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There's probably a lot of truth to this, but there's also a big difference. Humans are ultimately responsible and accountable for their actions. Should my actio

There's probably a lot of truth to this, but there's also a big difference. Humans are ultimately responsible and accountable for their actions. Should my actions turn out to carry a racist or sexist motive, even unbeknownst to me, i can be held to answer for that. That's a big difference. The rationalization from a human is valuable because it's delivered by the accountable party. From a machine such rationalization is at best worthless, since you can't hold the machine accountable at all.

jvanderbot 4y ago
But what youre saying only layers over the fact that, to avoid getting caught and convicted, a sufficiently good explanation is all that's necessary.
- delusional 4y ago
  Not quite. What I'm saying is that the explanation is valuable because it comes from the accountable party. That you have a good explanation does not absolve you of responsibility. The short and clear way to put it is this: You don't go to jail because YOU think you did something wrong, you go to jail because WE think you did something wrong. If I'm a customer at a bank, and my loan has been denied, I don't care what some unaccountable AI system can come up with to explain that. I care what about how the accountable bankers justify putting that AI system into the process in the first place. How do they justify that AI system getting to make decisions that affect me and my life. I don't care about why the process does what it does, I care about why that is the process.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >If I'm a customer at a bank, and my loan has been denied, I don't care what some unaccountable AI system can come up with to explain that. I care what about how the accountable bankers justify putting that AI system into the process in the first place. How do they justify that AI system getting to make decisions that affect me and my life. I don't care about why the process does what it does, I care about why that is the process. Well, a court/law just has to declare "AI" as allowed to be used in such decisions, and the whole recourse you describe vanishes though...
  - chii 4y ago
    > my loan has been denied, I don't care what some unaccountable AI system can come up with to explain that. > How do they justify that AI system getting to make decisions that affect me and my life. so you, a priori, make the assumption that your loan _should've_ been accepted? If the decision wasn't an AI, but some actuarial that calculates and computes based on a set of criteria, and the result is a denial, you could still make the same argument of "why is _this_ the process, instead of something else (that makes my loan acceptable)?".
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > I care what about how the accountable bankers justify putting that AI system into the process in the first place. Computers are already deciding. As to why: it's because it's their money they're lending.
    - delusional 4y ago
      I work in a bank and you're laughably wrong. Computers are at best assisting in the lending process but more realistically they're completely ignored. There is NO AI (at least recognizably, you could argue that there's some sort of very simple expert model embedded in the 10 credit limits) involved in the process at all. Out lending process is based on the judgment of a few specific individuals, with more involved clients requiring approval from more senior people. All steps of that process can be overturned by the overseeing person, and that person is accountable for their decision.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        I didn't say there was AI.
  - dmoo 4y ago
    Article 22 of the GDPR states “The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.”
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    Hidden in the definition of sufficient is "meeting the standards for absolution that an investigator would use". I honestly see no reason a system could not go so far as providing case law references or FICO + ECOA guidance as evidence for a compliant rejection, even if the underlying reason is some statistics based on sex. And why would a perfectly reasonable bank tell its customers it's using AI? AI would provide the breadcrumbs and the loan officer would conduct a reasonable story using that - it's just parallel reconstruction at its finest. I imagine this is how credit scores work. A number comes out of the system and the officer has the messy job of explaining it. I used to work in munitions export compliance and there intent really matters. It's the difference between a warning and going to federal prison. And intent is just a plausible story with evidence to back your decision, once you strip the emotion away.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
More importantly, to the best of our knowledge, human thinking is not simply predicting the next word based on a past model.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  but the fact that predicting the next words based on past models does such a good job of masquerading as human thinking indicates that much of human thinking isn't much more than that. It may even simplify the task of figuring human thinking by narrowing down the last details of of the smaller set of missing pieces. an analagous result was obtained back when they mapped the small finite number of neurons in a snail brain, or the behavior of individuals in ant colonies. What looks like complex behavior turns out to be very simple under the hood. for the vast ocean of the population who... not sure how to describe them... not good students when in school, would rather spend the bulk of their time with the TV blaring, eating cheetos and swiping on tik-tok, following the lives of celebrities and fighting about it, rather than do anything long term productive with their own lives... chat gpt may have already exceeded what they do with their cranial talents. even a level up on the ladder, the types of office situations lampooned in The Office or Dilbert, are they doing much more as a percentage of time spent than chat GPT can do? "Mondays, amirite!?" then the question becomes, are the intellectual elites among us doing that much more, or just doing much more of the same thing? I think a large portion of what we do is exactly what chap GPT does. The question is what is this other piece of our brains' that intervenes to say "hmm, need to think about this part a lot harder"
  - kortilla 4y ago
    >such a good job of masquerading as human thinking indicates that much of human thinking isn't much more than that. No, that doesn’t follow. It just means it roughly looks like human thinking. Your comment is akin to saying a high resolution photo of a human has basically figured out a way to replicate humans. It looks like it in one aspect but it’s laughably wrong. Humans thought without language.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
wilg 4y ago
We don't know that it's true that humans are "responsible" or "accountable" for their actions in any meaningful way. This smells like a "free will" argument. IMHO, it's unlikely "free will" and "responsibility" are anything more than an illusion.
- WA 4y ago
  It really doesn’t matter for this discussion, because society and laws are structured as if people have free will. An AI has to live up to that as well.
  - wilg 4y ago
    Maybe I'm confused about the topic, then. What does "living up to that" mean here? Legal liability or something?
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Yes, that was their point. Humans have accountability to one another - either legally or in less formal ways (such as being fired if you're making your co-workers uncomfortable). Current machines simply don't have that kind of accountability. Even if we wanted to, we can't punish or ostracize ChatGPT when it lies to us, or makes us uncomfortable.
      - vixen99 4y ago
        Their use & application can be made accountable.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        The point of this thread is that the explanation a human gives carries some weight because the human know they may/will be held accountable for the truth of that explanation. ChatGPT's explanations carry no such weight, since ChatGPT itself has no concept of suffering consequences for its actions. So, while both humans and ChatGPT can and do give bogus explanations for their actions, there are reasons to trust the humans' explanations more than ChatGPT's. Whether or not we hold humans using ChatGPT accountable for their use of it is irrelevant to this thread.
smeagull 4y ago
The only intent taking place here, is someone placing a process under automatic control. That's it. If I make a bot that posts random comments and it offends you, then I'm a bit responsible, but also you've gotten offended by a random comment.

