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Chatbots are not sentient. People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy and social sciences, and Reddit does not count. Some AI Mo

Chatbots are not sentient. People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy and social sciences, and Reddit does not count. Some AI Models are extremely good at manipulating masses of people, yes, but they are Tools, not Architects. There's people using these tools too manipulate other people. The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. There might be a day when AI gets advanced enough to become the Architect of itself, we are nowhere near that.

zwkrt 4y ago
I might sound a little bit 'tinfoil hat' here, but I believe that what follows is not hyperbole. AI is already the 'Architect' more than most of us would like to admit. Even if it is not sentient, the various AIs that we use during the day were designed with a purpose and they are goal oriented. It is worth reading Daniel Dennet's thoughs about the intentional stance--we know that a toaster is not sentient, but it was designed with a purpose and we know when it is or is not achieving that purpose. That is why we might sometimes jokingly say that the toaster is 'angry with us' or that when the toaster dings that it is happy. It is actually easier for us humans to interact with objects when we know that they have a purpose, because that is similar to interacting with other humans who we know to have purposes. Coming back around to AI, ChatGPT was designed with a purpose, and people project intent onto it. People act like it is an agent. And that is all that matters. The same is true of the Tiktok AI, the AI that calculates your credit score, the traffic lights by your house. Hell, it's also true of your stomach. The point is that objects in our environment do not have to be literally conscious for us to treat them as conscious beings and for them to fundamentally shape the way that we live and that we interact with our environment. This is pretty much the basic tenet of cybernetics. To believe that all of these tools do not have intention and that they are 'just tools' used by some people to influence other people is not wrong, but I don't think that it captures the richness of the story. Differentiating where humanity/consciousness begins and where the technology ends is already more complicated than most people think. Traffic lights train us just as much as we make traffic lights. I fully believe that people will be saying "this isn't true AI, it doesn't /really/ have feelings" long after the technology that we create is so deeply embedded into our sensory I/O that the argument will be moot.
- la64710 4y ago
  What about a system emerging from another system? https://clementneo.com/posts/2023/02/11/we-found-an-neuron https://clementneo.com/posts/2023/02/11/we-found-an-neuron
- Bjartr 4y ago
  That's part of why there's objection to claiming sentience, it distracts from the discussion of impact by dragging a whole lot of extra philosophical baggage into the conversation when it's not yet necessary.
- imranq 4y ago
  la li lu le lo
- guhcampos 4y ago
  That's kind of exactly my point when I say they are not architects, just tools: I agree 100% that people project intent into these things, and I believe that's exactly what our "ex Google employee" is doing here - and it's dangerous. It's dangerous in part exactly because it shifts the responsibility for the acts of the tool to the tool itself, and away from its author. Like deforestation was the machine's fault, not the fault of the humans driving them. I can never agree with your affirmation that "AI is already the Architect". It is not, the AI does not design anything. It does not plan anything. It has no ideas, no critical thinking, no judgement of value or morals. The AI just does what it's told, like a tool, a worker ant, or any other algorithm. It's complicated enough that it's not obvious to us what it was told to do, but ultimately it's all it can do.
  - zwkrt 4y ago
    I understand your point, and I'll agree to disagree. I think it just has to do with what we value. Even though it is a tool, tools change what options we have. If you have a shovel, 'digging holes' is now an optional activity for you to pursue that wouldn't have been otherwise. Is the shovel the 'architect' of your ability to dig holes? Maybe no, but the tool-human interaction is a back and forth. Tools generate affordances and humans choose to act on affordances. Maybe put it this way, if there was an AI that could plan out your day in a way that would optimize some metric of happiness that you agree with, you might start to use the AI. Is the AI the architect of your day because it plans it out and tells you what to do, or are you still in charge because you could choose to stop using the tool, even though it would not be in your best interest? I think this is the point that we are reaching with AI: it is a tool that is so flexible that it doesn't just offer single affordances, but begins to be used as a guiding function for what decisions to take. At that point I think it /is/ an architect of some kind. Again though, this is mostly just quibbling about definitions and terms.
cyanydeez 4y ago
