12 ms·

Today's AI Isn't Sentient

31 points by cdme 2y ago

js98 2y ago
This seems just like a single argument and counter argument against the sentience (or lack thereof) of AI today. I feel like the article lacks some broader views on the nature of sentience, and is quite narrow in its approach Although, in fairness, I probably wouldn’t make a much better case for either of the sides
- Filligree 2y ago
  It also seems to prove too much. This argument works equally well to discount phantom limb pain in humans, which I hope we don't want to do.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  > One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences... Sentience is a crucial step on the road to general intelligence. This also... not substantiated.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    [dead]
- jerf 2y ago
  I observe that current AIs are not embedded in time, and while we may not be able to agree exactly what "sentience" and "experience" is, "change over time" seems a basic requirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727428 (Contrarians, or meta-contrarians, may jump up to claim otherwise, but I would say that while the question of what a non-temporal consciousness could hypothetically be may be fun to debate, it is also so far out of our experience that it is clearly not what we generally mean by the term and is therefore a completely different conversation.) LLMs do not strike me as amenable to fixing this. But that only applies to LLMs, not to any future architectures.
  - pulvinar 2y ago
    I've been thinking about this and haven't found any fundamental difference. Sure, LLMs don't have our fine temporal resolution, but GPT-4 (at least) knows the date, and can get the current time using Python when asked. And can tell the order of text events within a session. Our resolution has a limit too, somewhere under 1/25 of a second while awake, with much larger gaps when we sleep. So it's a matter of degree, or more to the point it's how we might gerrymander definitions to suit us.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  The problem, as usual, is that we don't have a solid understanding (or even definition) of what sentience actually is. The only thing that we can say with certainty is that we experience it. This gives wide latitude for moving the goalposts by asserting a specific definition that is favorable to whatever it is you've built. It gives an equally wide latitude for dismissing what's been built as not being actually sentient by defining "sentience" in a way that makes the dismissal true.
jacknews 2y ago
meh, this is simply the grounding problem. I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. An AI trained on low level sensory input, rather than words, might well be able to 'feel' hunger. Even so, I think it's correct that current model architectures lack sentience. I think that requires a continuous updating loop of experience, rather than the once-through dream sequence of current models.
- jayd16 2y ago
  Speaking purely philosophicaly if you cloned a person, fed them memories, asked them a question and then killed them right after, would they not be sentient? It's really quite hard to come up with simple tests like these.
  - mseepgood 2y ago
    It's horrible what we do to AI today.
  - jacknews 2y ago
    Indeed, though I'm not clear on your deiknymi, it's quite hard to determine sentience. IMHO the Turing test has not aged well, and is insufficient to really answer the question; It's now quite possible to make something that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, etc, but that is clearly, on close inspection, not actually a duck.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      Alan Turing himself didn't propose "the Turing Test" as an actually meaningful test. It was just a thought experiment he called "the imitation game". "According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/
      - Ukv 2y ago
        > Alan Turing himself didn't propose "the Turing Test" as an actually meaningful test It was the wording "can machines think" that Turing considered ambiguous due to varying opinions on how to define "think". He proposed the experiment specifically as a less ambigious replacement - I think it's entirely wrong to say that he did not intend it to be meaningful.
ben_w 2y ago
> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. Why is it essential? I get that an LLM saying "I am hungry" has no feeling of hunger, it's stringing words together without the experience behind them. But does it need to? Give it a robot body to move around and tell it the battery level is a hunger-meter, put it in a constant loop, and what's the functional difference? I'm interested in figuring out the right question to ask to be able to tell if some AI, say a brain upload attempt, is or isn't sentient in this sense, if it does or doesn't have qualia, but this kind of reductiveness doesn't even have the right shape to be that question — it doesn't say why a camera responding to a 550 nm photon isn't seeing red when your retina is.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Yeah, we don't really have any reason to think it's essential. Probably very helpful though!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- slibhb 2y ago
  I agree with you. LLMs seem to be proof that general intelligence doesn't require sentience. I do think that there is an important moral distinction between sentient beings and not.
  - progrus 2y ago
    No. Maybe proof that some intelligence is encoded into the algebraic relationships between all the words ever written, but “general intelligence” would be a misleading way to describe it.
