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I think one cool benefit of AI advances will be, that many more ordinary people will start thinking about philosophical problems such as the one posed in this a

I think one cool benefit of AI advances will be, that many more ordinary people will start thinking about philosophical problems such as the one posed in this article. What is the meaningful difference between something truly being learned, and mere "copying" of "tiny pieces of material" that have been observed in the past? Could learning exist in a vacuum universe, with nothing to copy? Is there any LLM output that could convince the author of originality, or will it never be convincing? Can the author always tell whether he's interacting with one?

kypro 3y ago
For me the most concerning thing about the ChatGPT hype has been seeing how difficult people seem to find reasoning about the risks and abilities of these systems. Questions around the emergent properties, sentience and creativity of AI systems should rarely be discussed as black and whites. I don't think ChatGPT is sentient, but is it more sentient than a rock? I mean, maybe? At least I would be wrong to say a hard no to that. Similarly questions around the ability of LLMs to reason or produce original work probably isn't black or white either. LLMs do seem to show some signs of basic reasoning ability and have shown they are able to produce unique works, but clearly there are limits to both. Perhaps this isn't unique to AI though. A "bad" artist is arguably one that is too heavily influenced by another and lacks artistic creativity. But does that mean what they do has no creativity? I think not, but that often is the black and white language people will use. It seems to me ChatGPT is neither stealing or doing something all that creative.