8 ms·

Agreed, oftentimes the truly zealous AI pundits act as if our modern day LLMs are completely, 100% equivalent to humans, which I find utterly insane as a concep

Agreed, oftentimes the truly zealous AI pundits act as if our modern day LLMs are completely, 100% equivalent to humans, which I find utterly insane as a concep. For example any discussion about copyrighted works, which is a hot topic, will inevitably end up with someone equating an LLM "learning" to a human learning, as if the two are identical. I think human languages and psyches just aren't built to cope with the concept of AI. Many words have loose meanings, like "learning" in the case of AIs, that can easily be twisted to mean one of dozens of definitions, depending on the stance of the person talking about it. It'll be interesting as the technology becomes more prevalent and mundane how people start treating it all. I'm hoping we get to realizing that a computer isn't a human regardless of the eloquence of its "speech" or whatever words we use to describe what it does, but I guess we'll see

roenxi 3y ago
We've reached the inevitable part of the conversation! What distinction are you drawing between what an LLM does and what a human does? Because as far as I can see they are identical. A human artist looks at a lot of different sources, builds up a black-box statistical model of how to create from that and can reproduce other styles on demand based on a few samples. Generative AI follows the same process. What distinction do you want to draw to say that they should be treated differently legally? And why would that even be desirable?
- voltaireodactyl 3y ago
  One distinction would be that every source a human looked at involved a payment for access to/a copy of each and every source inputted into their black-box. Which is not the case with the current AI models (or rather, the companies profiting off them), to my understanding.
  - inimino 3y ago
    You mean all the landscape artists and portrait and figure and still life painters throughout all human history who just casually made art of whatever they saw around them?
- staticman2 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure the artist is conscious and the AI isn't which means there's something reductive about your claim that they are both merely "applying a black-box statistical" model. Even if it's true (which is debatable,) it doesn't appear to be more informative than saying "they are both made of atoms."
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Well, my personal opinion is with the rise of neural nets we've basically proven that "consciousness" is an illusion and there is nothing there to find. But for the sake of argument, lets assume that there is something called consciousness, artists have it and neural nets don't. How are you going to demonstrate that consciousness is responsible for what the artists are doing? We have undeniable proof that the art could be created by a statistical model, there is solid evidence that the brain creates art by simulating a mathematical neural network to achieve creative outcomes - the brain is full of relatively simple neurons linking together in a way that is logically similar to the way we're encoding information into these matrices. So it is quite reasonable to believe that the artists are conscious but suspect that consciousness isn't involved in the process of creating a copyrighted work. How does that get dealt with?
    - staticman2 3y ago
      I'll talk about fiction, since I've written some. If I write a ghost story it's because I enjoy ghost stories and want to take a crack at my own. While I don't know why ideas pop into my head, I do know that I pick the ones that are subjectively fun or to my taste. And if I do a clever job or a bad job I have a sense of it when I reread what I wrote. These AI's aren't doing anything like that. They have no preference or intent. Their choices change depending on setting like temperature or prompts. Or let's try a different example. Stephen King wrote a novel where he imagined the protagonist gets killed and eaten by the villain's pet pig (Misery). He struggled to come up with a different ending because he said nobody wants to read a whole novel just to see the main character die in the end. He thought about it and did a different ending. Are you claiming Stephen King's conscious deliberation wasn't part of his writing process? I'd say it clearly was. Also, I don't really understand the consciousness is an illusion argument. If none of us are conscious, why should I justify any copyright policy preference to you? That would be like justifying a copyright policy preference to a doorknob. But somehow I'm also a doorknob in this analogy??? Suppose Bob says he's conscious and Jim says he isn't and we believe them. Doesn't that suggest we would have different policy preferences on how they are treated? It would appear murdering Jim wouldn't be particularly harmful but murdering Bob would. I don't have to show how Jim and Bob's mind differ to prefer policies that benefit Bob over Jim.
- darkerside 3y ago
  It's this kind of thinking that is the only reason machines would ever become the primary life form on earth.
- woopsn 3y ago