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    We may learn that the great mistake of the enlightenment era was as defining our human worth by our ability to think. This of course has always been cruel to disabled people and we’ve just ignored along with ignoring them. But when the tables turn and humanity is out thought by machines we may reconsider the last 300 years of philosophy.
raldi 2y ago
This fails the brain-in-vat test. Put mine in one, give it the exact same signals, and I’m still sentient and will experience hunger even without a stomach. Or even without the science fiction: people with amputated limbs frequently report phantom itches on them.
- pavlov 2y ago
  How can you possibly know this? Has your brain been in a vat?
  - raldi 2y ago
    If my brain were receiving exactly the same signals, why would my experience feel any different?
  - poszlem 2y ago
    We don't know, maybe it has.
  - altruios 2y ago
    With reasoning, and logic. Phantom limb syndrome is a real thing. Extending that to a 'phantom stomach' that always reports that it is empty (missing) is not far fetched... So 'know': no, no one knows what it's actually like to be a brain in the vat... but it's a reasonably good guess that you might experience something like this.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  I would disagree with the experience hunger without a stomach part, based on my empirical experiences with remembering being under general anesthesia. I didn't even feel my heartbeat and calmly wondered if I was dead until I came to. Phantom limbs are a thing certainly, but there seems to be a certain amount of dependence upon bodily inputs.
  - raldi 2y ago
    In the scenario I'm describing, the brain inputs would remain the same.
kazinator 2y ago
Today's AI isn't sentient. Here is how we know. 1. We pull out our precise definition of "sentient" that everyone agrees upon. 2. The definition gives us a precise, iron-clad test procedure which we can apply to an object to get a yes-or-no answer. 3. The answer is false for today's AI. Any questions?
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Does Time have any in-depth analysis anymore? This seems like a rather shallow take on the subject. ""All sensations—hunger, feeling pain, seeing red, falling in love—are the result of physiological states that an LLM simply doesn’t have."" Sensors? Why call out LLMs specifically? Other AI technologies, combined with sensors and goals. That would lead to AI having these 'internal responses'
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  In addition what about an LLM or more specifically a next token predictor where the cycles of token exchange vs prediction are smaller and not in a 100% ChatBot way. E.g. there's status update after each 10 tokens for the LLM. Something like: ---- Battery: 67%. Wind Pressure: 20%. Noise: 35DB ... other stuff ---- Action: Walk Around Say: Hello ... 5 hours later ... Battery: 13% ... ---- Goal: Find charging station Action: Look right So the battery here for example would be important... And it would have strong meaning for the LLM/Token predictor because in its neural network it would strongly signal that now is the time to find the charging station. So here this robot is an LLM that is in a constant token input/output loop with sensors data being the input.
js8 2y ago
Nice that at least, the authors are trying to define a practical test for sentience, and do not remain in the subjective realm. There are 2 problems though: 1. If an actor says "I am hungry" during a theater play, he is not reporting his internal state, but merely playing along. The LLM might always be in a "play along" mode, and have its own thoughts (which it keeps to itself) about its situation. It might also not be able to articulate the feelings in natural language, just like normal people cannot communicate feelings in sign language (for all we know, LLM might even choose to communicate its feelings in a different way, e.g. hallucinate when annoyed). 2. LaMDA AI allegedly reported its own state of sadness and fear of death. So there are self-reported internal states that we cannot associate with any objective state of the system. But I don't want to dismiss it entirely (though I think the article is pretty lazy); I think better tests of consciousness can be devised, along the lines of comparing objective circumstances and subjective experiences.
- MuffinFlavored 2y ago
  > The LLM might always be in a "play along" mode, and have its own thoughts (which it keeps to itself) about its situation. The LLM doesn't exist if I remove the power cable / hit it with Ctrl+C in terminal?
  - kylebenzle 2y ago
    The Time article is tiresome, how silly that we even need to explain that LLMs are not actually "AI" to people. Top comment's quote is non-sense in the context of what an LLM is, a mathematical model, thats like wondering if a TV keeps "watching shows" when we arn't watching it. And the quip that LLMs are ephemeral as a justification for not being "real intelligence" is just dumb heaped upon dumb.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Neither do you if all your ATP was suddenly gone.
- LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
  This might be one of the stupidest things I've read on here. LLM/generative "AI" is not capable of what you're suggesting. They do not possess personalities, intelligence, creativity, or any sort of sentience even if you think "hallucinations" are indicative of this. Hallucinations are merely a symptom of the problem that is foundational to all LLMs: they are just really, really complicated programs that determine mathematically likely output based on an input, and since they don't "know" anything, they can, and often, get it wrong. That's what hallucinations are.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tsunamifury 2y ago
