2 ms·

Let for the sake of argument, assume that the LLM is truly sapience. Then this would be the first alien intelligence we have ever encountered. All life and inte

Let for the sake of argument, assume that the LLM is truly sapience. Then this would be the first alien intelligence we have ever encountered. All life and intelligence we have seen before were organic, carbon-based life, including the most distant and unintuitive ones like the cephalopods, cetaceans, and primates. Even now we are still arguing whether these creatures are intelligent or they are just "not there" yet. We refuse to acknowledge their higher reasoning capacity regardless of evidences like rudimentary communication, social structure, tool use, etc. And these are things sharing >70% similarity to us. An LLM is so different and alien we would literally incapable of imagining their thought process even if they are pummeling us with evidences of their intelligence. It is just how it is. So I think it is futile and even foolish to try to quantify or create criteria for "intelligence" when discussing AI. Let it be and accept it for what it is: something we humans have created that can do lots of stuff.

snickell 3y ago
I would hazard a guess that if we first encountered a ChatGPT-4 level LLM* as radio signals from Mars we would baseline assume it was "intelligent alien life". * assuming its instruction tuned: - in terms of self-disclosure (no "I'm made by openAI on earth" statements!) - sans its relatively schematic "guard rail" responses. It would be hard to imagine intelligent life being more obviously intelligent to us: ChatGPT literally speaks our language, and has learned patterns of "thought" derived from our own. None of this necessarily implies sapience, but I think the "alien intelligence" framing reverses the default assumption (we'd probably be freaking about alien intelligent life if we got a radio signal from mars delineating the prime numbers :-D ) in interesting ways, thanks for sharing!
- tornato7 3y ago
  You're absolutely right! Here's a prompt you can use to chat with a Martian. It's actually very entertaining! > You are a representative of an alien civilization from Mars. I am a human who has made first contact with you. Write an opening message to earth. Stay in character as a martian. Make up facts and information where required. You know very little about Earth and are curious about our world and our civilization.
- jamilton 3y ago
  I think we might assume it's intelligent until we had a second conversation and it's forgotten everything from the first. Then we're back to a state of confusion.

snickell 3y ago

I would hazard a guess that if we first encountered a ChatGPT-4 level LLM* as radio signals from Mars we would baseline assume it was "intelligent alien life". * assuming its instruction tuned: - in terms of self-disclosure (no "I'm made by openAI on earth" statements!) - sans its relatively schematic "guard rail" responses. It would be hard to imagine intelligent life being more obviously intelligent to us: ChatGPT literally speaks our language, and has learned patterns of "thought" derived from our own. None of this necessarily implies sapience, but I think the "alien intelligence" framing reverses the default assumption (we'd probably be freaking about alien intelligent life if we got a radio signal from mars delineating the prime numbers :-D ) in interesting ways, thanks for sharing!

tornato7 3y ago
You're absolutely right! Here's a prompt you can use to chat with a Martian. It's actually very entertaining! > You are a representative of an alien civilization from Mars. I am a human who has made first contact with you. Write an opening message to earth. Stay in character as a martian. Make up facts and information where required. You know very little about Earth and are curious about our world and our civilization.
jamilton 3y ago
I think we might assume it's intelligent until we had a second conversation and it's forgotten everything from the first. Then we're back to a state of confusion.