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IMHO, while anthropomorphizing AI is an error, it's only an error in the same sense that anthropomorphizing a cat or a dog or a cow is an error. People tend to

by epgui 3y ago

IMHO, while anthropomorphizing AI is an error, it's only an error in the same sense that anthropomorphizing a cat or a dog or a cow is an error. People tend to think MUCH too narrowly about the parameters of "intelligence" and/or "consciousness" and vastly overestimate the human perspective.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago
Are dogs and cats debating their equivalence of anthropomorphizing? If anything I would say the opposite. We draw parallels quickly to other organisms and vastly underestimate the range of human cognition.
- epgui 3y ago
  I don't mean to suggest that humans have little cognition, what I mean is that something can be intelligent and conscious even if it behaves in a decidedly non-human way. Animals have their own kinds of intelligence, and they are all conscious, albeit with different kinds of higher functions than humans. But all the possible colours and textures of cognition tend to get lost when we reflect about the nature of AI. We tend to boil it down (incorrectly IMO) to some variation of "it's not intelligent/conscious because it doesn't do X the way humans do".
atleastoptimal 3y ago
Yeah the subtext people mean when they say not to "anthropomorphize" AI is "humans are the gold standard of intelligence, all of its limitations are in its failures to do things humans do easily or automatically, by anthropomorphizing it you are ignoring the AI's limitations". There is this built in assumption that humans have a natural supremacy in the realm of "intuitive" information processing that is unquantifiable. As AI improves this somewhat supernatural view will dissipate. In fact, in the future when people talk about not "anthropomorphizing" AI, it will be in the opposite sense, i.e. we will be warned not to assume that an AI has human flaws, because in reality it is much smarter than that.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Cats, dogs, cows, and other animals have better learning capabilities than deep learning systems. This is specifically because most DL systems are frozen, compressed snapshots of a static training distribution. The deployment distribution is not only dynamic, but malleable: output of the model changes the distribution of 'correct' outputs for most nontrivial tasks. Continuous unsupervised retraining and fine tuning is beyond the capabilities of deep learning.
- epgui 3y ago
  > better I don't mean to be pedantic or flippant, but it really depends how you measure. By any measure of correctness, a Casio calculator manufactured in the 1980s has superior intelligence to a human. I would just say "different", personally.
kromem 3y ago
If anything, we should be more ready to anthropomorphize a LLM over a dog or cat. It's being trained and evaluated on how effectively it can complete anthropomorphic data, and at this point has been shown to model world models abstractly present in the training data. The trick is - as humans - avoiding binary thinking on the topic and recognizing there's almost certainly a spectrum going on, where certain aspects of anthropomorphizing like attributing a subjective continuous experience is silly, but other aspects like the model having some kind of abstracted modeling of emotional states, motivators, or concepts of self - unquestionably things modeled in the majority of social media data fed into the models - is seriously evaluated and considered. We're too caught up in either or thinking, where no one wants to be seen as a tinfoil hat figure around "it's alive" so the 'safe' stance is denying any anthropomorphizing up until those people are caught by surprise by research around the performance benefits of emotional language or jailbreaking with appeals to empathy, at which point all too often there's an anchoring bias where they deny the new information as long as possible (another anthropomorphic feature that seems to have made its way into LLMs btw). Less than 10% of what I see people discuss about models today seems particularly enlightened, and the leading minds like Hinton who straight up say you can't autocomplete well without underlying knowledge get dismissed by those eager to distance themselves from any accusation of being too quick to anthropomorphize the thing trained and evaluated on extending anthropomorphic data... It's a ridiculous state of affairs.

by epgui 3y ago

cscurmudgeon 3y ago

Are dogs and cats debating their equivalence of anthropomorphizing? If anything I would say the opposite. We draw parallels quickly to other organisms and vastly underestimate the range of human cognition.

epgui 3y ago
I don't mean to suggest that humans have little cognition, what I mean is that something can be intelligent and conscious even if it behaves in a decidedly non-human way. Animals have their own kinds of intelligence, and they are all conscious, albeit with different kinds of higher functions than humans. But all the possible colours and textures of cognition tend to get lost when we reflect about the nature of AI. We tend to boil it down (incorrectly IMO) to some variation of "it's not intelligent/conscious because it doesn't do X the way humans do".

atleastoptimal 3y ago

Yeah the subtext people mean when they say not to "anthropomorphize" AI is "humans are the gold standard of intelligence, all of its limitations are in its failures to do things humans do easily or automatically, by anthropomorphizing it you are ignoring the AI's limitations". There is this built in assumption that humans have a natural supremacy in the realm of "intuitive" information processing that is unquantifiable. As AI improves this somewhat supernatural view will dissipate. In fact, in the future when people talk about not "anthropomorphizing" AI, it will be in the opposite sense, i.e. we will be warned not to assume that an AI has human flaws, because in reality it is much smarter than that.

kmeisthax 3y ago

Cats, dogs, cows, and other animals have better learning capabilities than deep learning systems. This is specifically because most DL systems are frozen, compressed snapshots of a static training distribution. The deployment distribution is not only dynamic, but malleable: output of the model changes the distribution of 'correct' outputs for most nontrivial tasks. Continuous unsupervised retraining and fine tuning is beyond the capabilities of deep learning.

epgui 3y ago
> better I don't mean to be pedantic or flippant, but it really depends how you measure. By any measure of correctness, a Casio calculator manufactured in the 1980s has superior intelligence to a human. I would just say "different", personally.

kromem 3y ago

If anything, we should be more ready to anthropomorphize a LLM over a dog or cat. It's being trained and evaluated on how effectively it can complete anthropomorphic data, and at this point has been shown to model world models abstractly present in the training data. The trick is - as humans - avoiding binary thinking on the topic and recognizing there's almost certainly a spectrum going on, where certain aspects of anthropomorphizing like attributing a subjective continuous experience is silly, but other aspects like the model having some kind of abstracted modeling of emotional states, motivators, or concepts of self - unquestionably things modeled in the majority of social media data fed into the models - is seriously evaluated and considered. We're too caught up in either or thinking, where no one wants to be seen as a tinfoil hat figure around "it's alive" so the 'safe' stance is denying any anthropomorphizing up until those people are caught by surprise by research around the performance benefits of emotional language or jailbreaking with appeals to empathy, at which point all too often there's an anchoring bias where they deny the new information as long as possible (another anthropomorphic feature that seems to have made its way into LLMs btw). Less than 10% of what I see people discuss about models today seems particularly enlightened, and the leading minds like Hinton who straight up say you can't autocomplete well without underlying knowledge get dismissed by those eager to distance themselves from any accusation of being too quick to anthropomorphize the thing trained and evaluated on extending anthropomorphic data... It's a ridiculous state of affairs.