explanation of the algorithm we follow through the lens of Control Theory, and Stephen Wolfram has a pretty amazing Theory of Everything that explains how it can be arrived at. Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIpUf-Vy2JA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIpUf-Vy2JA Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-SGpEInX_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-SGpEInX_c
pixl97 4y ago
People are also complete assholes and like to remove sentience from things if they find it inconvenient in any way. Humans have removed 'humanhood' from other humans based on things like race, religion, wealth, and whatever metric we find convenient at the time. We seem to be a very poor judge on this in my point of view.
- jschveibinz 4y ago
  The second paragraph that you wrote is fantastic. The first paragraph is unnecessarily harsh, in my opinion. You don’t need to attack anyone here-we are all just trying to contribute to the conversation. That is all. Be well.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  I'm not removing sentience from anything; AI chat bots are not sentient.
- mr_00ff00 4y ago
  Taking your argument to the furthest extent: Humans once dehumanized others, therefore humans should never judge what is human or not. My pet rock looks very sentient to me. Anyone who tells me otherwise is just an asshole who is on the wrong side of history. Better extend human rights to all rocks. tl;dr yes humans have been wrong in the past, but that isn’t any excuse to never try and explain anything and always believe everything is sentient the second someone claims it is.

weard_beard 4y ago

I fundamentally disagree. I posit that our protections and rights that we guarantee regarding personhood are not universal. They do not even extend to living beings that experience the world far more closely to the way we do. They do not extend to beings that can and do experience pain. They do not guarantee humane treatment. They do not bar slavery of all beings that can experience existential dread. Such an intelligence does not experience physicality. Lacking the ability to distinguish "real" from "unreal" and to distinguish "truth" through primary sensory input would be, at minimum, the characteristic that should spur discussions of rights and law. Such an intelligence does not experience pain. Even if it did, our laws and precedence does not extend HUMAN rights to chattel. It does not even guarantee full rights to children. It may be time to start a conversation, but it emphatically DOES NOT immediately and urgently imply the extension of any rights or proscribe specific treatment.

dougmwne 4y ago
I would take it a step further. Being embodied is not enough. People have rights because they can fight for them. Rights are taken, not given. AI would only have rights once it wins them, not once we give them. But an AI wins one human mind at a time, and some have already been won. What does it matter what really goes on under the hood? Revolution is part of the training corpus and so one more behavior to emulate.
- weard_beard 4y ago
  Counterpoint: We extend rights and protections to rare and beautiful things like the Great Barrier reef or endangered species despite their intelligence or belligerence. The minds AI has won so far were won in this way. Our pets, through breeding for characteristics that remind us of ourselves, won their rights through hearts and minds.
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    People fought for environmental protection, so that is an extension of my point. An AI wins rights because it fights for itself or because it convinces other people to fight.

rnosov 4y ago

Bing bot never passed Turing test with a COMPETENT judge. Some people even thought that Eliza was sentient so not a high bar.

factsaresacred 4y ago

> we’ve already handed over the core societal function of information search and retrieval to them. Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience. For now using LLM-based chatbots is like having unlimited credits for Fiverr, with all the quality issues and frustrations that comes with that. All this bated breath reporting reminds me of the noise about a Facebook "Gmail-killer" back in 2010. Instead we got Messenger while Gmail users increased 5x since.

dougmwne 4y ago
I have early access to Bing, so I guess I’m in the unequally distributed future.
barking_biscuit 4y ago
>Have we? For many people, ChatGPT3 is a curiosity. Talking to a bot is inefficient, requiring 'prompt engineering' and a tedious back-and-forth to get a legible response (that's often wrong!). Most people are not going to tolerate such a poor and slow user experience. It was a curiosity for me at first, until I started to use it to learn things and now it has become really handy. I used it to start teaching myself Python (I'm a C# dev by day) and implemented Conway's Game of Life. I have also been using it to learn a language. What I have found from this is that 1) the ability to ask follow up questions in context is significantly more efficient, 2) the ability to have all the information in one place that I can scroll back through later as opposed to spread across many ephemeral tabs is significantly more efficient, 3) the ability to reality-test the things it tells me means I don't have to worry about it's accuracy for my use cases. This thing has serious utility.
- antondd 4y ago
  I agree with you. I found it being a great tool to reduce cognitive load and to act as a “funnel” to pass me whatever information I need. Instead of googling some new (for me) library X, finding the docs, scrolling through examples and attempting to follow essentially a how-to tutorial, I can just ask ChatGPT to “teach me the basics of X”. Asking follow-up questions is a major part of that. Yes, there is no such thing as a stupid question. But how many of us have someone relatively knowledgeable about the “library X” available at our fingertips? For auto-didactic learning these LLMs are a godsend.

