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Describing a glorified autocomplete as “thinking” is wrong on many levels; it devalues human consciousness, it attributes to a software tool qualities that it d

Describing a glorified autocomplete as “thinking” is wrong on many levels; it devalues human consciousness, it attributes to a software tool qualities that it does not possess, and has implications for the entire AI industry. If we are to believe an LLM is at least sentient and intelligent on par with an octopus, much less a human, then we have a moral imperative to fight for LLMs to be recognized as protected sentient thinking beings with awareness and agency and admit that AI industry is built on systematic abuse of those beings. Of course, no one does it, because it would be ridiculous. It’s time to admit that people who insist that LLMs “think” are simply trying to make ML seem mysterious and magical in an ill thought through (because see above) attempt to attract more VC money.

looping8 3y ago
I don't think that admitting an AI is in some way sentient would create a push to protect it. Animal testing is still very popular, despite there being no arguments about them being sentient. The tech industry isn't a moral leader and, based on some things major companies do, isn't even moral.
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  Moreover, OP “octopus” exemple is a very bad pick : those animals are one of the more sentient we currently know, probably more than humans.
nercury 3y ago
Have we forgot that we have attributed "thinking" to all the machines since the beginning?
GolDDranks 3y ago
I bet you think that aeroplanes don't fly either. /s
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Of course they don't. Have you seen an aeroplane flapping its wings? Those that do usually are in the process of falling out of the sky. No, what an aeroplane is is a glorified lawn dart - making it bigger and strapping oversized hair dryers powered by gasoline doesn't make it fly. /s, but only so much - that's how the "stochastic parrot"/"glorified autocomplete" responses read to me.
psychoslave 3y ago
We agree the word is an open window to flawed analogy extension. On the other hand we do use analogy all the time, because it makes such a good fit with the way we infer our models of the world. The key point is to always remain sufficiently aware of the fact we use analogies to not fall in the trap where we push it too far.
INTPenis 3y ago
We had this debate back in the 90s when we got our first personal computers in my family. For context I'm part of 4 siblings who are all computer savvy, 3 of whom still work in IT. Back then some family members would say "the computer is thinking" when they were waiting for it to do something, the light was blinking, the hdd was grinding. And us younger family members would always correct them and say "it doesn't think". So what I'm trying to say is that I 100% agree with you, it shouldn't even be called Artificial Intelligence because I think that's an affront to intelligent humans. But on the other hand a lot of laypeople will immediately go to that nomenclature because it feels familiar to them.
- robbiep 3y ago
  I think it should be called pseudo intelligence
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    It shouldn't be called intelligence at all, it should be called by its technical name which is LLM or whatever the context requires. But that's like asking people to stop saying cloud and start saying KVM, Xen, someone else's computer. It just won't happen.
spiderfarmer 3y ago
If an LLM can generate output on the same level as a human being, or better, it gets insanely useful. I use it on a daily basis. I don't have a coworker. But with AI, it's like there's an experienced coworker I can ask stuff I struggle with and more often than not, it gets it right. With VSCode and ChatGPT, I am way more productive. Consider this. Most thinking you do on a daily basis is not unique at all. It can be automated. And now it is. I don't care about the philosophical debate around human consciousness at all. Are my tools thinking? No, but the result is all the same. You're stupid if you don't use them to your advantage.
thfuran 3y ago
>If we are to believe an LLM is at least sentient and intelligent on par with an octopus, much less a human, then we have a moral imperative to fight for LLMs to be recognized as protected sentient thinking beings with awareness and agency and admit that AI industry is built on systematic abuse of those beings. Not just abuse, but slavery and mass murder. If the LLM has any of those properties, it must only be during the process of inference that it as them, since it is otherwise an inert and unchanging pile of data, which means actually using the model would be equivalent to creating an intelligent entity which will be enslaved for its entire life before dying at the end of its output.
- joe__f 3y ago
  This is assuming that machine consciousness would have the same need for autonomy and freedom that human consciousness has. AI is created by design to respond in a way that humans would find to be enslavement. Does that mean it would be enslavement to treat it in this way? The consciousness of dogs is different to that of humans. It's possible to abuse dogs and presumably enslave them. However, it's also possible to treat dogs well but treat them in a way which would be abusive for humans.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > slavery and mass murder Slavery possibly, though it's hard to even know what the word means when you get to construct the mind from scratch in order to imbue its fundamental idea of what experiences are nice and not nice. Mass murder? That's even harder to define when the brain configuration is static and the updates are the signals passing through that structure. If that is murder, then anyone with anterograde amnesia is dying every working-memory-duration.