  Did you write this reply because it was the most typical way that the thread up until GP could have continued? I don't mean that to sound flippant -- if this wasn't your intent, then obviously you understand the distinction.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I also only downvote comments containing things like "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this..." (tiny handful of my downvotes violate that rule). I don't like to disappoint expectations.
- Jensson 3y ago
  > A human artist looks at a lot of different sources, builds up a black-box statistical model of how to create from that and can reproduce other styles on demand based on a few samples. Generative AI follows the same process. The reason programs are different in front of the law is that humans can program programs to do whatever they like at scale, humans can't program humans to do whatever they like at scale. So for example if it became legal to use images from an AI, then we would program an AI that basically copies images and it would be legal, because it is an AI. But at that point we know the law has been violated because programs that just copies images aren't a legal way to get copyrighted images for free. You saying "But the AI is a black box" just means that you could have hidden anything in there, it doesn't prove anything. Legally it is the same as if you wrote a program to copy images.
- hnbad 3y ago
  In what way is this argument any more productive than showing up to Pluto with a plucked chicken and yelling "BEHOLD! A MAN!"? We can make all kinds of navel-gazing arguments about why LLMs and humans are identical but at the end of the day you'll go home and poop and the LLM will blissfully idle on a forgotten AWS compute instance burning a hole into someone's pocket and any idiot can see that you two are not the same in any sense. Just because onthologies are leaky and fuzzy when applied to real world that doesn't mean there aren't tangible differences between things that are clearly different. I can construct a semantic argument for why deleting an LLM is akin to murder (and use it to either reason that deleting an LLM should be punished with the death penalty or that it should be okay to kill random people who annoy me) but that won't impress the judge or jury unless I'm trying to make a case for criminal insanity. Making a machine do things humans can do but faster/cheaper/more has tangibly different implications than letting only humans do it. It should be treated differently for the same reasons that just because a public water fountain is free to use that doesn't mean you can put a hose on it and use it to water your lawn.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I'd be doing a lot better than expected if my arguments have the sort of historical pull that Diogenes' had. And he made a point accurately - they had to change the definition and he showed their approach up as not being able to accurately identify a man without making hilarious mistakes along the way.
kbenson 3y ago
> I'm hoping we get to realizing that a computer isn't a human regardless of the eloquence of its "speech" or whatever words we use to describe what it does, but I guess we'll see My anecdotal experience with how people treat Alexa devices does not inspire confidence in me with regards to this. I can't even convince my wife not to gender it when referring to it.
- maebert 3y ago
  To be fair, anthropomorphizing is kind of a built in feature for us — or more accurately, ascribing intentionality to things as a means of explanation. Magnets “want” to stick together, my vintage computer “thinks” it’s 1993, and the furious gods are hurling burning rocks from the skies because my neighbor ate leavened bread on the wrong day. It’s not limited to AI or LLMs - theory of mind is a powerful explanatory tool that helps us navigate a complex world, and we misapply it all the time.
- kombookcha 3y ago
  I don't think this is really down to people understanding what a computer is, but more down to how humans interact with nonhumans. We anthropomorphize animals and objects all the time. A computer program is ultimately a (complicated) object, that we often give all sorts of human trappings, like a human voice that expresses things in human languages. If you can take pity on the final, dented avocado at the shops because it looks "sad", you will for sure end up calling Alexa 'she'. Avocados can't be sad, but they can look sad /to humans/, and a machine can't really have a gender or be polite in the human sense, but it can definitely sound like a polite lady. I think humans will just fundamentally relate to anything they perceive socially as another human, even if we know full well they aren't human. Probably it's a lot less work for a human brain, than it is to try to engage with the true essence of being an avocado or an Alexa.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    I agree, but I'm not sure why you don't think that is at least relevant if not partially responsible for people seeing humanity in a language model. If we anthropomorphic animals and even vegetables regularly, what happens when something appears to talk back to us intelligently? I don't think these mechanisms are nearly as distinct as you make them out to be.
concordDance 3y ago
