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I disagree with your confident assertions about its "agency" and "intent" when there's no goal post for what those things mean in humans to begin with. Barring

I disagree with your confident assertions about its "agency" and "intent" when there's no goal post for what those things mean in humans to begin with. Barring OpenAI's filters, if I asked it to participate as a party in a business negotiation determining a fair selling price for its writing services, I'm sure it could emulate that sort of character long enough to pass. And if it can successfully fake being a self interested actor working towards goals of its own material interest, whats the difference between faking it and actually having agency? At some point you have to acknowledge emergent agency and other properties as a possibility.

gwright 4y ago
> I disagree with your confident assertions about its "agency" and "intent" when there's no goal post for what those things mean in humans to begin with. I'm not sure how confident I am! I think the success of LLMs are serving to challenge our understandings of cognition and intelligence in humans. I tend to agree with you that our understanding of agency, intent, intelligence, cognition, free will, and related ideas in humans is incomplete and so it is a challenge to think about how they might apply (or not) to LLMs. > whats the difference between faking it and actually having agency? Good question. The Chinese Room Argument is very close to this but framed as "understanding" vs "agency": https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/