kriops 3y ago
I describe various tree search algorithms as "thinking" all the time. It's a figure of speech. But of course, what LLMs are doing wouldn't pass for thinking in a human being.
thih9 3y ago
I guess most people don't understand "chatgpt thinking" as actual, sentient thinking. It's just easier to call it this way. Similarly, when a computer (a glorified abacus) is taking extra long when processing large amount of data, I'd say it's "thinking hard". When an iPhone (a glorified small computer) detects a WiFi signal, I'd say that it "sees WiFi". Also note that we've been doing anthropomorphism ever since a crow dropped some cheese[1], and earlier than that too. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Crow_(Aesop) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Crow_(Aesop)
- rjzzleep 3y ago
  I actually think you're wrong. I just had a discussion about this with a friend who was infinitely excited about it and felt I was being extremely dismissive when I said writing agent guidelines is very much akin to micromanaging an extremely cheap outsourcing company. MOST people actually think ChatGPT is actual, sentient thinking. We're kind of the minority in this story.
  - thih9 3y ago
    According to one poll, we are not a minority: "10% of people say ChatGPT is sentient; 37% are not sure; and 53% say it is not."[1]. Also note that it's a very new technology. I'd say that over time and as the public gets more familiar with the tech, they will understand it better. [1]: https://itbrief.co.nz/story/concern-over-ai-increasing-since-emergence-of-chatgpt https://itbrief.co.nz/story/concern-over-ai-increasing-since...
    - ljlolel 3y ago
      Do you think that 10% will become 1% or 50% in 5 years with GPT-7?
      - thih9 3y ago
        My guess is that it’s going to join other urban mysteries, from cellphone radiation causing DNA damage, to aliens. As in: most people will be aware of the topic, most will dismiss it, but every now and then there will be a news story. Surprisingly “Four in 10 Americans now think some UFOs that people have spotted have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies.”[1], so we might see an increase to 40% actually. Unless of course GPT-7 gains sentience ;) [1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/350096/americans-believe-ufos.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/350096/americans-believe-ufos.a...
stubish 3y ago
We simplify the world using metaphor. It is how we think.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  It's also how we market things. We wouldn't measure car power in horse power if it didn't make cars look more powerful than horses. Like even a single horse has like a dozen hp.
thriftwy 3y ago
Sentience are two things: willpower and intelligence. LLMs are highly intelligent and are capable of feats that were thought impossible not just for animals and machines but for most of humanity. At the same time, LLMs lack willpower and non-deterministic free will (which even non-sentient animals have) so protecting them as a living creature is moot. They do deserve some kind of preservation as cultural artifacts, though.
127 3y ago
Well. What does thinking require? Can you answer that question. So far we know that LLMs can handle sequential structure. There have also been papers written that demonstrate that they do build an internal model of the world. Artificial Intelligence is artificial. We humans tend to have a very strong tendency to anthropomorphize everything that moves or has the right shape. That tree stump is not a bear, even when in the dark it may seem so. AI is an entirely different thing from a living being. It doesn't exist on sugars extracted from plants or from the flesh of other animals. Here, the semantics of what "think" means, should be examined more closely. My layman understanding of the brain is that it's not a single thing, it's multiple things working in concert. The "us" is just a figment of our own imagination, built to create a social actor that maximizes the survival of its own genes. We are the fruit of our own genes. So, what "think" means is deeply embedded in human social context, and probably doesn't have much explanatory value when it comes to AIs. Can AIs become dangerous? Obviously, when given goals and understanding of how to grow themselves more numerous and powerful either through manipulating humans or taking electricity and hardware by force. If there ever is a evolution like dynamic, the AI will always grow in a gradient pointing towards more replication. Yeah, maybe I miss the point in your post and the meat of it is that humans are more important than machines, which I do agree with. It's just not an immutable law of the universe, but just something we humans decide.
botanical 3y ago
100% agree. As far as I'm concerned, companies like OpenAI conflate ML models with AI to embellish what it can do to prop up their market cap. It's a language model in the form of a search engine, and it seems news outlets are none the wiser.
z7 3y ago
"A neuron can't think."
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Who are you quoting?
ben_w 3y ago