> oftentimes the truly zealous AI pundits act as if our modern day LLMs are completely, 100% equivalent to humans, which I find utterly insane as a concept Never heard anyone say this and I know (and know of) a lot of doomers. Honestly, this entire line of discussion would be far less frustrating if it weren't for the endless strawmanning and name-calling.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  I'm sure most would put me pretty far onto the doomer side. I can confirm that I'm not concerned with how LLMs compare to human equivalence today. I'm concerned with whether they are artificial intelligence at all, what the bounding functions for AI's development are, how we could possibly solve the alignment problem, and whether we even understand human intelligence enough to recognize an artificial intelligence at all or predict how intelligence might work in something drastically more powerful than us.
krisoft 3y ago
> For example any discussion about copyrighted works, which is a hot topic, will inevitably end up with someone equating an LLM "learning" to a human learning, as if the two are identical. The argument is not that they are identical. LLMs and diffusion models learning is a new thing. We are all trying to come to terms what that means, and how we should regulate it. (And if at all we should regulate it) Do note, we are talking about here what the law should be, not what the law is. And in doing so we compare this new thing to already existing things. "It is a bit similar to this in this regard" or "it is unlike that thing in this other regard". I don't think it is controversial to say that if an LLM outputs byte-to-byte the text of a copyrighted work the work remains under copyright. The person who run the LLM does not magically gain rights by that. If you coax your model to output the text of the Harry Potter books you don't suddenly become able to publish it. The question is what happens if the new work contains elements from copyrighted works. For example if it borrows the "magical school" setting from HP but mixes it with Nordic mythology and makes it as deadly as Game of Thrones. What then? Can they publish this new thing? Do they need to pay fees to J K Rowling, and George R. R. Martin? It is generally permissible to publish that new work if it was created by a human. If it is sufficiently different from the other works you are free to write and publish it. Does this suddenly change just because the text was output by an LLM? The argument is not that "human learning" and "machine learning" is the same. It is that they are similar enough that one has to argue why you think one can create new work and why the other can't.
- tedajax 3y ago
  Human learning and machine learning aren't even close to similar and pretending like they are is very stupid.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    That is not a very well formed argument, is it? You basically state your opinion and then call people who have an oposite opinion names. Let’s try to elevate the conversation: there is a newly published author MrX. His book combines themes from many copyrighted works in a novel way and is a critical and commercial success. There is no allegation of any copyright infringement around the work. Suddenly information comes out that MrX used LLMs heavily in the creation of the book and the LLM was trained on copyrighted works. Do you think MrX owes licencing fees to those other authors? And which ones? All the ones in the training set? Just the ones which has thematic/stylistic similarity to his work? How come those thematic/stylistic similarities only matter if MrX used an LLM and don’t matter if he used his own head?
saiya-jin 3y ago
Who the heck cares if AGI will 100% mimick humans and human minds, that's purely academic discussion. What is a serious concern are overall capabilities (let's say penetration of networks and installing hacks across whole internet and further), combined with say malevolency. Its trivial to judge mankind from whole internet as something to be removed from this planet for greater good or maybe managed tightly in some cozy concentration camps, just look at the freakin' news. Let's stop kidding ourselves, we are often very deeply flawed and literally nobody alive is or ever was perfect, despite what religions try to say. I am concerned about some capable form of AI/AGI exactly because it will grok humanity based on purely data available. And lack of any significant control or even understanding of what's actually happening to those models and how they evolve their knowledge/opinions. Even if the risk is 1%, that's existential risk we are running towards blindly. And I honestly think its way higher than 1%. Even if I will be proven wrong some proper caution is a smart approach. But you can't expect when people's net wealth tightly coupled with moving as fast as possible and ignoring those concerns to do the best decisions for future of mankind, that's a pipe dream in a same vein as proper communism is. If that would be the case very few bright people would work at facebook for example (and many many other companies including parts of my own).
bart_spoon 3y ago
> For example any discussion about copyrighted works, which is a hot topic, will inevitably end up with someone equating an LLM "learning" to a human learning, as if the two are identical. I don’t think the point is that the two are exactly identical or that humans and LLMs are equivalent, but that the processes are similar enough in the general level that any attempt to regulate LLM training in copyrighted material will inevitably have the same ramifications for human learning. In pretty much all attempts I’ve seen to differentiate the two, it inevitably boils down to hand-waving about how human beings are “special”.

