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... ChatGPT is a bigger, fancier mechanical turk. It's still aligned by the manual labour of underpaid people given no benefits for their work. They get exposed

... ChatGPT is a bigger, fancier mechanical turk. It's still aligned by the manual labour of underpaid people given no benefits for their work. They get exposed to some of the most horrible content on the Internet every day as part of their job. It's trained on data mined from other humans. It regurgitates that content and if it's too close to verbatim with the training data we have manual labour fixing that. There's an army of people that are trying to make it look like they're keeping SkyNET in a box... just don't look in the box. See God in it if you want. Believe that it has feelings. Believe that it can think for itself and develop agency over it's future... one day. People believe all kinds of things about the natural universe that make no sense but it makes them feel something. LLM's are what they are. No more, no less. Don't believe the hype, stick to the science.

Andrex 3y ago
Combine an LLM with long-term memory formation/recollection and a protracted (~18 year?) incubation period where it interacts with the outside world, and... the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point.
- curiousllama 3y ago
  > the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point This is like saying the difference between Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer is pretty blurry because, look, we can watch Murphy do do all the same things Oppenheimer did! For some reason with "AI" we get all mystical and act like imitation = the real thing. Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one
  - Andrex 3y ago
    > Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one Because our society has decided you need to become certified to be a doctor, and to do that you have to be a human being. There's no reason to think an AI couldn't have the same level of skill as a human doctor. The film comparison doesn't work for me, Cillian and Robert are real people. I think at the end of the day it's how you view the philosophy of the human soul. For me, it follows that if brains are matter and can produce the illusion of consciousness, so can electronics.
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      >> Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one > Because our society has decided you need to become certified to be a doctor, and to do that you have to be a human being. For the record, I don’t think this addresses the point. The point is that if a person can convince another that they’re a doctor, they still might not be a doctor. Your reply, that a computer can never convince someone that they’re a doctor because it’s a computer, doesn’t address the point. Presumably the point was made by a person, who would not be categorically excluded from being a doctor. But it’s also not a great example because “doctor” in our society isn’t just a super smart person who knows about medicine. They also need to be licensed. There’s no amount of convincing a doctor can do to a patient that gives them a license. So maybe a better formulation of the original point would be just because I can convince you I'm a computer programmer doesn't make me one. And maybe that’s true, I’m not sure.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    It makes you a doctor if I’m a person who is qualified to make people doctors.
  - hackinthebochs 3y ago
    No, the mysticism is from those who think we need something more than the correct sort of information dynamics to have consciousness/sentience/intelligence.
    - agentultra 3y ago
      Right now we don’t have any system that has the correct sort of “information dynamics.” There is no specification available for sentience/intelligence. So people who want to believe an LLM is sentient can jump to any conclusion they want and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But they’re not right either. I think it’s highly reductionist to compare an LLM to an intelligent, sentient being and claim it’s basically the same thing. We know how model training works, how transformers work, and we know what the expected results are. Not so for consciousness, sentience, or intelligence. Scientists have been making breakthroughs in our understanding of these phenomena but it’s still incomplete. LLM’s are useful for one thing. They’re algorithms that run on a machine to perform work for us.
c_crank 3y ago
You can give them agency or a good approximation of that via self generated prompts. Of course, just agency + intelligence doesn't equal SkyNet.

Andrex 3y ago

Combine an LLM with long-term memory formation/recollection and a protracted (~18 year?) incubation period where it interacts with the outside world, and... the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point.

curiousllama 3y ago
> the line between AI and consciousness would be pretty blurry at that point This is like saying the difference between Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer is pretty blurry because, look, we can watch Murphy do do all the same things Oppenheimer did! For some reason with "AI" we get all mystical and act like imitation = the real thing. Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one
- Andrex 3y ago
  > Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one Because our society has decided you need to become certified to be a doctor, and to do that you have to be a human being. There's no reason to think an AI couldn't have the same level of skill as a human doctor. The film comparison doesn't work for me, Cillian and Robert are real people. I think at the end of the day it's how you view the philosophy of the human soul. For me, it follows that if brains are matter and can produce the illusion of consciousness, so can electronics.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    >> Just because I can convince you I'm a doctor doesn't make me one > Because our society has decided you need to become certified to be a doctor, and to do that you have to be a human being. For the record, I don’t think this addresses the point. The point is that if a person can convince another that they’re a doctor, they still might not be a doctor. Your reply, that a computer can never convince someone that they’re a doctor because it’s a computer, doesn’t address the point. Presumably the point was made by a person, who would not be categorically excluded from being a doctor. But it’s also not a great example because “doctor” in our society isn’t just a super smart person who knows about medicine. They also need to be licensed. There’s no amount of convincing a doctor can do to a patient that gives them a license. So maybe a better formulation of the original point would be just because I can convince you I'm a computer programmer doesn't make me one. And maybe that’s true, I’m not sure.
- adrianN 3y ago
  It makes you a doctor if I’m a person who is qualified to make people doctors.
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  No, the mysticism is from those who think we need something more than the correct sort of information dynamics to have consciousness/sentience/intelligence.
  - agentultra 3y ago
    Right now we don’t have any system that has the correct sort of “information dynamics.” There is no specification available for sentience/intelligence. So people who want to believe an LLM is sentient can jump to any conclusion they want and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But they’re not right either. I think it’s highly reductionist to compare an LLM to an intelligent, sentient being and claim it’s basically the same thing. We know how model training works, how transformers work, and we know what the expected results are. Not so for consciousness, sentience, or intelligence. Scientists have been making breakthroughs in our understanding of these phenomena but it’s still incomplete. LLM’s are useful for one thing. They’re algorithms that run on a machine to perform work for us.

c_crank 3y ago

You can give them agency or a good approximation of that via self generated prompts. Of course, just agency + intelligence doesn't equal SkyNet.