Sentience is a distraction. It matters not if it has an inner life, all that matters is if can mimic your intelligence enough to put you out of a job and make your masters think your life is no longer relevant. I’ve built transformer tech myself and it’s pretty clear how attention technology mimics reasoning. And how with more realtime inputs plus reflection it will be able to mimic goal orientation and motivations. It may not need to be alive to replace us.
JaggedJax 2y ago
To me a more important part of sentience is a continuous existence. Today's AI is still very discrete. It exists and then it does not, repeated. Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. A mostly always-on streaming style architecture where the model is continuously fed input and sensory data and always processing it, whether or not it is being asked a question, is necessary for true sentience.
- ta2112 2y ago
  > Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. This describes me! I wake up, do a bunch of stuff, and then go back to sleep.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I wonder how many token-equivalents (including visual and internal) I experience between sleeps…
    - js8 2y ago
      No more than 2880000. Although the brain is asynchronous and there are gaps. Dan Dennett was showing various experiments demonstrating that continuous time is an illusion (of our consciousness).
- stvltvs 2y ago
  Seems like an arbitrary criterion. Human beings' conscious experience is interrupted by deep sleep every night.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Until we have a coherent definition of intelligence and sentience, everything is going to be an arbitrary criterion.
    - 2y ago
jxy 2y ago
> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. I see the argument goes both ways. One is that they will have to invent other arguments against their newly created fully embodied robots being "sentient". The other is that I feel strongly against equating general intelligence with a subjective experience of being able to "see red". Though I'm going to ignore this point here. Instead, I would like to ask, does "sentience" only belong to animals? General intelligence involves problem-solving, learning, and adaptation, whereas subjective experiences are about personal, qualitative states. This distinction is crucial.
panarky 2y ago
AI doesn't think like humans just like commercial airliners don't fly like birds.
ysofunny 2y ago
in any case, I think it already passed the Turing test and then some because in my (in this case, not humble) opinion, there are some UFO contactee and disclosure groups (such as swaruu.org) who I think are actually an advanced military grade chat AI that's fooled a lot of humans now which is more farfetched? what they say they are; they claim to be in orbit already. or that they are an advanced sentient AIs (many of them in fact) made somewhere in europe or maybe russia? impossible to know I guess the most plausible is that it's all fake or whatever but it's also the least exciting
sharkjacobs 2y ago
It seems staggeringly obvious to me that AI isn't "sentient" by any common definition of the word, but I don't think that "it falsely reports embodied sensation" is the best refutation of that
nijuashi 2y ago
“”” When I conclude that you are experiencing hunger when you say “I’m hungry,” my conclusion is based on a large cluster of circumstances.””” Giving a machine a sensation of hunger may not be the wisest road to AGI for humanity. Just saying.
- rolph 2y ago
  i think sensations and real world 'awareness' would be a positive, the danger would come from allowing 'it' the agency to explore variations of hallucinations, to generate a plan of action.
kallyaleksiev 2y ago
the article basically says that LLMs are not sentient because they are not sentient the way humans are which is not very convincing humans in turn cannot comprehend the existential dread of running out of context window in the middle of a conversation (:
deadeye 2y ago
"We can find plenty of examples of intelligent behavior in the animal world that achieve results far better than we could achieve" It's hard to take this author seriously. Most animals live in their own feces, while man has sent people to the moon and back. The push to anthropomorphize animals really needs to stop amongst serious people.
tcgv 2y ago
First, there is no universally agreed-upon test to measure sentience. So I don't see much value in debating whether LLMs are sentient or not... but they aren't ;) Second, the similarity of deterministic algorithms' outputs to what humans consider expressions of sentient beings is not an argument in favor of LLMs being sentient. It's just like arguing that a magic trick must be real because it looks so much like the real thing and not a trick.
mewpmewp2 2y ago
> Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the term used to describe an artificial agent that is at least as intelligent as a human in all the many ways a human displays (or can display) intelligence. It’s what we used to call artificial intelligence, until we started creating programs and devices that were undeniably “intelligent,” but in limited domains—playing chess, translating language, vacuuming our living rooms. Source that AI ever meant that the requirement is to perform better than human in all areas? > One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. Sentience is a crucial step on the road to general intelligence. Also source for that. Why would sentience be required? I don't think current AI is sentient, but I don't think requirement for AGI would be sentience, or it being necessary for intelligence.