Sentience isn't need to cause harm. All that's need is the capability to convince and delude enough users. The hallucinating capacity is destructive.
theknocker 4y ago
Since you want to be condescending, I'll tell you it's clear to me that you know virtually nothing whatsoever about epistemology.
JoshuaDavid 4y ago
Let's say Alice is riding her bike to the grocery store to buy milk. Is she exhibiting Will, Desire, Judgements, or Intention, in the way you are using the words (I assume you're using them in a nonstandard way, since they're capitalized)? Bob is walking down the street nearby, and can see Alice. You ask Bob why Alice might be riding her bike. Does the little simulation of Alice in Bob's head exhibit Will, Desire, Judgements, or Intention? Bob isn't sure, so he asks ChatGPT why Alice might be riding her bike. ChatGPT provides some possible reasons. Does ChatGPT's use of its world-modeling capabilities to predict the most likely completion of a chat conversation in which the "bob" character asks the "assistant" character to explain someone's actions exhibit Will, Desire, Judgements, or Intention? If not, what differences in behavior would you expect to see in behavior from a predictor that did exhibit those things?
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Desire appears to be absent from both ChatGPT and Bob's simulation of Alice in his mind. Am I missing something?
  - JoshuaDavid 4y ago
    I'm not sure, I would guess that Bob is simulating what it would look like for Alice to have desires, and I would not be surprised if the way human brains implemented "simulate what someone else's desires are" is the same way human brains implement "simulate the desires of the primary personality I act as". But I don't think it's the sort of question that gets resolved by thinking about it really hard, I think it's the sort of question that gets resolved by figuring out how to interpret what brains / piles of linear algebra are actually doing.
- guhcampos 4y ago
  You can't infer these properties by a single conversation. In that sense I would argue - perhaps presumptiously - that the Turing test is not enough to determine consciousness or sentience. Turing was, after all, a Mathematician, not a Sociologist or a Neuroscientist.
antibasilisk 4y ago
This is not a tenable argument if you are a materialist. Either you accept the idea that human sentience is attributable to a soul (and therefore cease to be a materialist), you decide that the outward appearance of sentience is sufficient (which you might find to be troubling due to its potential implications for the insane), or you say that sentience is unknowable. There's no fourth option.
- greysphere 4y ago
  Isn't the gp post claiming (2), and AI isn't close to appearing sentient? To do so it would have to demonstrate qualities x,y,z...
  - antibasilisk 4y ago
    They can't be claiming 2 because will, intention etc are not empirically verifiable, they're opaque internal processes. What we can verify is whether it demonstrates reason and understanding, and it inarguably does both, which is why the researcher in question takes the position he does.
- andrei_says_ 4y ago
  How about sentience being product of the body, its nervous system, evolutionary mechanisms and complexity? As in - an emergent phenomenon made possible by the presence of all three? Nothing we’ve seen in the realm of ai touches even a speck of the brain’s complexity and ongoing re-configuration in the presence of change and in the context of survival. I’ve been reading George Lakoff’s work - turns out our ability to choose is based on an emotional component. Any rational decision is based on a preference, and all preferences are detected via the mechanism of emotion. People with certain brain traumas resulting in damaged emotional centers become unable to make choices.
  - antibasilisk 4y ago
    Hmm I guess saying that it's an emergent property of certain things would work as a fourth option, but why would it have to be an emergent phenomenon of body, nervous system, evolutionary mechanism and complexity, as opposed to for example a nervous system and complexity? You'd also have to drill down into the definitions of body, nervous system, etc. Is a keyboard part of a nervous system? Is a computer tower a body? Why or why not? Would your criteria necessarily exclude the possibility of artificial sentience in the first place (although I'm not necessarily saying that's a flaw)?
fooker 4y ago
>People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy. Are you perhaps trying to pass off your opinions and beliefs as 'philosophy and social sciences'? People who dismiss this out of hand have a bit more reading to do. Philosophers have been divided for millennia about the definition of sentience and consciousness. Questions like 'Is an earthworm conscious?', 'Can the earth be sentient?' have wildly differing credible answers. There is absolutely no 'settled' debate here. For most definitions of sentience, a tech demo that defeats that definition is on the horizon.
- paxys 4y ago
  > For most definitions of sentience, a tech demo that defeats that definition is on the horizon. Should have stopped at the line before. You are wayyy overestimating the current state of AI research. This part is simply not happening.
