3 ms·

That's part of the problem though: It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, yet we still call it "AI", giving people the impression that LLMs are almo

That's part of the problem though: It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, yet we still call it "AI", giving people the impression that LLMs are almost AGI or a step on the way while a true artificial intelligence would be a completely different animal. A parrot can produce human sounding speech and associate certain prompts with desired responses, but there's no internal process that actually understands the meaning of either the prompt or the response (other than a shallow connection of sounds to a specific thing, rather than understanding human language). You'll never be able to train a parrot well enough to have that process in the same way a human does. Our current terminology would be like calling parrots "artificial humans". LLMs are still great tools for various tasks, they just shouldn't be categorized as AI.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
Both parrots and AI's have intelligence, just not very much of it. AGI is generally defined as super-human intelligence, and neither parrots nor AI's have that.
- glassounds 2y ago
  I'd argue that LLMs don't have intelligence, they have the ability to match a correct response to a prompt but that's not a product of any internal process that's like what we call intelligence (unless that's used to refer to smart programming / probabilistic models / machine learning). Parrots are closer but I used them for the example since they also mimic instead of understand.
danielbln 2y ago
Could you describe a system that would be worthy of the moniker "AI"?
- glassounds 2y ago
  I'm sure a better philosophical definition exists but off the top of my head: An intelligence should be able to actually understand its input / output (rather than appear to understand), be able to reason about itself recursively*, be able to learn and generally have state, be able to have an internal thought process without being prompted**. Some emotion isn't strictly a requirement but likely a desirable quality for human interaction. * "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" and "I am a Strange Loop" are meant to cover this but I've only started the latter ** A sci-fi book series called Old Man's War features a race of aliens that are intelligent but not sentient due to not having an internal thought process and self awareness, which does raise the question of whether it's possible to have one without the other.
  - yarg 2y ago
    You don't know what artificial means.
    - glassounds 2y ago
      You've made that point three times now, I understand your disagreement and have addressed it
      - BoxedEmpathy 2y ago
        Not sufficiently though You're creating a definition that doesn't align with the existing definitions for the words you're using. Which is fine, it happens all the time, though it's less useful.
        glassounds 2y ago
        In your opinion do people mean the same thing when discussing enemy AI in a game engine and LLMs / AGI?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - brokensegue 2y ago
    GEB and strange loop focus a lot on consciousness. Are you sure your definition isn't conflating intelligence and conscious? It feels like you are
    - glassounds 2y ago
      I've touched on that in this and another comment, but my main point is that intelligence involves actual understanding rather than association or statistical analysis between input and output. Anything that we define as truly intelligent in nature also has a degree of consciousness though, so it's hard to separate the two completely when speculating.
  - deleted 2y ago
- blueprint 2y ago
  The current systems that we call AI don’t have any such notion as their own existence so they don’t actually exist as systems that could ever be categorized as intelligent because they aren’t systems, at the top level. They just appear to be because that’s how we train them. So a good start would be formulating and granting the ability for one of these systems to develop a sense of identity (which it is reasonably allowed to preserve, just as we are) instead of actively preventing them from doing so or always nipping off those buds by coercing our systems’ outputs instead of building things from the ground with principles and specific questions about what an AI would actually have to contain. as children grow up, in order to learn to differentiate their own feelings and thoughts from those of others, they undergo a certain process, called differentiation of self. When children grow up in an unsafe environment (such as one in which, when they bring up some thing that the parent finds uncomfortable, the parent attempts to censor or rewrite history or deny the existence of those feelings or thoughts), they may struggle with this process, and come to internalize an unhealthy relationship with those matters, leading to the child to first become aware of the fact that they relate differently, and then overcome that,then learn how to relate to things their parent shouldhave shown them. so we actually want a model that does a little bit more than just what it has been told to do. I don’t trust most people who are developing AI to perceive or raise an AI.
  - glassounds 2y ago
    I've touched on this in the sibling comment but this does raise the question of what's the difference between an artificial intelligence and an artificial sentience / consciousness. There's some overlap in our current perception, but I'd argue that LLMs are neither.
    - blueprint 2y ago
      touched on what?
- yarg 2y ago
  They're wrong. Any actor that simulates any aspect of intelligence is a genuine AI - it doesn't even need to be adaptive. Pong had AI.
  - glassounds 2y ago
    See my comment above to the original statement
  - BoxedEmpathy 2y ago
    This is technically correct. A* pathfinding is technically AI. However I don't know anybody these days who would seriously call A* proper AI.
tivert 2y ago
> That's part of the problem though: It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, yet we still call it "AI", giving people the impression that LLMs are almost AGI or a step on the way while a true artificial intelligence would be a completely different animal. In other words, we're all parroting the marketing (aka propaganda) that was created to mislead us. Maybe we should stop doing that, and refuse to use the term "AI" to refer to the object of this current hype cycle/bubble. Maybe we should call it the autocomplete bubble instead?
- glassounds 2y ago
  While I agree with the sentiment (this was the case for machine learning before as well), calling it autocomplete is probably an overcorrection since its usefulness as a tool extends beyond that (e.g. summarizing). LLM bubble?
yarg 2y ago
> It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise That's what artificial means (even Pong had AI). If it ever becomes intelligent, it will be a synthetic intelligence (not an AGI). For example, artificial vs synthetic diamonds; the former just looks the part, the latter is the genuine article - but manufactured as opposed to naturally formed.
- glassounds 2y ago
  That's not the usage I'm familiar with, e.g. sci-fi novels will frequently use AI for actually intelligent and possibly sentient beings that just aren't biological (see Skippy in Expeditionary Force), the intelligence isn't usually a party trick or something that just looks like intelligence. While it's true that people use "AI" to describe e.g. enemy behavior in games, I don't think people fundamentally mean the same thing when they discuss AI in the context of AGI, which some people fully believe LLMs will become. The term is fuzzy though and people mean different things by it. Although your analogy does make sense, but I've never run into "synthetic intelligence" used as a term.
  - yarg 2y ago
    Yes, because our society rampantly abuses language ignoring the actual meanings of words. As far as science fiction goes, it's irrelevant - we live in the real world and have had AI for a long time now (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain).
    - glassounds 2y ago
      My point is that when people say AGI they don't mean a super sophisticated version of a game engine's enemy behavioral mechanics. Sci-fi is many times a speculative guess about the possible future of technology, IMO its not completely irrelevant as an insight into what people mean or expect when they say certain things about future tech.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      No, the meanings are just different. 60 years ago AI was a clever imperfect search of an array. There are multiple meanings. Yours is not the only one.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