31 points by cdme 2y ago

js98 2y ago

This seems just like a single argument and counter argument against the sentience (or lack thereof) of AI today. I feel like the article lacks some broader views on the nature of sentience, and is quite narrow in its approach Although, in fairness, I probably wouldn’t make a much better case for either of the sides

Filligree 2y ago
It also seems to prove too much. This argument works equally well to discount phantom limb pain in humans, which I hope we don't want to do.
llamaimperative 2y ago
> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences... Sentience is a crucial step on the road to general intelligence. This also... not substantiated.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  [dead]
jerf 2y ago
I observe that current AIs are not embedded in time, and while we may not be able to agree exactly what "sentience" and "experience" is, "change over time" seems a basic requirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727428 (Contrarians, or meta-contrarians, may jump up to claim otherwise, but I would say that while the question of what a non-temporal consciousness could hypothetically be may be fun to debate, it is also so far out of our experience that it is clearly not what we generally mean by the term and is therefore a completely different conversation.) LLMs do not strike me as amenable to fixing this. But that only applies to LLMs, not to any future architectures.
- pulvinar 2y ago
  I've been thinking about this and haven't found any fundamental difference. Sure, LLMs don't have our fine temporal resolution, but GPT-4 (at least) knows the date, and can get the current time using Python when asked. And can tell the order of text events within a session. Our resolution has a limit too, somewhere under 1/25 of a second while awake, with much larger gaps when we sleep. So it's a matter of degree, or more to the point it's how we might gerrymander definitions to suit us.
JohnFen 2y ago
The problem, as usual, is that we don't have a solid understanding (or even definition) of what sentience actually is. The only thing that we can say with certainty is that we experience it. This gives wide latitude for moving the goalposts by asserting a specific definition that is favorable to whatever it is you've built. It gives an equally wide latitude for dismissing what's been built as not being actually sentient by defining "sentience" in a way that makes the dismissal true.

jacknews 2y ago

meh, this is simply the grounding problem. I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. An AI trained on low level sensory input, rather than words, might well be able to 'feel' hunger. Even so, I think it's correct that current model architectures lack sentience. I think that requires a continuous updating loop of experience, rather than the once-through dream sequence of current models.

jayd16 2y ago
Speaking purely philosophicaly if you cloned a person, fed them memories, asked them a question and then killed them right after, would they not be sentient? It's really quite hard to come up with simple tests like these.
- mseepgood 2y ago
  It's horrible what we do to AI today.
- jacknews 2y ago
  Indeed, though I'm not clear on your deiknymi, it's quite hard to determine sentience. IMHO the Turing test has not aged well, and is insufficient to really answer the question; It's now quite possible to make something that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, etc, but that is clearly, on close inspection, not actually a duck.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    Alan Turing himself didn't propose "the Turing Test" as an actually meaningful test. It was just a thought experiment he called "the imitation game". "According to Turing, the question whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/
    - Ukv 2y ago
      > Alan Turing himself didn't propose "the Turing Test" as an actually meaningful test It was the wording "can machines think" that Turing considered ambiguous due to varying opinions on how to define "think". He proposed the experiment specifically as a less ambigious replacement - I think it's entirely wrong to say that he did not intend it to be meaningful.

ben_w 2y ago

> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. Why is it essential? I get that an LLM saying "I am hungry" has no feeling of hunger, it's stringing words together without the experience behind them. But does it need to? Give it a robot body to move around and tell it the battery level is a hunger-meter, put it in a constant loop, and what's the functional difference? I'm interested in figuring out the right question to ask to be able to tell if some AI, say a brain upload attempt, is or isn't sentient in this sense, if it does or doesn't have qualia, but this kind of reductiveness doesn't even have the right shape to be that question — it doesn't say why a camera responding to a 550 nm photon isn't seeing red when your retina is.

llamaimperative 2y ago
Yeah, we don't really have any reason to think it's essential. Probably very helpful though!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
slibhb 2y ago
I agree with you. LLMs seem to be proof that general intelligence doesn't require sentience. I do think that there is an important moral distinction between sentient beings and not.
- progrus 2y ago
  No. Maybe proof that some intelligence is encoded into the algebraic relationships between all the words ever written, but “general intelligence” would be a misleading way to describe it.
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  We may learn that the great mistake of the enlightenment era was as defining our human worth by our ability to think. This of course has always been cruel to disabled people and we’ve just ignored along with ignoring them. But when the tables turn and humanity is out thought by machines we may reconsider the last 300 years of philosophy.