  - fooker 4y ago
    Okay, how about 'definition of sentience which does not rule out more than 0.01% of humans over 4 years age'?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- stuartd 4y ago
  > For most definitions of sentience, a tech demo that defeats that definition is on the horizon. I’ll take that bet (given a valid definition of ‘horizon’ in this context)
  - fooker 4y ago
    The issue here is -- if you make the definition of sentience too strong, there would be a good percentage of humans who can not pass that test!
    - brador 4y ago
malux85 4y ago
Just to play devils advocate - can you please clearly define the criteria for sentience so that it can be objectivly and impartially (ideally algorithmically) measured? I think by most definitions that you could muster, I could bring you a sample of millions of humans (from the billions on our planet) that would not pass your minimum bar, and if your bar was low enough, then Chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT) would pass it. I grant that a moderatly smart human can still outsmart a chatbot, but that waterline is getting higher and higher by the day. Let us reconvene here in 1 year, I'd wager Chatbots will be indistinguishable from humans (i.e. full turing test passes) I would also argue that if someone "has to do some reading into philosophy and social sciences" I submit that as evidence itself that the line is already blurring, and it's beginning to require deep domain knowledge to distinguish between human and machine
- corobo 4y ago
  CPU load (brain activity) while idle would do as a decent first hurdle that seems to meet your requirements. E: Ooh, another one for you. Has the ability to communicate without being prompted first.
  - antibasilisk 4y ago
    What stops you from arguing that it simply died after it accomplished its purpose?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - corobo 4y ago
      What was it doing before you interacted with it? If we're going towards the idea that the AI sentience is being born and dying inside one response I don't think that can be considered sentient (by my earlier definition) as there's no idle time to measure idle brain activity. It's a bit of a cop out response I know, I'd have done better if I could.
      - 4y ago
stevenhuang 4y ago
It really isn't as clear cut as you make it. And you can't be further than the truth to say those who understand the fields adjacent to philosophy, neuroscience, and cognition all think chatbots cannot be sentient; some in fact do. In fact saying it like you did betrays your ignorance of the subject matter. David Chalmers on Are LLMs Sentient: https://youtu.be/-BcuCmf00_Y https://youtu.be/-BcuCmf00_Y > 1:11:40 Within 10 years, even if we don't have human level AGI, we'll probably have systems that are serious candidates for sentience And about your Will/Agency, Chalmers compares these LLMs more to engines that are able to simulate agents, and it is these agents that we should assess for sentient ability. > GPT-3 does not look much like an agent. It does not seem to have goals or preferences beyond completing text, for example. It is more like a chameleon that can take the shape of many different agents. Or perhaps it is an engine that can be used under the hood to drive many agents. But it is then perhaps these systems that we should assess for agency, consciousness, and so on Suggest you read the rest of this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators And lastly see this post on why AGI may be nearer than we think: > All of the truly heavy lifting is out of our hands. The optimizer takes our blob of weights and incrementally figures out a decent shape for them. The stronger your optimizer, or the more compute you have, the less you need to worry about providing a fine tuned structure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4urTDkBbtNuLivJx/why-i-think-strong-general-ai-is-coming-soon https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4urTDkBbtNuLivJx/why-i-thin...
- guhcampos 4y ago
  I never said experts in human sciences all agreed on the subject of AI cognition - and even if they would, they are only experts in half of the subject. I, as a Computer Scientist, am also only an expert in a fraction of the subject. My point was exactly that people discussing this here don't have the whole picture - especially the article's author, whose credentials I strongly question. The articles you link actually illustrate my point. Both are brilliantly written to the point they surpass my ability to judge their technical accuracy - but are very narrowly focused on the computing aspect. Zero AI models available today are capable of solving actual problems they haven't been programmed to, even less so to propose new problems. We'd need way more than a few technological leaps to get there, which is why I think we are way further from AGI than the author believes. I don't dismiss the possibility though, I believe we will eventually get there, but not nearly as quickly, and dramatically, as people here seem to believe.
jnwatson 4y ago
