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I feel anthropomorphizing is perfectly reasonable especially in this context. How would you like it described?
by Notatheist 3y ago
I feel anthropomorphizing is perfectly reasonable especially in this context. How would you like it described?
- janalsncm 3y agoThere’s so much baggage attached with it. The only thing a neural network “wants” is to minimize its loss function. That’s all.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y agoAll humans “want” to do is obey the laws of physics.
- csours 3y agoCan we anthropomorphize the loss function then?
- dragonwriter 3y agoThat's like anthropomorphizing utility functions in place of the humans that (are conjectured to) have them, isn't it?
- srcreigh 3y agoYou must not believe in human free will then. Or maybe you don’t believe the brain is the key aspect of human intelligence. Or believe the brain is more than just a organic NN
- janalsncm 3y agoI’m saying that neural networks are so different from brains that anthropomorphizing them runs a real risk of glossing over important differences. Terms like “free will” and “intelligence” are too fuzzy to talk about precisely unless we’re on the exact same page regarding what we mean. And applying our imprecise definitions to machines is not doing us any favors.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoThe neural network doesn't want to minimize its loss function any more than you want to maximize your inclusive genetic fitness. The neural network training process wants to minimize the neural network's loss function. The neural network, if it "wants" anything, will have such wants as were embedded in its weights through the process of minimize its loss function, which will mostly be "wants" whose satisfactions correlate with reduced loss function. Of course this is using the term "want" in a behaviourally-descriptive sense, not a subjective-experience sense. For example, AlphaGo's training routine wants to minimize AlphaGo's loss function. AlphaGo wants to beat you at Go.
- FeepingCreature 3y agoSee also: Reward is not the optimization target https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pdaGN6pQyQarFHXF4/reward-is-not-the-optimization-target https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pdaGN6pQyQarFHXF4/reward-...
- lacrimacida 3y agoAnthropomorphizing is valid in relation with laguage, human language. Other than that anthropomorphizing would be somewhat valid with other human outputs but ideally it is understood it’s just one of the lenses in the toolkit, that it has pros and cons just like any idea or any tool.
- kibwen 3y agoIt's one thing to deliberately anthropomorphize in order to construct an analogy. It's another thing to anthropomorphize by accident or by illusion, as per pareidolia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia . Just as in pareidolia, where the human brain is primed to "see" a human face in a certain pattern of light and shapes, it seems that human brains are primed to "see" a human intelligence in the output of an LLM, because our brains are pattern-matching on "things that look like human speech". But that's a reason to not anthropomorphize LLMs, precisely because people are inclined to do so without thinking.