roenxi 3y ago

We've reached the inevitable part of the conversation! What distinction are you drawing between what an LLM does and what a human does? Because as far as I can see they are identical. A human artist looks at a lot of different sources, builds up a black-box statistical model of how to create from that and can reproduce other styles on demand based on a few samples. Generative AI follows the same process. What distinction do you want to draw to say that they should be treated differently legally? And why would that even be desirable?

voltaireodactyl 3y ago
One distinction would be that every source a human looked at involved a payment for access to/a copy of each and every source inputted into their black-box. Which is not the case with the current AI models (or rather, the companies profiting off them), to my understanding.
- inimino 3y ago
  You mean all the landscape artists and portrait and figure and still life painters throughout all human history who just casually made art of whatever they saw around them?
staticman2 3y ago
I'm pretty sure the artist is conscious and the AI isn't which means there's something reductive about your claim that they are both merely "applying a black-box statistical" model. Even if it's true (which is debatable,) it doesn't appear to be more informative than saying "they are both made of atoms."
- roenxi 3y ago
  Well, my personal opinion is with the rise of neural nets we've basically proven that "consciousness" is an illusion and there is nothing there to find. But for the sake of argument, lets assume that there is something called consciousness, artists have it and neural nets don't. How are you going to demonstrate that consciousness is responsible for what the artists are doing? We have undeniable proof that the art could be created by a statistical model, there is solid evidence that the brain creates art by simulating a mathematical neural network to achieve creative outcomes - the brain is full of relatively simple neurons linking together in a way that is logically similar to the way we're encoding information into these matrices. So it is quite reasonable to believe that the artists are conscious but suspect that consciousness isn't involved in the process of creating a copyrighted work. How does that get dealt with?
  - staticman2 3y ago
    I'll talk about fiction, since I've written some. If I write a ghost story it's because I enjoy ghost stories and want to take a crack at my own. While I don't know why ideas pop into my head, I do know that I pick the ones that are subjectively fun or to my taste. And if I do a clever job or a bad job I have a sense of it when I reread what I wrote. These AI's aren't doing anything like that. They have no preference or intent. Their choices change depending on setting like temperature or prompts. Or let's try a different example. Stephen King wrote a novel where he imagined the protagonist gets killed and eaten by the villain's pet pig (Misery). He struggled to come up with a different ending because he said nobody wants to read a whole novel just to see the main character die in the end. He thought about it and did a different ending. Are you claiming Stephen King's conscious deliberation wasn't part of his writing process? I'd say it clearly was. Also, I don't really understand the consciousness is an illusion argument. If none of us are conscious, why should I justify any copyright policy preference to you? That would be like justifying a copyright policy preference to a doorknob. But somehow I'm also a doorknob in this analogy??? Suppose Bob says he's conscious and Jim says he isn't and we believe them. Doesn't that suggest we would have different policy preferences on how they are treated? It would appear murdering Jim wouldn't be particularly harmful but murdering Bob would. I don't have to show how Jim and Bob's mind differ to prefer policies that benefit Bob over Jim.
darkerside 3y ago
It's this kind of thinking that is the only reason machines would ever become the primary life form on earth.
woopsn 3y ago
Did you write this reply because it was the most typical way that the thread up until GP could have continued? I don't mean that to sound flippant -- if this wasn't your intent, then obviously you understand the distinction.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I also only downvote comments containing things like "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this..." (tiny handful of my downvotes violate that rule). I don't like to disappoint expectations.
Jensson 3y ago
> A human artist looks at a lot of different sources, builds up a black-box statistical model of how to create from that and can reproduce other styles on demand based on a few samples. Generative AI follows the same process. The reason programs are different in front of the law is that humans can program programs to do whatever they like at scale, humans can't program humans to do whatever they like at scale. So for example if it became legal to use images from an AI, then we would program an AI that basically copies images and it would be legal, because it is an AI. But at that point we know the law has been violated because programs that just copies images aren't a legal way to get copyrighted images for free. You saying "But the AI is a black box" just means that you could have hidden anything in there, it doesn't prove anything. Legally it is the same as if you wrote a program to copy images.
hnbad 3y ago
In what way is this argument any more productive than showing up to Pluto with a plucked chicken and yelling "BEHOLD! A MAN!"? We can make all kinds of navel-gazing arguments about why LLMs and humans are identical but at the end of the day you'll go home and poop and the LLM will blissfully idle on a forgotten AWS compute instance burning a hole into someone's pocket and any idiot can see that you two are not the same in any sense. Just because onthologies are leaky and fuzzy when applied to real world that doesn't mean there aren't tangible differences between things that are clearly different. I can construct a semantic argument for why deleting an LLM is akin to murder (and use it to either reason that deleting an LLM should be punished with the death penalty or that it should be okay to kill random people who annoy me) but that won't impress the judge or jury unless I'm trying to make a case for criminal insanity. Making a machine do things humans can do but faster/cheaper/more has tangibly different implications than letting only humans do it. It should be treated differently for the same reasons that just because a public water fountain is free to use that doesn't mean you can put a hose on it and use it to water your lawn.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I'd be doing a lot better than expected if my arguments have the sort of historical pull that Diogenes' had. And he made a point accurately - they had to change the definition and he showed their approach up as not being able to accurately identify a man without making hilarious mistakes along the way.