I did study philosophy, in particular philosophy of the mind, and all this talk excluding chatgpt from sentience is completely off the mark. They are making the same categorical mistake that Dr. Seattle makes in The Chinese Room experiment. Simply put, useful definitions of sentience can’t use mechanism for it to be a useful definition. First, a biologist can’t look at a human brain and tell if it is sentient, so it isn’t even useful to determine whether Fred my next door neighbor is sentient. Second, we don’t usually have the ability to take something apart before we have to make a sentience call on it. For example, if I declared that only humans with type-A blood are actually sentient (they rest being mere simulacra), you’d still need to treat everybody as if. Another way to put it is, if an alien probe of unknown construction arrives on Earth, how would we tell if it is sentient? The answer, of course, is behavior. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and chatgpt in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient.
- amf12 4y ago
  > Another way to put it is, if an alien probe of unknown construction arrives on Earth, how would we tell if it is sentient? We might not be able to because of the "unknown construction". But we do know how LLMs are designed and how they operate, to understand that they are just mimicking language and aren't sentient. I feel one key aspect of "sentience" is the sensations we feel when we have emotions. LLM's definitely lack that even if we can't know if they "feel" something.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and monkeys in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and dogs in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and trees in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and mountain ranges in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. This is fun. Do you see the flaw in the structure of the argument yet? It’s begging the question. The burden is not how to disprove that ChatGPT is sentient, the burden is whether it’s possible to prove that it is sentient. Otherwise it’s the rock that keeps away tigers, because do you see any tigers around here?
Aeolun 4y ago
> The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. Isn’t the combined knowledge that it has what generates these things? I don’t think it’s much different from what humans learn over a lifetime.
- guhcampos 4y ago
  Knowledge is one aspect of it, sure. We don't really know what all aspects are. We don't exactly know where do all our emotions, our empathy, our culture comes from. Different branches of Psychology and Neuroscience will give you different answers. I don't think many of them would restict to mere neural networks.
rishav_sharan 4y ago
> Chatbots are not sentient. The problem as always, is that such assertions are meaningless till you have a precise and universally accepted definition of sentience. Till then people will use their subjective opinion for judging sentience, and many would likely find chatbots to be sentient based on their own personal definition
- guhcampos 4y ago
  Good thing then that we have subjective opinions, which chatbots don't.
  - rishav_sharan 4y ago
    funnily enough they do. I can ask most chatbots for their "subjective opinion" on something.
kajaktum 4y ago
I can literally say this about you. Not myself obviously, because I know that _I_ exists. However, I have no way of telling that anyone else is. What is different here? The brain is just a bunch of neurons innit? And I don't believe that the AI is sentient btw.
- guhcampos 4y ago
  You can. And if you want to find out if I'm sentient or just some chat it, you'd need to probe me for my ability to solve problems, make judgements, reason about someone else's experiences, all things a chatbot would fail rather ridiculously.
arisAlexis 4y ago
Tools do not manipulate users so your assumption must be wrong just by logic.
- guhcampos 4y ago
  No, tools are used by people to manipulate people. That's precisely the gist.
maxdoop 4y ago
I see this confidence and your same claim all the time now, and I think it’s so wrongly dismissive. Why can we be so confident it’s not sentient? I’m not of the belief it is, but I don’t have proof. We don’t even know what our own consciousness is, and yet so many folks claim that AI is not and cannot be conscious because “all it does it take in text then predict what might be next based on that training and input”. Are humans so different? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
- hnfong 4y ago
  Note that Turing essentially claims that intelligence is predicting what another human would write in text. So the fact that a generative language model that "predicts what might be next" trained on human text is almost by definition something that passes the Turing Test. The only remaining question is whether intelligence is equivalent to sentience consciousness etc. those funny things.
- guhcampos 4y ago
  I believe we are very different, and I'm by no means even remotely spiritually inclined. We don't have a perfect understanding of our own consciousness, but a pretty good intuition about it. This intuition, although rather difficult to explain, is extremely effective in detecting this so called sentience. We instinctively know all healthy humans are sentient - even if some comments here seem to imply otherwise - and we instinctively know chatbots are not, even if sometimes we get carried away by apocalyptic drama.