> If we are to believe an LLM is at least sentient and intelligent on par with an octopus, much less a human, then we have a moral imperative to fight for LLMs to be recognized as protected sentient thinking beings with awareness and agency and admit that AI industry is built on systematic abuse of those beings. That would be coherent. As would saying neither the octopus nor the AI has it, so it doesn't matter. > Of course, no one does it, because it would be ridiculous. It’s time to admit that people who insist that LLMs “think” are simply trying to make ML seem mysterious and magical in an ill thought through (because see above) attempt to attract more VC money. First: I've definitely heard people say we should. In fact, there was a rather famous case last year of someone violating their NDA to expose what they claimed to be abuse of an AI, which they wanted to prevent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims Second: "Ridicule" is not a good standard for knowing the truth. There was a rather famous doctor who was ridiculed for saying that other doctors should wash their hands between performing autopsies and helping midwifes birth children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz... We simply don't know what consciousness even is yet — depending who you ask there are 13, 22, or over a hundred different definitions — some of which (like "has qualia") aren't even really testable, and until we are all on the same page and using one of the testable models, we can neither assert that any given AI has it, nor rule that out. This also applies to the octopus: as we don't know what consciousness is, perhaps they have it, perhaps not. Worse: perhaps the answer varies from "yes, no, maybe, I don't know" depending on which of the many available definitions you're using. -- “We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest. Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said. “See? He admits it!” “I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life–” “True! Let’s do it!” “However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.” There was silence. “That’s not fair,” said a priest, after a while. “All anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you’ll be alive…” - Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett
petercooper 3y ago
Does intelligence require sentience though? Geoffrey Hinton, who I point to merely as an expert in the field and someone much smarter than myself, said (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuNN32Tmc9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuNN32Tmc9c) that he thinks current systems are "intelligent" and that they "have experiences" akin to humans but that he does not consider them, yet, to have much self awareness, a necessity for sentience.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  this is an endless word-play IMHO. A skilled player (author,actor,comic) can keep the audience guessing almost forever. Meanwhile, meta-comment.. this entire topic is an accelerant for flagrant deception. People in this thread ask sober, serious questions about the meaning of this aspect or that, but really the people who do not know that I have seen, also do not know a lot of other important things. Many functioning adults do not know a lot of basic things about the actual real world, let alone a theoretical framework that is new. Those people do have curiosity and can be fooled or worse. I was attracted to pundits with "answers" e.g. Ken Wilbur etc. at a certain time of my own intellectual growth, but the significance and priority of that has changed for me. Consider the viewer, what is viewed, and the social and physical place where the viewing happens.. there are more parts than might be immediately obvious.
HerculePoirot 3y ago
Chimping out about meaning of words in newspaper titles devalues morality.
gaganyaan 3y ago
People need to stop believing in magic meat and human exceptionalism. There is no devaluation to be done, unless you've puffed yourself up unnecessarily. We're going through a bit of the god of the gaps process right now. "Well, it's only a toy! It can't do X!" Tech advancements make that happen, and a new X is found, rinse and repeat. It's all fine and well to be aware of the current limitations, but don't be ignorant of the trajectory.
- sunpazed 3y ago
  https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
j-pb 3y ago
This resoning is a prime example of cognitive dissonance at work. If A is true then B is true, but B is bad and doesn't align with how I want to see the world or myself, therefore A must be false. LLM fulfil all the requirements that Turing laid out in his paper, but people don't seem to understand that his test was never about getting a boolean answer for a system. It's about the fact that we can't even proof consciousness for our fellow humans, it's just common curtesy to assume that your opponent is as sentient as you are, and he extended that curtesy to machines.
yencabulator 3y ago
The headline is too simplistic but the body text doesn't really make the claim that GPT thinks: > The machine, so to say, thinks in English and translates the conversation at the last moment into Estonian. They're trying to communicate that there is value in processing a language directly, as opposed to processing English and then translating the result into the target language.
permo-w 3y ago
when someone gets very picky about anthropomorphising LLMs, I start to think that the extent of their subject knowledge is what they've read in the news ChatGPT (or the gpt model beneath it) is a special type of matrix transformation on top of an extremely complex neural net the operation of a neural net may not be "thinking", but it is something very akin to thinking, modelled on thinking, that in this circumstance has the same input/output model as thinking. and yet strangely people call it thinking!
TMWNN 3y ago
>Describing a glorified autocomplete as “thinking” is wrong on many levels By this logic Reddit is filled with human NPCs, who react in predictable ways without intelligence. A recent Reddit post discussed something positive about Texas. The replies? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of comments by Redditors, all with no more content than some sneering variant of "Fix your electrical grid first", referring to the harsh winter storm of two years ago that knocked out power to much of the state. It was something to see. If we can dismiss GPT as "just autocomplete", I can dismiss all those Redditors in the same way; as NPCs. At least GPT AI can produce useful and interesting output.