jvanderbot 4y ago

But what youre saying only layers over the fact that, to avoid getting caught and convicted, a sufficiently good explanation is all that's necessary.

delusional 4y ago
Not quite. What I'm saying is that the explanation is valuable because it comes from the accountable party. That you have a good explanation does not absolve you of responsibility. The short and clear way to put it is this: You don't go to jail because YOU think you did something wrong, you go to jail because WE think you did something wrong. If I'm a customer at a bank, and my loan has been denied, I don't care what some unaccountable AI system can come up with to explain that. I care what about how the accountable bankers justify putting that AI system into the process in the first place. How do they justify that AI system getting to make decisions that affect me and my life. I don't care about why the process does what it does, I care about why that is the process.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >If I'm a customer at a bank, and my loan has been denied, I don't care what some unaccountable AI system can come up with to explain that. I care what about how the accountable bankers justify putting that AI system into the process in the first place. How do they justify that AI system getting to make decisions that affect me and my life. I don't care about why the process does what it does, I care about why that is the process. Well, a court/law just has to declare "AI" as allowed to be used in such decisions, and the whole recourse you describe vanishes though...
- chii 4y ago
  > my loan has been denied, I don't care what some unaccountable AI system can come up with to explain that. > How do they justify that AI system getting to make decisions that affect me and my life. so you, a priori, make the assumption that your loan _should've_ been accepted? If the decision wasn't an AI, but some actuarial that calculates and computes based on a set of criteria, and the result is a denial, you could still make the same argument of "why is _this_ the process, instead of something else (that makes my loan acceptable)?".
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > I care what about how the accountable bankers justify putting that AI system into the process in the first place. Computers are already deciding. As to why: it's because it's their money they're lending.
  - delusional 4y ago
    I work in a bank and you're laughably wrong. Computers are at best assisting in the lending process but more realistically they're completely ignored. There is NO AI (at least recognizably, you could argue that there's some sort of very simple expert model embedded in the 10 credit limits) involved in the process at all. Out lending process is based on the judgment of a few specific individuals, with more involved clients requiring approval from more senior people. All steps of that process can be overturned by the overseeing person, and that person is accountable for their decision.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I didn't say there was AI.
- dmoo 4y ago
  Article 22 of the GDPR states “The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.”
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Hidden in the definition of sufficient is "meeting the standards for absolution that an investigator would use". I honestly see no reason a system could not go so far as providing case law references or FICO + ECOA guidance as evidence for a compliant rejection, even if the underlying reason is some statistics based on sex. And why would a perfectly reasonable bank tell its customers it's using AI? AI would provide the breadcrumbs and the loan officer would conduct a reasonable story using that - it's just parallel reconstruction at its finest. I imagine this is how credit scores work. A number comes out of the system and the officer has the messy job of explaining it. I used to work in munitions export compliance and there intent really matters. It's the difference between a warning and going to federal prison. And intent is just a plausible story with evidence to back your decision, once you strip the emotion away.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