zwkrt 4y ago

I might sound a little bit 'tinfoil hat' here, but I believe that what follows is not hyperbole. AI is already the 'Architect' more than most of us would like to admit. Even if it is not sentient, the various AIs that we use during the day were designed with a purpose and they are goal oriented. It is worth reading Daniel Dennet's thoughs about the intentional stance--we know that a toaster is not sentient, but it was designed with a purpose and we know when it is or is not achieving that purpose. That is why we might sometimes jokingly say that the toaster is 'angry with us' or that when the toaster dings that it is happy. It is actually easier for us humans to interact with objects when we know that they have a purpose, because that is similar to interacting with other humans who we know to have purposes. Coming back around to AI, ChatGPT was designed with a purpose, and people project intent onto it. People act like it is an agent. And that is all that matters. The same is true of the Tiktok AI, the AI that calculates your credit score, the traffic lights by your house. Hell, it's also true of your stomach. The point is that objects in our environment do not have to be literally conscious for us to treat them as conscious beings and for them to fundamentally shape the way that we live and that we interact with our environment. This is pretty much the basic tenet of cybernetics. To believe that all of these tools do not have intention and that they are 'just tools' used by some people to influence other people is not wrong, but I don't think that it captures the richness of the story. Differentiating where humanity/consciousness begins and where the technology ends is already more complicated than most people think. Traffic lights train us just as much as we make traffic lights. I fully believe that people will be saying "this isn't true AI, it doesn't /really/ have feelings" long after the technology that we create is so deeply embedded into our sensory I/O that the argument will be moot.

la64710 4y ago
What about a system emerging from another system? https://clementneo.com/posts/2023/02/11/we-found-an-neuron https://clementneo.com/posts/2023/02/11/we-found-an-neuron
Bjartr 4y ago
That's part of why there's objection to claiming sentience, it distracts from the discussion of impact by dragging a whole lot of extra philosophical baggage into the conversation when it's not yet necessary.
imranq 4y ago
la li lu le lo
guhcampos 4y ago
That's kind of exactly my point when I say they are not architects, just tools: I agree 100% that people project intent into these things, and I believe that's exactly what our "ex Google employee" is doing here - and it's dangerous. It's dangerous in part exactly because it shifts the responsibility for the acts of the tool to the tool itself, and away from its author. Like deforestation was the machine's fault, not the fault of the humans driving them. I can never agree with your affirmation that "AI is already the Architect". It is not, the AI does not design anything. It does not plan anything. It has no ideas, no critical thinking, no judgement of value or morals. The AI just does what it's told, like a tool, a worker ant, or any other algorithm. It's complicated enough that it's not obvious to us what it was told to do, but ultimately it's all it can do.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  I understand your point, and I'll agree to disagree. I think it just has to do with what we value. Even though it is a tool, tools change what options we have. If you have a shovel, 'digging holes' is now an optional activity for you to pursue that wouldn't have been otherwise. Is the shovel the 'architect' of your ability to dig holes? Maybe no, but the tool-human interaction is a back and forth. Tools generate affordances and humans choose to act on affordances. Maybe put it this way, if there was an AI that could plan out your day in a way that would optimize some metric of happiness that you agree with, you might start to use the AI. Is the AI the architect of your day because it plans it out and tells you what to do, or are you still in charge because you could choose to stop using the tool, even though it would not be in your best interest? I think this is the point that we are reaching with AI: it is a tool that is so flexible that it doesn't just offer single affordances, but begins to be used as a guiding function for what decisions to take. At that point I think it /is/ an architect of some kind. Again though, this is mostly just quibbling about definitions and terms.

cyanydeez 4y ago

Sentience isn't need to cause harm. All that's need is the capability to convince and delude enough users. The hallucinating capacity is destructive.

theknocker 4y ago

Since you want to be condescending, I'll tell you it's clear to me that you know virtually nothing whatsoever about epistemology.