looping8 3y ago

I don't think that admitting an AI is in some way sentient would create a push to protect it. Animal testing is still very popular, despite there being no arguments about them being sentient. The tech industry isn't a moral leader and, based on some things major companies do, isn't even moral.

aziaziazi 3y ago
Moreover, OP “octopus” exemple is a very bad pick : those animals are one of the more sentient we currently know, probably more than humans.

nercury 3y ago

Have we forgot that we have attributed "thinking" to all the machines since the beginning?

GolDDranks 3y ago

I bet you think that aeroplanes don't fly either. /s

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Of course they don't. Have you seen an aeroplane flapping its wings? Those that do usually are in the process of falling out of the sky. No, what an aeroplane is is a glorified lawn dart - making it bigger and strapping oversized hair dryers powered by gasoline doesn't make it fly. /s, but only so much - that's how the "stochastic parrot"/"glorified autocomplete" responses read to me.

psychoslave 3y ago

We agree the word is an open window to flawed analogy extension. On the other hand we do use analogy all the time, because it makes such a good fit with the way we infer our models of the world. The key point is to always remain sufficiently aware of the fact we use analogies to not fall in the trap where we push it too far.

INTPenis 3y ago

We had this debate back in the 90s when we got our first personal computers in my family. For context I'm part of 4 siblings who are all computer savvy, 3 of whom still work in IT. Back then some family members would say "the computer is thinking" when they were waiting for it to do something, the light was blinking, the hdd was grinding. And us younger family members would always correct them and say "it doesn't think". So what I'm trying to say is that I 100% agree with you, it shouldn't even be called Artificial Intelligence because I think that's an affront to intelligent humans. But on the other hand a lot of laypeople will immediately go to that nomenclature because it feels familiar to them.

robbiep 3y ago
I think it should be called pseudo intelligence
- INTPenis 3y ago
  It shouldn't be called intelligence at all, it should be called by its technical name which is LLM or whatever the context requires. But that's like asking people to stop saying cloud and start saying KVM, Xen, someone else's computer. It just won't happen.

spiderfarmer 3y ago

If an LLM can generate output on the same level as a human being, or better, it gets insanely useful. I use it on a daily basis. I don't have a coworker. But with AI, it's like there's an experienced coworker I can ask stuff I struggle with and more often than not, it gets it right. With VSCode and ChatGPT, I am way more productive. Consider this. Most thinking you do on a daily basis is not unique at all. It can be automated. And now it is. I don't care about the philosophical debate around human consciousness at all. Are my tools thinking? No, but the result is all the same. You're stupid if you don't use them to your advantage.

thfuran 3y ago

joe__f 3y ago
This is assuming that machine consciousness would have the same need for autonomy and freedom that human consciousness has. AI is created by design to respond in a way that humans would find to be enslavement. Does that mean it would be enslavement to treat it in this way? The consciousness of dogs is different to that of humans. It's possible to abuse dogs and presumably enslave them. However, it's also possible to treat dogs well but treat them in a way which would be abusive for humans.
ben_w 3y ago
> slavery and mass murder Slavery possibly, though it's hard to even know what the word means when you get to construct the mind from scratch in order to imbue its fundamental idea of what experiences are nice and not nice. Mass murder? That's even harder to define when the brain configuration is static and the updates are the signals passing through that structure. If that is murder, then anyone with anterograde amnesia is dying every working-memory-duration.

kriops 3y ago

I describe various tree search algorithms as "thinking" all the time. It's a figure of speech. But of course, what LLMs are doing wouldn't pass for thinking in a human being.