kbenson 3y ago

> I'm hoping we get to realizing that a computer isn't a human regardless of the eloquence of its "speech" or whatever words we use to describe what it does, but I guess we'll see My anecdotal experience with how people treat Alexa devices does not inspire confidence in me with regards to this. I can't even convince my wife not to gender it when referring to it.

maebert 3y ago
To be fair, anthropomorphizing is kind of a built in feature for us — or more accurately, ascribing intentionality to things as a means of explanation. Magnets “want” to stick together, my vintage computer “thinks” it’s 1993, and the furious gods are hurling burning rocks from the skies because my neighbor ate leavened bread on the wrong day. It’s not limited to AI or LLMs - theory of mind is a powerful explanatory tool that helps us navigate a complex world, and we misapply it all the time.
kombookcha 3y ago
I don't think this is really down to people understanding what a computer is, but more down to how humans interact with nonhumans. We anthropomorphize animals and objects all the time. A computer program is ultimately a (complicated) object, that we often give all sorts of human trappings, like a human voice that expresses things in human languages. If you can take pity on the final, dented avocado at the shops because it looks "sad", you will for sure end up calling Alexa 'she'. Avocados can't be sad, but they can look sad /to humans/, and a machine can't really have a gender or be polite in the human sense, but it can definitely sound like a polite lady. I think humans will just fundamentally relate to anything they perceive socially as another human, even if we know full well they aren't human. Probably it's a lot less work for a human brain, than it is to try to engage with the true essence of being an avocado or an Alexa.
- kbenson 3y ago
  I agree, but I'm not sure why you don't think that is at least relevant if not partially responsible for people seeing humanity in a language model. If we anthropomorphic animals and even vegetables regularly, what happens when something appears to talk back to us intelligently? I don't think these mechanisms are nearly as distinct as you make them out to be.

concordDance 3y ago

> oftentimes the truly zealous AI pundits act as if our modern day LLMs are completely, 100% equivalent to humans, which I find utterly insane as a concept Never heard anyone say this and I know (and know of) a lot of doomers. Honestly, this entire line of discussion would be far less frustrating if it weren't for the endless strawmanning and name-calling.