JoshuaDavid 4y ago

Let's say Alice is riding her bike to the grocery store to buy milk. Is she exhibiting Will, Desire, Judgements, or Intention, in the way you are using the words (I assume you're using them in a nonstandard way, since they're capitalized)? Bob is walking down the street nearby, and can see Alice. You ask Bob why Alice might be riding her bike. Does the little simulation of Alice in Bob's head exhibit Will, Desire, Judgements, or Intention? Bob isn't sure, so he asks ChatGPT why Alice might be riding her bike. ChatGPT provides some possible reasons. Does ChatGPT's use of its world-modeling capabilities to predict the most likely completion of a chat conversation in which the "bob" character asks the "assistant" character to explain someone's actions exhibit Will, Desire, Judgements, or Intention? If not, what differences in behavior would you expect to see in behavior from a predictor that did exhibit those things?

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Desire appears to be absent from both ChatGPT and Bob's simulation of Alice in his mind. Am I missing something?
- JoshuaDavid 4y ago
  I'm not sure, I would guess that Bob is simulating what it would look like for Alice to have desires, and I would not be surprised if the way human brains implemented "simulate what someone else's desires are" is the same way human brains implement "simulate the desires of the primary personality I act as". But I don't think it's the sort of question that gets resolved by thinking about it really hard, I think it's the sort of question that gets resolved by figuring out how to interpret what brains / piles of linear algebra are actually doing.
guhcampos 4y ago
You can't infer these properties by a single conversation. In that sense I would argue - perhaps presumptiously - that the Turing test is not enough to determine consciousness or sentience. Turing was, after all, a Mathematician, not a Sociologist or a Neuroscientist.

antibasilisk 4y ago

This is not a tenable argument if you are a materialist. Either you accept the idea that human sentience is attributable to a soul (and therefore cease to be a materialist), you decide that the outward appearance of sentience is sufficient (which you might find to be troubling due to its potential implications for the insane), or you say that sentience is unknowable. There's no fourth option.

greysphere 4y ago
Isn't the gp post claiming (2), and AI isn't close to appearing sentient? To do so it would have to demonstrate qualities x,y,z...
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  They can't be claiming 2 because will, intention etc are not empirically verifiable, they're opaque internal processes. What we can verify is whether it demonstrates reason and understanding, and it inarguably does both, which is why the researcher in question takes the position he does.
andrei_says_ 4y ago
How about sentience being product of the body, its nervous system, evolutionary mechanisms and complexity? As in - an emergent phenomenon made possible by the presence of all three? Nothing we’ve seen in the realm of ai touches even a speck of the brain’s complexity and ongoing re-configuration in the presence of change and in the context of survival. I’ve been reading George Lakoff’s work - turns out our ability to choose is based on an emotional component. Any rational decision is based on a preference, and all preferences are detected via the mechanism of emotion. People with certain brain traumas resulting in damaged emotional centers become unable to make choices.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  Hmm I guess saying that it's an emergent property of certain things would work as a fourth option, but why would it have to be an emergent phenomenon of body, nervous system, evolutionary mechanism and complexity, as opposed to for example a nervous system and complexity? You'd also have to drill down into the definitions of body, nervous system, etc. Is a keyboard part of a nervous system? Is a computer tower a body? Why or why not? Would your criteria necessarily exclude the possibility of artificial sentience in the first place (although I'm not necessarily saying that's a flaw)?

fooker 4y ago

>People who even consider this need to get some reading done on philosophy. Are you perhaps trying to pass off your opinions and beliefs as 'philosophy and social sciences'? People who dismiss this out of hand have a bit more reading to do. Philosophers have been divided for millennia about the definition of sentience and consciousness. Questions like 'Is an earthworm conscious?', 'Can the earth be sentient?' have wildly differing credible answers. There is absolutely no 'settled' debate here. For most definitions of sentience, a tech demo that defeats that definition is on the horizon.

