5 ms·

It's interesting to compare this "sound-talk" that parrots can easily accomplish with the obviously greater intelligence of apes, who can't reproduce human soun

by pcrh 4y ago

It's interesting to compare this "sound-talk" that parrots can easily accomplish with the obviously greater intelligence of apes, who can't reproduce human sounds, with the debate over whether chatGPT is intelligent or not. Note that Koko was obviously a greater communicator than any parrot ever was. Is mimicking human behaviour a necessary, or even sufficient, criteria for demonstrating cognition and intelligence?

Chinjut 4y ago
I believe there is significant scientific skepticism as to whether Koko was communicating to the degree popularly portrayed.
pks016 4y ago
Speech and language are two different things. > Is mimicking human behaviour a necessary, or even sufficient, criteria for demonstrating cognition and intelligence? Depends on how you define them. We love to anthropomorphize everything. If an animal shows language comprehension, that's bigger than speech.
baja_blast 4y ago
> obviously greater intelligence of apes Apes are not more intelligent than parrots, despite not having hands like apes parrots use tools with the same sophistication as chimps, and Crows surpass all great apes except humans in tool use and complexity. Parrots have been able to solve complex puzzles of equal or greater complexity to what a Chimp could solve. And when it comes to social behavior parrots/corvids are far more sophisticated and complex. Honestly if I had to bet which animal would outsmart which in a real world game of wits I would bet on the parrot or crow over a chimp every time. I apes have hands which are perfect for tool use and making, but crows make more complex tools using their beak.
tokyolights2 4y ago
The short story "The Great Silence" by Ted Chaing feels very relevant here. > The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices? We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?
- taneq 4y ago
  I think the dark forest theory rings very true here. The risk/reward equation for communication is skewed so far towards the risk end that, as the joke goes, maybe the surest sign that there’s intelligent life is that none of it has contacted us. Or Peter Watts’ much more succinct take: if they do exist, they’ll be mean.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    Maybe there is some truth in this. Wisdom and truth can be found in silence.
- musicale 4y ago
  Parrots are extremely intelligent. And like most birds they also have superior spatial navigation skills.
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PKop 4y ago
I'm not sure how obvious it is; that story seems just as likely to have been fraudulent as true.
- gweinberg 4y ago
  I think Koko's trainer really did believe her more extravagant claims. So did Clever Hans's. But there was a lot of wishful thinking along the lines of "Koko's making a weird gorilla joke that doesn't make sense to human minds" when a more likely explanation would be "Koko really doesn't know what she is saying".
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
Koko's language skills were misrepresented in a pretty extreme way. Very few recordings of Koko communicating anything more than short phrases were ever released, and those that were never demonstrated much more than word association. I've met dogs and pigs that were able to go fetch the "carrot" versus the "bunny" stuffed animals based on verbal commands, but I'm not going to claim that constitutes mastery of language. Koko primarily communicated via repeating individual words that she'd been able to correlate with getting immediate effects. "Food", "Water", etc. When she did use multi-word phrases, they had no semblance of grammar: human babies will quickly work out the difference between "Me bite him" and "him bite me", whereas Koko never did. Frankly, despite being billed as a decisive blow against the Chomsky school of linguistics, Koko probably stands as strong evidence for it. IMO, the massive complexity gap between human-level language compared to the relatively tight pack of merely possessing vocabulary animals, pretty directly correlated with levels of problem solving skills and tool use, should signal that there's something to the idea that our cognitive and language abilities are pretty closely linked. Mimicking human behavior may not be necessary for intelligence, but some kind of language likely is.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Language has also been called the "operating system" of the brain. When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language. This is commonly believed for no reason that I'm aware of. It is obviously not true.
    - Talanes 4y ago
      >It is obviously not true. Different people tend to have differing levels of internal monologue. Mine is so constant that nearly all conscious thought filters through it, to the point that it would be very easy to mistake the monologue for the totality of consciousness. It's a theory that rings true with people who think like I do, but still assume that everyone else thinks the same way too.
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
> Note that Koko was obviously a greater communicator than any parrot ever was. Sadly, I don't think this is actually true, despite the popular belief. See https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4 https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4 TL;DW - Data was VERY cherry-picked to make it look like she could communicate via sign language. At best, she was responding via rote memorization and had no idea what she was actually communicating.
RichardCA 4y ago
The story of Washoe is arguable more relevant than Koko. I remember seeing this on TV when I was a kid. https://youtu.be/UwZWWsc5xDk https://youtu.be/UwZWWsc5xDk The part that starts at 32:00 to around 38:00 is quite interesting, they programmed a PDP-8 to function as an icon-based chat mechanism. I always remembered the "grooming" part.
nopinsight 4y ago
It depends on which behavior is mimicked. The vast majority of people would say that no unintelligent, or parrot-level-intelligent, entity can explain a joke like this: https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/gpt-4-jokes https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/gpt-4-jokes I also personally asked GPT-4 to solve an easy CodeForces problem dated March 2023 and its solution worked perfectly the first time. (I haven’t yet tested it on a harder Codeforces problem.) Although the problem is relatively easy, it’s still much harder than the Fizz buzz test. Geoffrey Hinton has updated his AGI timeline significantly in the last 2 years. He is definitely worth listening to: https://mobile.twitter.com/JMannhart/status/1641764742137016320 https://mobile.twitter.com/JMannhart/status/1641764742137016...
- pcrh 4y ago
  Thanks, the explanation of jokes was very interesting, although both GPTs made the wrong interpretation of the goat/toga party joke. The joke is that the speaker thought it was a "goat party", not a "toga party" (rather than that they dressed as a goat in a toga party). Similarly for the intelligence joke; the joke there is that the speaker can only get an unintelligent girl, rather than that he seeks an unintelligent girl. I was more impressed by the glove and ball interpretation, to be honest.
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by pcrh 4y ago