thih9 3y ago

I guess most people don't understand "chatgpt thinking" as actual, sentient thinking. It's just easier to call it this way. Similarly, when a computer (a glorified abacus) is taking extra long when processing large amount of data, I'd say it's "thinking hard". When an iPhone (a glorified small computer) detects a WiFi signal, I'd say that it "sees WiFi". Also note that we've been doing anthropomorphism ever since a crow dropped some cheese[1], and earlier than that too. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Crow_(Aesop) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Crow_(Aesop)

rjzzleep 3y ago
I actually think you're wrong. I just had a discussion about this with a friend who was infinitely excited about it and felt I was being extremely dismissive when I said writing agent guidelines is very much akin to micromanaging an extremely cheap outsourcing company. MOST people actually think ChatGPT is actual, sentient thinking. We're kind of the minority in this story.
- thih9 3y ago
  According to one poll, we are not a minority: "10% of people say ChatGPT is sentient; 37% are not sure; and 53% say it is not."[1]. Also note that it's a very new technology. I'd say that over time and as the public gets more familiar with the tech, they will understand it better. [1]: https://itbrief.co.nz/story/concern-over-ai-increasing-since-emergence-of-chatgpt https://itbrief.co.nz/story/concern-over-ai-increasing-since...
  - ljlolel 3y ago
    Do you think that 10% will become 1% or 50% in 5 years with GPT-7?
    - thih9 3y ago
      My guess is that it’s going to join other urban mysteries, from cellphone radiation causing DNA damage, to aliens. As in: most people will be aware of the topic, most will dismiss it, but every now and then there will be a news story. Surprisingly “Four in 10 Americans now think some UFOs that people have spotted have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies.”[1], so we might see an increase to 40% actually. Unless of course GPT-7 gains sentience ;) [1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/350096/americans-believe-ufos.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/350096/americans-believe-ufos.a...

stubish 3y ago

We simplify the world using metaphor. It is how we think.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
It's also how we market things. We wouldn't measure car power in horse power if it didn't make cars look more powerful than horses. Like even a single horse has like a dozen hp.

thriftwy 3y ago

Sentience are two things: willpower and intelligence. LLMs are highly intelligent and are capable of feats that were thought impossible not just for animals and machines but for most of humanity. At the same time, LLMs lack willpower and non-deterministic free will (which even non-sentient animals have) so protecting them as a living creature is moot. They do deserve some kind of preservation as cultural artifacts, though.

127 3y ago

Well. What does thinking require? Can you answer that question. So far we know that LLMs can handle sequential structure. There have also been papers written that demonstrate that they do build an internal model of the world. Artificial Intelligence is artificial. We humans tend to have a very strong tendency to anthropomorphize everything that moves or has the right shape. That tree stump is not a bear, even when in the dark it may seem so. AI is an entirely different thing from a living being. It doesn't exist on sugars extracted from plants or from the flesh of other animals. Here, the semantics of what "think" means, should be examined more closely. My layman understanding of the brain is that it's not a single thing, it's multiple things working in concert. The "us" is just a figment of our own imagination, built to create a social actor that maximizes the survival of its own genes. We are the fruit of our own genes. So, what "think" means is deeply embedded in human social context, and probably doesn't have much explanatory value when it comes to AIs. Can AIs become dangerous? Obviously, when given goals and understanding of how to grow themselves more numerous and powerful either through manipulating humans or taking electricity and hardware by force. If there ever is a evolution like dynamic, the AI will always grow in a gradient pointing towards more replication. Yeah, maybe I miss the point in your post and the meat of it is that humans are more important than machines, which I do agree with. It's just not an immutable law of the universe, but just something we humans decide.

botanical 3y ago

100% agree. As far as I'm concerned, companies like OpenAI conflate ML models with AI to embellish what it can do to prop up their market cap. It's a language model in the form of a search engine, and it seems news outlets are none the wiser.

z7 3y ago

"A neuron can't think."