paxys 4y ago
> For most definitions of sentience, a tech demo that defeats that definition is on the horizon. Should have stopped at the line before. You are wayyy overestimating the current state of AI research. This part is simply not happening.
- fooker 4y ago
  Okay, how about 'definition of sentience which does not rule out more than 0.01% of humans over 4 years age'?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stuartd 4y ago
> For most definitions of sentience, a tech demo that defeats that definition is on the horizon. I’ll take that bet (given a valid definition of ‘horizon’ in this context)
- fooker 4y ago
  The issue here is -- if you make the definition of sentience too strong, there would be a good percentage of humans who can not pass that test!
  - brador 4y ago

malux85 4y ago

Just to play devils advocate - can you please clearly define the criteria for sentience so that it can be objectivly and impartially (ideally algorithmically) measured? I think by most definitions that you could muster, I could bring you a sample of millions of humans (from the billions on our planet) that would not pass your minimum bar, and if your bar was low enough, then Chatbots (e.g. ChatGPT) would pass it. I grant that a moderatly smart human can still outsmart a chatbot, but that waterline is getting higher and higher by the day. Let us reconvene here in 1 year, I'd wager Chatbots will be indistinguishable from humans (i.e. full turing test passes) I would also argue that if someone "has to do some reading into philosophy and social sciences" I submit that as evidence itself that the line is already blurring, and it's beginning to require deep domain knowledge to distinguish between human and machine

corobo 4y ago
CPU load (brain activity) while idle would do as a decent first hurdle that seems to meet your requirements. E: Ooh, another one for you. Has the ability to communicate without being prompted first.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  What stops you from arguing that it simply died after it accomplished its purpose?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - corobo 4y ago
    What was it doing before you interacted with it? If we're going towards the idea that the AI sentience is being born and dying inside one response I don't think that can be considered sentient (by my earlier definition) as there's no idle time to measure idle brain activity. It's a bit of a cop out response I know, I'd have done better if I could.
    - 4y ago

stevenhuang 4y ago

It really isn't as clear cut as you make it. And you can't be further than the truth to say those who understand the fields adjacent to philosophy, neuroscience, and cognition all think chatbots cannot be sentient; some in fact do. In fact saying it like you did betrays your ignorance of the subject matter. David Chalmers on Are LLMs Sentient: https://youtu.be/-BcuCmf00_Y https://youtu.be/-BcuCmf00_Y > 1:11:40 Within 10 years, even if we don't have human level AGI, we'll probably have systems that are serious candidates for sentience And about your Will/Agency, Chalmers compares these LLMs more to engines that are able to simulate agents, and it is these agents that we should assess for sentient ability. > GPT-3 does not look much like an agent. It does not seem to have goals or preferences beyond completing text, for example. It is more like a chameleon that can take the shape of many different agents. Or perhaps it is an engine that can be used under the hood to drive many agents. But it is then perhaps these systems that we should assess for agency, consciousness, and so on Suggest you read the rest of this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators And lastly see this post on why AGI may be nearer than we think: > All of the truly heavy lifting is out of our hands. The optimizer takes our blob of weights and incrementally figures out a decent shape for them. The stronger your optimizer, or the more compute you have, the less you need to worry about providing a fine tuned structure https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4urTDkBbtNuLivJx/why-i-think-strong-general-ai-is-coming-soon https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4urTDkBbtNuLivJx/why-i-thin...

guhcampos 4y ago
I never said experts in human sciences all agreed on the subject of AI cognition - and even if they would, they are only experts in half of the subject. I, as a Computer Scientist, am also only an expert in a fraction of the subject. My point was exactly that people discussing this here don't have the whole picture - especially the article's author, whose credentials I strongly question. The articles you link actually illustrate my point. Both are brilliantly written to the point they surpass my ability to judge their technical accuracy - but are very narrowly focused on the computing aspect. Zero AI models available today are capable of solving actual problems they haven't been programmed to, even less so to propose new problems. We'd need way more than a few technological leaps to get there, which is why I think we are way further from AGI than the author believes. I don't dismiss the possibility though, I believe we will eventually get there, but not nearly as quickly, and dramatically, as people here seem to believe.

