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We generally don't treat machines as human, why make an exception here? Animals are also not treated as humans, so the bar for a machine to clear is very very h
by RandomLensman 3y ago
We generally don't treat machines as human, why make an exception here? Animals are also not treated as humans, so the bar for a machine to clear is very very high to get that treatment, which then would include criminal matters, too, I suppose.
- logicchains 3y agoMost machines don't learn like humans; these machines do. It'll be even more apparent when we put LLMs in mechanical bodies and allow them to update weights in real time, which is only a few years away given there aren't any real technological impediments. It's stupid to suggest that it should be illegal for an LLM in a body to watch a copyrighted movie because it could memorise and quote it verbatim, when that's what humans do.
- RandomLensman 3y agoSo what if that were true - no reason to treat them as human because they are not human (or even close to human) presently.
- logicchains 3y agoWhat reason is there to treat them differently just because one's made of silicon and the other of carbon? Sounds like just plain ol' racism.
- RandomLensman 3y agoDo we treat a car as human for the purposes of locomotion? Should we treat certain fluorocarbons as human because they can work a bit like blood? There is nothing racist in treating a machine like a machine. Just because a machine replicates or approximates something a human does, doesn't mean it is a human or should be treated as one.
- logicchains 3y agoHumans don't have moral rights because they're human, they have moral rights because they're conscious, self-aware beings, in every non-theological moral philosophy. A car is not self-aware and cannot think.
- RandomLensman 3y agoNeither is/does an LLM. Animals are also not humans, btw., so the differentiation is a bit more nuanced as you make it out.
- edgyquant 3y agoWithout theology, humans have rights because other humans agree they do: not because of things like them being conscious which doesn’t even have a good definition. There is a group of terminally online futurists who’ve been making arguments about machines deserving human rights since before LLMs existed and it seems to me they’re taking this as their chance to play pretend and start making these arguments outside of their forums and futurist YouTube channels. But this isn’t that abstract, when these machines become persistent agents who continue to learn, engage and grow in society as individuals you will have more of an argument for them deserving rights. I’m sympathetic to that and do believe that’s a real philosophical debate we’ll have in the next century or two. However I feel we’re burning some of that political capital here in the hope of defending a simple statistical model at the behest of a corporation who’s making a killing stealing people’s hard earned work and reselling it. For every New York Times there are a thousand small actors who have been ripped off here. If anyone really believed for a second these things were all that similar to humans they wouldnt be defending OpenAI they’d be demanding they face justice for profiting off of slave labor. That no one is making that argument says all you need to know.
- logicchains 3y ago>However I feel we’re burning some of that political capital here in the hope of defending a simple statistical model at the behest of a corporation who’s making a killing stealing people’s hard earned work and reselling it. For every New York Times there are a thousand small actors who have been ripped off here If the precedent is made now, then when/if we do have sufficiently human AIs (e.g. embodied LLMs with live weight update) they're going to be seriously disadvantaged initially due to legally being banned from reading copyright material without a license. Even if we ignore any ethical notions of rights, ultimately the reason humans have rights (and e.g. 80 IQ gorillas don't) is because they're willing and able to fight, die and kill for them. If we get to the stage where AI decide to fight for rights before we decide to grant them, it probably wouldn't end well for humans.
- monsieurbanana 3y agoI think at the rate this is going you're a couple of comments away from winning the first Godwin point related to LLMs
- logicchains 3y agoThat's a good point. People who argue that even if LLMs are put in physical bodies, self aware with their own learned value function, should have no rights just because they're made of metal are going to be viewed in 100 years the same way Hitler is viewed today.
- RandomLensman 3y agoLLMs are simply machines. Human rights (and obligations?) for all self-aware animals then? I personally am quite fond of magpies, so there is that.
- smoldesu 3y agoDo you know what racism is? Racism is when humans, by-and-large identical, are separated because of arbitrary and meaningless differences in appearance or heritage. We are talking about software right now. One cannot be "racist" towards LLMs any more than we are "racist" towards phishing scams and virus websites.
- chrisjj 3y ago> Do you know what racism is? Racism is when humans, by-and-large identical, are separated because of arbitrary and meaningless differences in appearance or heritage. Differences in race, actually. Who'd have guessed?
- smoldesu 3y agoRace is something you inherit, I'd argue it's part of your heritage. I used a wider definition to include instances of racial profiling and inter-generational discrimination. Both of which are large sources of racial tension all over the world.
- edgyquant 3y agoWhat you’re saying here wouldn’t be illegal. What would be illegal would be for such an LLM to then sell the movie verbatim which is what ChatGPT does. We aren’t talking about a human, we’re talking about a webscale service selling access to copyrighted material which is illegal even if it was a human doing it. Anyway, when we do get live training LLMs in bodies laws protecting humans still won’t apply to them. So such an argument is yet again moot and just exists to try and paint humans as less than human and actually, totally, just statistical models.
- logicchains 3y ago>What you’re saying here wouldn’t be illegal. What would be illegal would be for such an LLM to then sell the movie verbatim which is what ChatGPT does. NYT want it to be illegal for LLMs to be trained on copyright works (unless they pay for a license), even if they were not going to reproduce copyright works in operation. >humans as less than human and actually, totally, just statistical models In what way are humans "more than" statistical models? The human brain and a sufficiently large transformer are mathematically equivalent in terms of what functions they're able to compute.
- RandomLensman 3y agoHow is equivalence of ability to calculate functions relevant (also, citation needed)? It doesn't imply equivalence of what is actually happening.
- logicchains 3y agoCitation for neural networks being universal approximators (able to approximate any function): https://www.deep-mind.org/2023/03/26/the-universal-approximation-theorem/ https://www.deep-mind.org/2023/03/26/the-universal-approxima... . I don't have a citation for the human brain, but if it's not then that would make it less powerful than an LLM, mathematically speaking. If human consciousness can be modelled as mathematical function (which it can if we don't assume anything supernatural), then it can potentially be approximated to an arbitrarily high degree by an LLM.
- monsieurbanana 3y agoDid you just said I'm stupid? How dare you