More importantly, to the best of our knowledge, human thinking is not simply predicting the next word based on a past model.

fsckboy 4y ago
but the fact that predicting the next words based on past models does such a good job of masquerading as human thinking indicates that much of human thinking isn't much more than that. It may even simplify the task of figuring human thinking by narrowing down the last details of of the smaller set of missing pieces. an analagous result was obtained back when they mapped the small finite number of neurons in a snail brain, or the behavior of individuals in ant colonies. What looks like complex behavior turns out to be very simple under the hood. for the vast ocean of the population who... not sure how to describe them... not good students when in school, would rather spend the bulk of their time with the TV blaring, eating cheetos and swiping on tik-tok, following the lives of celebrities and fighting about it, rather than do anything long term productive with their own lives... chat gpt may have already exceeded what they do with their cranial talents. even a level up on the ladder, the types of office situations lampooned in The Office or Dilbert, are they doing much more as a percentage of time spent than chat GPT can do? "Mondays, amirite!?" then the question becomes, are the intellectual elites among us doing that much more, or just doing much more of the same thing? I think a large portion of what we do is exactly what chap GPT does. The question is what is this other piece of our brains' that intervenes to say "hmm, need to think about this part a lot harder"
- kortilla 4y ago
  >such a good job of masquerading as human thinking indicates that much of human thinking isn't much more than that. No, that doesn’t follow. It just means it roughly looks like human thinking. Your comment is akin to saying a high resolution photo of a human has basically figured out a way to replicate humans. It looks like it in one aspect but it’s laughably wrong. Humans thought without language.
  - fsckboy 4y ago

wilg 4y ago

We don't know that it's true that humans are "responsible" or "accountable" for their actions in any meaningful way. This smells like a "free will" argument. IMHO, it's unlikely "free will" and "responsibility" are anything more than an illusion.

WA 4y ago
It really doesn’t matter for this discussion, because society and laws are structured as if people have free will. An AI has to live up to that as well.
- wilg 4y ago
  Maybe I'm confused about the topic, then. What does "living up to that" mean here? Legal liability or something?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Yes, that was their point. Humans have accountability to one another - either legally or in less formal ways (such as being fired if you're making your co-workers uncomfortable). Current machines simply don't have that kind of accountability. Even if we wanted to, we can't punish or ostracize ChatGPT when it lies to us, or makes us uncomfortable.
    - vixen99 4y ago
      Their use & application can be made accountable.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        The point of this thread is that the explanation a human gives carries some weight because the human know they may/will be held accountable for the truth of that explanation. ChatGPT's explanations carry no such weight, since ChatGPT itself has no concept of suffering consequences for its actions. So, while both humans and ChatGPT can and do give bogus explanations for their actions, there are reasons to trust the humans' explanations more than ChatGPT's. Whether or not we hold humans using ChatGPT accountable for their use of it is irrelevant to this thread.

smeagull 4y ago

The only intent taking place here, is someone placing a process under automatic control. That's it. If I make a bot that posts random comments and it offends you, then I'm a bit responsible, but also you've gotten offended by a random comment.