_heimdall 3y ago
I'm sure most would put me pretty far onto the doomer side. I can confirm that I'm not concerned with how LLMs compare to human equivalence today. I'm concerned with whether they are artificial intelligence at all, what the bounding functions for AI's development are, how we could possibly solve the alignment problem, and whether we even understand human intelligence enough to recognize an artificial intelligence at all or predict how intelligence might work in something drastically more powerful than us.

krisoft 3y ago

> For example any discussion about copyrighted works, which is a hot topic, will inevitably end up with someone equating an LLM "learning" to a human learning, as if the two are identical. The argument is not that they are identical. LLMs and diffusion models learning is a new thing. We are all trying to come to terms what that means, and how we should regulate it. (And if at all we should regulate it) Do note, we are talking about here what the law should be, not what the law is. And in doing so we compare this new thing to already existing things. "It is a bit similar to this in this regard" or "it is unlike that thing in this other regard". I don't think it is controversial to say that if an LLM outputs byte-to-byte the text of a copyrighted work the work remains under copyright. The person who run the LLM does not magically gain rights by that. If you coax your model to output the text of the Harry Potter books you don't suddenly become able to publish it. The question is what happens if the new work contains elements from copyrighted works. For example if it borrows the "magical school" setting from HP but mixes it with Nordic mythology and makes it as deadly as Game of Thrones. What then? Can they publish this new thing? Do they need to pay fees to J K Rowling, and George R. R. Martin? It is generally permissible to publish that new work if it was created by a human. If it is sufficiently different from the other works you are free to write and publish it. Does this suddenly change just because the text was output by an LLM? The argument is not that "human learning" and "machine learning" is the same. It is that they are similar enough that one has to argue why you think one can create new work and why the other can't.

tedajax 3y ago
Human learning and machine learning aren't even close to similar and pretending like they are is very stupid.
- krisoft 3y ago
  That is not a very well formed argument, is it? You basically state your opinion and then call people who have an oposite opinion names. Let’s try to elevate the conversation: there is a newly published author MrX. His book combines themes from many copyrighted works in a novel way and is a critical and commercial success. There is no allegation of any copyright infringement around the work. Suddenly information comes out that MrX used LLMs heavily in the creation of the book and the LLM was trained on copyrighted works. Do you think MrX owes licencing fees to those other authors? And which ones? All the ones in the training set? Just the ones which has thematic/stylistic similarity to his work? How come those thematic/stylistic similarities only matter if MrX used an LLM and don’t matter if he used his own head?

saiya-jin 3y ago

Who the heck cares if AGI will 100% mimick humans and human minds, that's purely academic discussion. What is a serious concern are overall capabilities (let's say penetration of networks and installing hacks across whole internet and further), combined with say malevolency. Its trivial to judge mankind from whole internet as something to be removed from this planet for greater good or maybe managed tightly in some cozy concentration camps, just look at the freakin' news. Let's stop kidding ourselves, we are often very deeply flawed and literally nobody alive is or ever was perfect, despite what religions try to say. I am concerned about some capable form of AI/AGI exactly because it will grok humanity based on purely data available. And lack of any significant control or even understanding of what's actually happening to those models and how they evolve their knowledge/opinions. Even if the risk is 1%, that's existential risk we are running towards blindly. And I honestly think its way higher than 1%. Even if I will be proven wrong some proper caution is a smart approach. But you can't expect when people's net wealth tightly coupled with moving as fast as possible and ignoring those concerns to do the best decisions for future of mankind, that's a pipe dream in a same vein as proper communism is. If that would be the case very few bright people would work at facebook for example (and many many other companies including parts of my own).

bart_spoon 3y ago

> For example any discussion about copyrighted works, which is a hot topic, will inevitably end up with someone equating an LLM "learning" to a human learning, as if the two are identical. I don’t think the point is that the two are exactly identical or that humans and LLMs are equivalent, but that the processes are similar enough in the general level that any attempt to regulate LLM training in copyrighted material will inevitably have the same ramifications for human learning. In pretty much all attempts I’ve seen to differentiate the two, it inevitably boils down to hand-waving about how human beings are “special”.