Chinjut 4y ago

I believe there is significant scientific skepticism as to whether Koko was communicating to the degree popularly portrayed.

pks016 4y ago

Speech and language are two different things. > Is mimicking human behaviour a necessary, or even sufficient, criteria for demonstrating cognition and intelligence? Depends on how you define them. We love to anthropomorphize everything. If an animal shows language comprehension, that's bigger than speech.

baja_blast 4y ago

> obviously greater intelligence of apes Apes are not more intelligent than parrots, despite not having hands like apes parrots use tools with the same sophistication as chimps, and Crows surpass all great apes except humans in tool use and complexity. Parrots have been able to solve complex puzzles of equal or greater complexity to what a Chimp could solve. And when it comes to social behavior parrots/corvids are far more sophisticated and complex. Honestly if I had to bet which animal would outsmart which in a real world game of wits I would bet on the parrot or crow over a chimp every time. I apes have hands which are perfect for tool use and making, but crows make more complex tools using their beak.

tokyolights2 4y ago

The short story "The Great Silence" by Ted Chaing feels very relevant here. > The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices? We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?

taneq 4y ago
I think the dark forest theory rings very true here. The risk/reward equation for communication is skewed so far towards the risk end that, as the joke goes, maybe the surest sign that there’s intelligent life is that none of it has contacted us. Or Peter Watts’ much more succinct take: if they do exist, they’ll be mean.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  Maybe there is some truth in this. Wisdom and truth can be found in silence.
musicale 4y ago
Parrots are extremely intelligent. And like most birds they also have superior spatial navigation skills.

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PKop 4y ago

I'm not sure how obvious it is; that story seems just as likely to have been fraudulent as true.

gweinberg 4y ago
I think Koko's trainer really did believe her more extravagant claims. So did Clever Hans's. But there was a lot of wishful thinking along the lines of "Koko's making a weird gorilla joke that doesn't make sense to human minds" when a more likely explanation would be "Koko really doesn't know what she is saying".

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

Koko's language skills were misrepresented in a pretty extreme way. Very few recordings of Koko communicating anything more than short phrases were ever released, and those that were never demonstrated much more than word association. I've met dogs and pigs that were able to go fetch the "carrot" versus the "bunny" stuffed animals based on verbal commands, but I'm not going to claim that constitutes mastery of language. Koko primarily communicated via repeating individual words that she'd been able to correlate with getting immediate effects. "Food", "Water", etc. When she did use multi-word phrases, they had no semblance of grammar: human babies will quickly work out the difference between "Me bite him" and "him bite me", whereas Koko never did. Frankly, despite being billed as a decisive blow against the Chomsky school of linguistics, Koko probably stands as strong evidence for it. IMO, the massive complexity gap between human-level language compared to the relatively tight pack of merely possessing vocabulary animals, pretty directly correlated with levels of problem solving skills and tool use, should signal that there's something to the idea that our cognitive and language abilities are pretty closely linked. Mimicking human behavior may not be necessary for intelligence, but some kind of language likely is.

WalterBright 4y ago
Language has also been called the "operating system" of the brain. When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language. This is commonly believed for no reason that I'm aware of. It is obviously not true.
  - Talanes 4y ago
    >It is obviously not true. Different people tend to have differing levels of internal monologue. Mine is so constant that nearly all conscious thought filters through it, to the point that it would be very easy to mistake the monologue for the totality of consciousness. It's a theory that rings true with people who think like I do, but still assume that everyone else thinks the same way too.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago

> Note that Koko was obviously a greater communicator than any parrot ever was. Sadly, I don't think this is actually true, despite the popular belief. See https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4 https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4 TL;DW - Data was VERY cherry-picked to make it look like she could communicate via sign language. At best, she was responding via rote memorization and had no idea what she was actually communicating.

RichardCA 4y ago

The story of Washoe is arguable more relevant than Koko. I remember seeing this on TV when I was a kid. https://youtu.be/UwZWWsc5xDk https://youtu.be/UwZWWsc5xDk The part that starts at 32:00 to around 38:00 is quite interesting, they programmed a PDP-8 to function as an icon-based chat mechanism. I always remembered the "grooming" part.

nopinsight 4y ago

It depends on which behavior is mimicked. The vast majority of people would say that no unintelligent, or parrot-level-intelligent, entity can explain a joke like this: https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/gpt-4-jokes https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/gpt-4-jokes I also personally asked GPT-4 to solve an easy CodeForces problem dated March 2023 and its solution worked perfectly the first time. (I haven’t yet tested it on a harder Codeforces problem.) Although the problem is relatively easy, it’s still much harder than the Fizz buzz test. Geoffrey Hinton has updated his AGI timeline significantly in the last 2 years. He is definitely worth listening to: https://mobile.twitter.com/JMannhart/status/1641764742137016320 https://mobile.twitter.com/JMannhart/status/1641764742137016...

pcrh 4y ago
Thanks, the explanation of jokes was very interesting, although both GPTs made the wrong interpretation of the goat/toga party joke. The joke is that the speaker thought it was a "goat party", not a "toga party" (rather than that they dressed as a goat in a toga party). Similarly for the intelligence joke; the joke there is that the speaker can only get an unintelligent girl, rather than that he seeks an unintelligent girl. I was more impressed by the glove and ball interpretation, to be honest.

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