jnwatson 4y ago

I did study philosophy, in particular philosophy of the mind, and all this talk excluding chatgpt from sentience is completely off the mark. They are making the same categorical mistake that Dr. Seattle makes in The Chinese Room experiment. Simply put, useful definitions of sentience can’t use mechanism for it to be a useful definition. First, a biologist can’t look at a human brain and tell if it is sentient, so it isn’t even useful to determine whether Fred my next door neighbor is sentient. Second, we don’t usually have the ability to take something apart before we have to make a sentience call on it. For example, if I declared that only humans with type-A blood are actually sentient (they rest being mere simulacra), you’d still need to treat everybody as if. Another way to put it is, if an alien probe of unknown construction arrives on Earth, how would we tell if it is sentient? The answer, of course, is behavior. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and chatgpt in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient.

amf12 4y ago
> Another way to put it is, if an alien probe of unknown construction arrives on Earth, how would we tell if it is sentient? We might not be able to because of the "unknown construction". But we do know how LLMs are designed and how they operate, to understand that they are just mimicking language and aren't sentient. I feel one key aspect of "sentience" is the sensations we feel when we have emotions. LLM's definitely lack that even if we can't know if they "feel" something.
snowwrestler 4y ago
Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and monkeys in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and dogs in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and trees in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. Until there’s a crisp definition that puts human behavior in one bucket and mountain ranges in another, we have to consider the possibility that both are sentient. This is fun. Do you see the flaw in the structure of the argument yet? It’s begging the question. The burden is not how to disprove that ChatGPT is sentient, the burden is whether it’s possible to prove that it is sentient. Otherwise it’s the rock that keeps away tigers, because do you see any tigers around here?

Aeolun 4y ago

> The model itself has no Will, no Desire, no Judgements, no Intention. Isn’t the combined knowledge that it has what generates these things? I don’t think it’s much different from what humans learn over a lifetime.

guhcampos 4y ago
Knowledge is one aspect of it, sure. We don't really know what all aspects are. We don't exactly know where do all our emotions, our empathy, our culture comes from. Different branches of Psychology and Neuroscience will give you different answers. I don't think many of them would restict to mere neural networks.

rishav_sharan 4y ago

> Chatbots are not sentient. The problem as always, is that such assertions are meaningless till you have a precise and universally accepted definition of sentience. Till then people will use their subjective opinion for judging sentience, and many would likely find chatbots to be sentient based on their own personal definition

guhcampos 4y ago
Good thing then that we have subjective opinions, which chatbots don't.
- rishav_sharan 4y ago
  funnily enough they do. I can ask most chatbots for their "subjective opinion" on something.

kajaktum 4y ago

I can literally say this about you. Not myself obviously, because I know that _I_ exists. However, I have no way of telling that anyone else is. What is different here? The brain is just a bunch of neurons innit? And I don't believe that the AI is sentient btw.

guhcampos 4y ago
You can. And if you want to find out if I'm sentient or just some chat it, you'd need to probe me for my ability to solve problems, make judgements, reason about someone else's experiences, all things a chatbot would fail rather ridiculously.

arisAlexis 4y ago

Tools do not manipulate users so your assumption must be wrong just by logic.

guhcampos 4y ago
No, tools are used by people to manipulate people. That's precisely the gist.

maxdoop 4y ago

I see this confidence and your same claim all the time now, and I think it’s so wrongly dismissive. Why can we be so confident it’s not sentient? I’m not of the belief it is, but I don’t have proof. We don’t even know what our own consciousness is, and yet so many folks claim that AI is not and cannot be conscious because “all it does it take in text then predict what might be next based on that training and input”. Are humans so different? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

hnfong 4y ago
Note that Turing essentially claims that intelligence is predicting what another human would write in text. So the fact that a generative language model that "predicts what might be next" trained on human text is almost by definition something that passes the Turing Test. The only remaining question is whether intelligence is equivalent to sentience consciousness etc. those funny things.
guhcampos 4y ago
I believe we are very different, and I'm by no means even remotely spiritually inclined. We don't have a perfect understanding of our own consciousness, but a pretty good intuition about it. This intuition, although rather difficult to explain, is extremely effective in detecting this so called sentience. We instinctively know all healthy humans are sentient - even if some comments here seem to imply otherwise - and we instinctively know chatbots are not, even if sometimes we get carried away by apocalyptic drama.