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You are anthropomorphing. The machine doesn’t “really” understand, it’s just “simulating” it understands. “You” is “3 characters on an input string that are us
by otikik 3y ago
You are anthropomorphing. The machine doesn’t “really” understand, it’s just “simulating” it understands.
“You” is “3 characters on an input string that are used to configure a program”. The prompt could have been any other thing, including a binary blob. It’s just more convenient for humans to use natural language to communicate, and the machine already has natural language features, so they used that instead of creating a whole new way of configuring it.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoHow do you know you aren't just "simulating" understanding?
- otikik 3y agoI don't need to fully understand my own thought process completely in order to understand (or - simulate to understand) that what the machine is doing is orders of magnitude less advanced. I say that the machine is "simulating it understands" because it does an obviously bad job at it. We only need to look at obvious cases of prompt attacks, or cases where AI gets off rails and produces garbage, or worse - answers that look plausible but are incorrect. The system is blatantly unsophisticated, when compared to regular human-level understanding. Those errors make it clear that we are dealing with "smoke and mirrors" - a relatively simple (compared to our mental process) matching algorithm. Once (if) it starts behaving like a human, admittedly, it will be much harder for me to not anthropomorphize it myself.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago[flagged]
- GTP 3y agoYou definitely know when, while talking with a person, you just pretend to understand what this person is saying vs you actually understand. Is an experience that every human has in his/her life at least once.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoNo you cannot know this, because you might just be simulating that you understand. You cannot reliably observe a system from within itself. It's like running an antivirus on an infected system is inherently flawed, because there might be some malware running that knows every technique the antivirus uses to scan the system and can successfully manipulate every one of them to make the system appear clean. There is no good argument for why or how the human brain could not be entirely simulated by a computer/neural network/LLM.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoWonder if anybody has used Godel's Incompleteness to prove this for our inner perception. If our brain is a calculation, then from inside the calculation, we can't prove ourselves to be real, right?
- brabel 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
- johnisgood 3y agoSolipsism can be fun to think about, but it makes no practical difference unless you do "wake up" (in a pod, for example) at least once.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoAnd even then that could be part of the simulated experience
- GTP 3y agoBut we don't know for sure whether intelligence is computable or not.
- rightbyte 3y agoThink stereotypical sales people talking about your tech and you talking about it.
- criley2 3y agoAll human understanding is simulated (built by each brain) and all are imperfect. Of course reality is simulated for each of us -- take a psychedelic and realize no one else's reality is changing! I find it interesting how discussions of language models are forcing us to think very deeply about our own natural systems and their limitations. It's also forcing us to challenge some of our egotistical notions about our own capabilities.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoYou can't come up with a difference between a person saying 'hello' and an mp3 player saying 'hello'?
- pixl97 3y agoGet back to me when the MP3 has a few billion words (songs?) it can choose from, and when you walk into the room with it and say 'howdy' it responds correctly with 'hello' back.
- nayuki 3y agoThe good ol' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room argument ... with audio files!
- ImHereToVote 3y agoExcept the chinese room creates a model that can create uniqe answers.
- robga 3y ago> You are anthropomorphing. Agreed. The situation is so alien that we are prone to attribute human like terms to describe it. > The machine doesn’t “really” understand, it’s just “simulating” it understands. You are actually displaying a subtle form of anthropomorphism with this statement. You're comparing a human-like quality (“understands”) with the AI. Your point still stands and your final para is well said - but it shows the difficult nature of discourse around the topic.
- Ensorceled 3y ago> > The machine doesn’t “really” understand, it’s just “simulating” it understands. > You are actually displaying a subtle form of anthropomorphism with this statement. You're comparing a human-like quality (“understands”) with the AI. This doesn't make sense. You're saying that saying a machine DOES NOT have a human like quality is "subtly" anthropomorphizing the machine?
- tough 3y agoI mean I think I kinda get it. Understanding for a machine will never be the same understanding than understanding for a human. Well maybe in a few decades tech is really there and it turned out we were really all in a one of many laplace deterministic simulated worlds and are just LLM's generating next tokens probabilistically too
- robga 3y agoI mean the word “understand” is problematic. Machine and human understanding may be different but the word is applied to both. Does an XOR circuit “understand” what it is doing? I venture the word is inappropriate when applied to non-humans.
- burnished 3y agoI think it makes sense, the framing is an inherently human one even if in negation. In contrast we'd probably never feel the need to clarify that a speaker isn't really singing.
- logicallee 3y agoHere is how you can know that ChatGPT really understands, rather than simulating that it understands: - You can give it specific instructions and it will follow them, modifying its behavior by doing so. This shows that the instructions are understood well enough to be followed. For example, if you ask it to modify its behavior by working through its steps, then it will modify its behavior to follow your request. This means the request has been understood/parsed/whatever-you-want-to-call-it since how could it successfully modify its behavior as requested if the instructions weren't really being understood or parsed correctly? Hence saying that the machine doesn't "really" understand, it's just "simulating" it understands is like saying that electric cars aren't "really" moving, since they are just simulating a combustion engine which is the real thing that moves. In other words, if an electric car gets from point A to point B it is really moving. If a language model modifies its behavior to follow instructions correctly, then it is really understanding the instructions.
- vidarh 3y agoHow do you know you're anything more than an LLM?
- ada1981 3y agoAnd my consciousness is just my token window?
- vidarh 3y ago(EDIT: I think my comment above was meant to reply to the parent of the comment I ended up replying to, but too late to edit that one now) Maybe. Point being that since we don't know what gives rise to consciousness, speaking with any certainty on how we are different to LLMs is pretty meaningless. We don't even know of any way to tell if we have existence in time, or just an illusion of it provided by a sense of past memories provided by our current context. As such the constant stream of confident statements about what LLMs can and cannot possibly do based on assumptions about how we are different are getting very tiresome, because they are pure guesswork.
- 3y ago
- jameshart 3y agoI am not anthropomorphizing. The person who wrote the prompt using ‘you’ is. I’m interested in why they chose to do that.