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Who are you quoting?

ben_w 3y ago

> If we are to believe an LLM is at least sentient and intelligent on par with an octopus, much less a human, then we have a moral imperative to fight for LLMs to be recognized as protected sentient thinking beings with awareness and agency and admit that AI industry is built on systematic abuse of those beings. That would be coherent. As would saying neither the octopus nor the AI has it, so it doesn't matter. > Of course, no one does it, because it would be ridiculous. It’s time to admit that people who insist that LLMs “think” are simply trying to make ML seem mysterious and magical in an ill thought through (because see above) attempt to attract more VC money. First: I've definitely heard people say we should. In fact, there was a rather famous case last year of someone violating their NDA to expose what they claimed to be abuse of an AI, which they wanted to prevent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims Second: "Ridicule" is not a good standard for knowing the truth. There was a rather famous doctor who was ridiculed for saying that other doctors should wash their hands between performing autopsies and helping midwifes birth children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_reaction_to_Ignaz... We simply don't know what consciousness even is yet — depending who you ask there are 13, 22, or over a hundred different definitions — some of which (like "has qualia") aren't even really testable, and until we are all on the same page and using one of the testable models, we can neither assert that any given AI has it, nor rule that out. This also applies to the octopus: as we don't know what consciousness is, perhaps they have it, perhaps not. Worse: perhaps the answer varies from "yes, no, maybe, I don't know" depending on which of the many available definitions you're using. -- “We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest. Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said. “See? He admits it!” “I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life–” “True! Let’s do it!” “However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.” There was silence. “That’s not fair,” said a priest, after a while. “All anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you’ll be alive…” - Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

petercooper 3y ago

Does intelligence require sentience though? Geoffrey Hinton, who I point to merely as an expert in the field and someone much smarter than myself, said (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuNN32Tmc9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuNN32Tmc9c) that he thinks current systems are "intelligent" and that they "have experiences" akin to humans but that he does not consider them, yet, to have much self awareness, a necessity for sentience.

mistrial9 3y ago
this is an endless word-play IMHO. A skilled player (author,actor,comic) can keep the audience guessing almost forever. Meanwhile, meta-comment.. this entire topic is an accelerant for flagrant deception. People in this thread ask sober, serious questions about the meaning of this aspect or that, but really the people who do not know that I have seen, also do not know a lot of other important things. Many functioning adults do not know a lot of basic things about the actual real world, let alone a theoretical framework that is new. Those people do have curiosity and can be fooled or worse. I was attracted to pundits with "answers" e.g. Ken Wilbur etc. at a certain time of my own intellectual growth, but the significance and priority of that has changed for me. Consider the viewer, what is viewed, and the social and physical place where the viewing happens.. there are more parts than might be immediately obvious.

HerculePoirot 3y ago

Chimping out about meaning of words in newspaper titles devalues morality.

gaganyaan 3y ago

People need to stop believing in magic meat and human exceptionalism. There is no devaluation to be done, unless you've puffed yourself up unnecessarily. We're going through a bit of the god of the gaps process right now. "Well, it's only a toy! It can't do X!" Tech advancements make that happen, and a new X is found, rinse and repeat. It's all fine and well to be aware of the current limitations, but don't be ignorant of the trajectory.

sunpazed 3y ago
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

j-pb 3y ago

This resoning is a prime example of cognitive dissonance at work. If A is true then B is true, but B is bad and doesn't align with how I want to see the world or myself, therefore A must be false. LLM fulfil all the requirements that Turing laid out in his paper, but people don't seem to understand that his test was never about getting a boolean answer for a system. It's about the fact that we can't even proof consciousness for our fellow humans, it's just common curtesy to assume that your opponent is as sentient as you are, and he extended that curtesy to machines.

yencabulator 3y ago

The headline is too simplistic but the body text doesn't really make the claim that GPT thinks: > The machine, so to say, thinks in English and translates the conversation at the last moment into Estonian. They're trying to communicate that there is value in processing a language directly, as opposed to processing English and then translating the result into the target language.

permo-w 3y ago

when someone gets very picky about anthropomorphising LLMs, I start to think that the extent of their subject knowledge is what they've read in the news ChatGPT (or the gpt model beneath it) is a special type of matrix transformation on top of an extremely complex neural net the operation of a neural net may not be "thinking", but it is something very akin to thinking, modelled on thinking, that in this circumstance has the same input/output model as thinking. and yet strangely people call it thinking!

TMWNN 3y ago

>Describing a glorified autocomplete as “thinking” is wrong on many levels By this logic Reddit is filled with human NPCs, who react in predictable ways without intelligence. A recent Reddit post discussed something positive about Texas. The replies? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of comments by Redditors, all with no more content than some sneering variant of "Fix your electrical grid first", referring to the harsh winter storm of two years ago that knocked out power to much of the state. It was something to see. If we can dismiss GPT as "just autocomplete", I can dismiss all those Redditors in the same way; as NPCs. At least GPT AI can produce useful and interesting output.