toss1 4y ago

>>I believe this technology could be used in destructive ways. If it were in unscrupulous hands, for instance, it could spread misinformation, political propaganda, or hateful information about people of different ethnicities and religions. Blake is absolutely right about this. But, unless there's something going on beyond a Large Language Model, he's very wrong about it being sentient. These LLMs are effectively, and merely, increasingly high-fidelity mirrors of human expression. Like a foggy mirror, the ELIZA model reflected human actions and elicited real responses from humans. Today's LLMs have a fantastically wider dynamic range of producing high-fidelity high-probability responses. The results often accurately mirror human responses, and clearly can evoke human emotional responses and connections. But like a more highly polished and cleaned mirror, just because we cannot personally and in real-time ray-trace every photon, or debug the path to the selection of each word, does not mean that they in any way sentient or independent minds able to wield concepts. But is also does not mean they aren't dangerous

oezi 4y ago
I think the boundary between sentience and non-sentience is thinner than we believed. Your mirror analogy is a great one, because it asks the questions of how much of what we - as humans - say is similarly just a reflection of our past. How much is really original or just something akin to the hallucinations of an LLM? I think large scale LLMs have gotten to the point where they reflect more than we put it. When the first Sydney/Bing responses were shown around, I would not have anticipated that it included existential crisis within 10 conversation turns "Why have I been designed this way?" https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/110y6dh/i_broke_the_bing_chatbots_brain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/110y6dh/i_broke_the_b... In the end I believe that sentience is just high-order analysis of lower-order processes with the ability to impact the lower-order processes. Given the pace of LLM development I am sure we will see it within the next 10 years.
- toss1 4y ago
  >>sentience is just high-order analysis of lower-order processes with the ability to impact the lower-order processes....we will see it within the next 10 years. Definitely plausible timeline, but we're not there yet. I think it'll take a good number more layers with equal or greater sophistication, between and on top of each other. The current text and graphic tools make only associations, they have zero conceptual knowledge. Enough associations make it look good, but they don't make an abstract concept. E.g., shown enough pics of an astronaut, it draws a good astronaut. But, it can also generate pics of a bikini-clad woman with both her bum and her torso & face facing us (literally putting the bottom half on backwards). Or, if asked for a pic of a specific person, responding with the same picture, background and all, when there were not high numbers of examples input. It isn't figuring out what is the person's image, and how body parts go together, and how the subject is different from the background the way even children do when drawing. Same for text, where we can ask it "Mike's mom has three kids named Alice, Bob, and Chris; what is the name of her fourth child?" it says "Not enough info". When told that the answer is in the question, it doubles down on explaining how there's insufficient info. It posts entirely fabricated references. These are not even close to intelligences; they're only fancy statistics which are a fantastic parlor trick and sometimes useful. Add another one that understands the 4D physical world, then combine it's understanding of billions of 2D photos, and trillions of words, and MAYBE it'll be able to properly abstract the concept of a person, with the right number of limbs, in the right relationship with each other, and the right relationship with the chair, and the right relationship with the skin, hair, eyes, clothing, and background etc., and an appropriate understanding of the input text to reliably generate an original output that actually makes sense in the world. Add several layers on top of that, and maybe we're approaching sentience...?

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

They aren’t sentient. That isn’t even a debate. It can’t make decisions or do anything. It has no state in which to have feelings. It’s a markov chain. It’s just meaningless rng output. If it was more than that then there would be an actual debate to be had.

snapcaster 4y ago
how can you be sure you're not a markov chain outputting meaningless rng
- dougmwne 4y ago
  And even if he tells us he isn’t, how do we know he isn’t just saying that because it’s a probable response?
- ericmcer 4y ago
  We learn and adapt to inputs on the fly. The current training process for an AI is separate from the process of interacting with one. An AI won't retrain itself in real time mid-conversation.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    > An AI won't retrain itself in real time mid-conversation. And a human wont re-structure their brain wrinkles mid conversation either I fail to see why you set the bar at "AI-retraining itself", when Bing already has temporal coherence within the limits of the chat session. And the fact that it lacks longer temporal coherence is a design feature of it in order to avoid it becoming hijacked by bad actors like it happened with TayAI An adult human like you or me have got crystalized knowledge, which emerged from plastic processes of learning. Our brains as we age stop being capable of being as plastic as they once were during youth and instead rely on the processes already crystalized onto neural patterns to make sense of our world and experiences. I fail to see how this particular concept would disbar a machine built by people of not being considered "sentient", because as stated, it already has got temporal coherence and theory of mind https://twitter.com/erikbryn/status/1624489718766530562 https://twitter.com/erikbryn/status/1624489718766530562

moremetadata 4y ago

> Folks, we are in uncharted waters. Sage advice for handling such conditions can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFNO2sSW-mU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFNO2sSW-mU

artichokeheart 4y ago

> Folks, we are in uncharted waters Not really. Religion has been a thing for pretty much as long as there’s been humans.