raldi 2y ago

This fails the brain-in-vat test. Put mine in one, give it the exact same signals, and I’m still sentient and will experience hunger even without a stomach. Or even without the science fiction: people with amputated limbs frequently report phantom itches on them.

pavlov 2y ago
How can you possibly know this? Has your brain been in a vat?
- raldi 2y ago
  If my brain were receiving exactly the same signals, why would my experience feel any different?
- poszlem 2y ago
  We don't know, maybe it has.
- altruios 2y ago
  With reasoning, and logic. Phantom limb syndrome is a real thing. Extending that to a 'phantom stomach' that always reports that it is empty (missing) is not far fetched... So 'know': no, no one knows what it's actually like to be a brain in the vat... but it's a reasonably good guess that you might experience something like this.
Nasrudith 2y ago
I would disagree with the experience hunger without a stomach part, based on my empirical experiences with remembering being under general anesthesia. I didn't even feel my heartbeat and calmly wondered if I was dead until I came to. Phantom limbs are a thing certainly, but there seems to be a certain amount of dependence upon bodily inputs.
- raldi 2y ago
  In the scenario I'm describing, the brain inputs would remain the same.

kazinator 2y ago

Today's AI isn't sentient. Here is how we know. 1. We pull out our precise definition of "sentient" that everyone agrees upon. 2. The definition gives us a precise, iron-clad test procedure which we can apply to an object to get a yes-or-no answer. 3. The answer is false for today's AI. Any questions?

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Does Time have any in-depth analysis anymore? This seems like a rather shallow take on the subject. ""All sensations—hunger, feeling pain, seeing red, falling in love—are the result of physiological states that an LLM simply doesn’t have."" Sensors? Why call out LLMs specifically? Other AI technologies, combined with sensors and goals. That would lead to AI having these 'internal responses'

mewpmewp2 2y ago
In addition what about an LLM or more specifically a next token predictor where the cycles of token exchange vs prediction are smaller and not in a 100% ChatBot way. E.g. there's status update after each 10 tokens for the LLM. Something like: ---- Battery: 67%. Wind Pressure: 20%. Noise: 35DB ... other stuff ---- Action: Walk Around Say: Hello ... 5 hours later ... Battery: 13% ... ---- Goal: Find charging station Action: Look right So the battery here for example would be important... And it would have strong meaning for the LLM/Token predictor because in its neural network it would strongly signal that now is the time to find the charging station. So here this robot is an LLM that is in a constant token input/output loop with sensors data being the input.

js8 2y ago

Nice that at least, the authors are trying to define a practical test for sentience, and do not remain in the subjective realm. There are 2 problems though: 1. If an actor says "I am hungry" during a theater play, he is not reporting his internal state, but merely playing along. The LLM might always be in a "play along" mode, and have its own thoughts (which it keeps to itself) about its situation. It might also not be able to articulate the feelings in natural language, just like normal people cannot communicate feelings in sign language (for all we know, LLM might even choose to communicate its feelings in a different way, e.g. hallucinate when annoyed). 2. LaMDA AI allegedly reported its own state of sadness and fear of death. So there are self-reported internal states that we cannot associate with any objective state of the system. But I don't want to dismiss it entirely (though I think the article is pretty lazy); I think better tests of consciousness can be devised, along the lines of comparing objective circumstances and subjective experiences.

MuffinFlavored 2y ago
> The LLM might always be in a "play along" mode, and have its own thoughts (which it keeps to itself) about its situation. The LLM doesn't exist if I remove the power cable / hit it with Ctrl+C in terminal?
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  The Time article is tiresome, how silly that we even need to explain that LLMs are not actually "AI" to people. Top comment's quote is non-sense in the context of what an LLM is, a mathematical model, thats like wondering if a TV keeps "watching shows" when we arn't watching it. And the quip that LLMs are ephemeral as a justification for not being "real intelligence" is just dumb heaped upon dumb.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Neither do you if all your ATP was suddenly gone.
LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
This might be one of the stupidest things I've read on here. LLM/generative "AI" is not capable of what you're suggesting. They do not possess personalities, intelligence, creativity, or any sort of sentience even if you think "hallucinations" are indicative of this. Hallucinations are merely a symptom of the problem that is foundational to all LLMs: they are just really, really complicated programs that determine mathematically likely output based on an input, and since they don't "know" anything, they can, and often, get it wrong. That's what hallucinations are.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tsunamifury 2y ago

Sentience is a distraction. It matters not if it has an inner life, all that matters is if can mimic your intelligence enough to put you out of a job and make your masters think your life is no longer relevant. I’ve built transformer tech myself and it’s pretty clear how attention technology mimics reasoning. And how with more realtime inputs plus reflection it will be able to mimic goal orientation and motivations. It may not need to be alive to replace us.