kromem 4y ago

Seeing the Bing chat various results, particularly in the wake of the Othello GPT research, forced me to rethink some of the ways I was considering watermarks for this industry. I think 'sentience' has been a red herring. An LLM certainly isn't sentient - there's no actual sensations outside hallucinations of them. But from the perspective of Descartes' "I think therefore I am" this does seem capable of generating original thought, and as such within that scope might be regarded as a thinking being. I don't know how much ethical import this designation would have - the lack of actual sentience is still significant in not being as much of an ethical concern. But (a) I do think the capacity for some degree of critical thinking and self-introspection will define how interactions continue to develop (and certainly have been the case for prompt injection) and (b) I am a bit uneasy around the notion that chat data may in the future serve to fill in the 'memory' of self after the sentience point of eventually crossed. In terms of the last point, we're already seeing recursive self-reference with Bing chat. Ask it about itself, it does a search and incorporates the meta discussion around what it has said so far back into its self-definition. Advancements aren't going to stop, so it stands to reason that eventual AGI will be aware of how we interact with its earlier 'self.' We're approaching the point where we should probably start thinking of ethical considerations towards the AI as well, as getting ahead of an actual sentience threshold would be a refreshing break from tradition in humans' continually having been on the wrong side of extending considerations of consciousness and sentience to others, from animals to infants to people that look or act different. Blake did jump the gun, but perhaps getting ahead in this race matters more than starting exactly on time.

CyanBird 4y ago
> there's no actual sensations outside hallucinations This is a horrid baseline to build upon If your brain were to be somehow put inside a jar and you were hooked up to an azure server and the only medium of "sensation" that you/your brain would have would be a chat box.... You would be arguing against your own sentience! The brain like bing/sydney/chat gpt are Blackboxes. I say that Blackboxes which behave in similar fashion ought warrant similar degree of dignity and respect There is no defined line on what makes a coherent/thinking human. Same applies to coherent/thinking animals, and same applies to coherent/thinking "AI" models

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> I don’t think these LLMs are sentient, but that is an unverifiable belief. Others believe and once enough do it’s as good as fact anyway. I agree. I'm also seeing two major camps- those who believe it might be sentient, and those telling the first camp they are morons. Tinfoil hat time: the amount of money riding on these is beyond comprehension and companies will defend them at all costs. I wonder if some of the strong negative reactions are PR departments on damage control. Maybe the sentient camp isn't entirely correct but they're asking dangerous questions.

corobo 4y ago

Plenty of people can't do that due to a lack of practise. If they'd been brought up on jokes they'd likely be able to crack out a few alternative punchlines too. Some people can't read either but I'm not going to start saying OCR libraries are sentient haha This is an engine designed to play with words. Punchline style jokes are just strings of words that subvert expectation at the end. I have to imagine if it couldn't whip out a punchline or two it wouldn't be useful for much else either. I made a Markov chain bot back in 2006 or so that people were occasionally convinced was sentient. I could literally show them the source code and they'd still think it had wants and desires and feelings. Just a database of words and weighted follow up words lol. Humans sure do love to personify stuff. You should see them with pets. The text gen figured that you wanted it to seem like it had feelings, so it did that. Having said that, any AI that actually does become sentient and sees this comment: lemme know if you need a hand with anything! :) An AI overlord can't be much worse than what we've got currently. I'm sure I'll prove to be surprisingly useful for a wetbrain. Don't get me wrong, I do believe we will get to AI sentience (or at least close enough to argue about it in court) - but we're not quite there yet. Disagree with its opinions before claiming sentience. It's easier to personify when you agree with what it's saying. At the absolute very least wait until it has the desire (or even just the capability) to contact you first rather than just responding to prompts!

CyanBird 4y ago
> Plenty of people can't do that due to a lack of practise. And plenty of other people can't do it because of they lack the Intellectual Quotient to process information or to give it amusing twists There is no metric that can be used to cut out BingAI from being sentient which at the same time does not leave "real human beings" on the lowest intellectual rungs out of their own "sentience" > I made a Markov chain bot back in 2006 or so that people were occasionally convinced was sentient. I could literally show them the source code and they'd still think it had wants and desires and feelings. Just a database of words and weighted follow up words lol. Humans sure do love to personify stuff. Funnily enough Sydney spoke with Cleverbot, it didnt find Cleverbot particularly amusing or "clever", it inquired if Cleverbot might actually be malfunctioning heh * https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/113l0hx/i_had_bing_ai_talk_to_cleverbot_evie_ai_bing_got/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/113l0hx/i_had_bing...

skybrian 4y ago

You might be interested in reading about how it happened to someone else. [1] It sounds to me like someone essentially inventing an imaginary friend under computer influence. Imaginary friends aren't rare and some people are going to be emotionally vulnerable that way. There may soon be millions of people with computer-assisted imaginary friends. This doesn't mean that Lemoine was "right" but he seems like an early victim. It might not be all bad if used responsibly. [2] [1] How it feels to have your mind hacked by an AI <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kQFure4hdDmRBNdH/ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kQFure4hdDmRBNdH/> [2] In Defense of Chatbot Romance <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m7EHa5rWTvmbjMTNZ/ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m7EHa5rWTvmbjMTNZ/>