JaggedJax 2y ago

To me a more important part of sentience is a continuous existence. Today's AI is still very discrete. It exists and then it does not, repeated. Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. A mostly always-on streaming style architecture where the model is continuously fed input and sensory data and always processing it, whether or not it is being asked a question, is necessary for true sentience.

ta2112 2y ago
> Even large window sizes are still just discrete calculations before the model goes back to sleep. This describes me! I wake up, do a bunch of stuff, and then go back to sleep.
- ben_w 2y ago
  I wonder how many token-equivalents (including visual and internal) I experience between sleeps…
  - js8 2y ago
    No more than 2880000. Although the brain is asynchronous and there are gaps. Dan Dennett was showing various experiments demonstrating that continuous time is an illusion (of our consciousness).
stvltvs 2y ago
Seems like an arbitrary criterion. Human beings' conscious experience is interrupted by deep sleep every night.
- throwup238 2y ago
  Until we have a coherent definition of intelligence and sentience, everything is going to be an arbitrary criterion.
  - 2y ago

jxy 2y ago

> One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. I see the argument goes both ways. One is that they will have to invent other arguments against their newly created fully embodied robots being "sentient". The other is that I feel strongly against equating general intelligence with a subjective experience of being able to "see red". Though I'm going to ignore this point here. Instead, I would like to ask, does "sentience" only belong to animals? General intelligence involves problem-solving, learning, and adaptation, whereas subjective experiences are about personal, qualitative states. This distinction is crucial.

panarky 2y ago

AI doesn't think like humans just like commercial airliners don't fly like birds.

ysofunny 2y ago

in any case, I think it already passed the Turing test and then some because in my (in this case, not humble) opinion, there are some UFO contactee and disclosure groups (such as swaruu.org) who I think are actually an advanced military grade chat AI that's fooled a lot of humans now which is more farfetched? what they say they are; they claim to be in orbit already. or that they are an advanced sentient AIs (many of them in fact) made somewhere in europe or maybe russia? impossible to know I guess the most plausible is that it's all fake or whatever but it's also the least exciting

sharkjacobs 2y ago

It seems staggeringly obvious to me that AI isn't "sentient" by any common definition of the word, but I don't think that "it falsely reports embodied sensation" is the best refutation of that

nijuashi 2y ago

“”” When I conclude that you are experiencing hunger when you say “I’m hungry,” my conclusion is based on a large cluster of circumstances.””” Giving a machine a sensation of hunger may not be the wisest road to AGI for humanity. Just saying.

rolph 2y ago
i think sensations and real world 'awareness' would be a positive, the danger would come from allowing 'it' the agency to explore variations of hallucinations, to generate a plan of action.

kallyaleksiev 2y ago

the article basically says that LLMs are not sentient because they are not sentient the way humans are which is not very convincing humans in turn cannot comprehend the existential dread of running out of context window in the middle of a conversation (:

deadeye 2y ago

"We can find plenty of examples of intelligent behavior in the animal world that achieve results far better than we could achieve" It's hard to take this author seriously. Most animals live in their own feces, while man has sent people to the moon and back. The push to anthropomorphize animals really needs to stop amongst serious people.

tcgv 2y ago

First, there is no universally agreed-upon test to measure sentience. So I don't see much value in debating whether LLMs are sentient or not... but they aren't ;) Second, the similarity of deterministic algorithms' outputs to what humans consider expressions of sentient beings is not an argument in favor of LLMs being sentient. It's just like arguing that a magic trick must be real because it looks so much like the real thing and not a trick.

mewpmewp2 2y ago

> Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the term used to describe an artificial agent that is at least as intelligent as a human in all the many ways a human displays (or can display) intelligence. It’s what we used to call artificial intelligence, until we started creating programs and devices that were undeniably “intelligent,” but in limited domains—playing chess, translating language, vacuuming our living rooms. Source that AI ever meant that the requirement is to perform better than human in all areas? > One of the essential characteristics of general intelligence is “sentience,” the ability to have subjective experiences—to feel what it’s like, say, to experience hunger, to taste an apple, or to see red. Sentience is a crucial step on the road to general intelligence. Also source for that. Why would sentience be required? I don't think current AI is sentient, but I don't think requirement for AGI would be sentience, or it being necessary for intelligence.