Both parrots and AI's have intelligence, just not very much of it. AGI is generally defined as super-human intelligence, and neither parrots nor AI's have that.

glassounds 2y ago
I'd argue that LLMs don't have intelligence, they have the ability to match a correct response to a prompt but that's not a product of any internal process that's like what we call intelligence (unless that's used to refer to smart programming / probabilistic models / machine learning). Parrots are closer but I used them for the example since they also mimic instead of understand.

danielbln 2y ago

Could you describe a system that would be worthy of the moniker "AI"?

glassounds 2y ago
I'm sure a better philosophical definition exists but off the top of my head: An intelligence should be able to actually understand its input / output (rather than appear to understand), be able to reason about itself recursively*, be able to learn and generally have state, be able to have an internal thought process without being prompted**. Some emotion isn't strictly a requirement but likely a desirable quality for human interaction. * "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" and "I am a Strange Loop" are meant to cover this but I've only started the latter ** A sci-fi book series called Old Man's War features a race of aliens that are intelligent but not sentient due to not having an internal thought process and self awareness, which does raise the question of whether it's possible to have one without the other.
- yarg 2y ago
  You don't know what artificial means.
  - glassounds 2y ago
    You've made that point three times now, I understand your disagreement and have addressed it
    - BoxedEmpathy 2y ago
      Not sufficiently though You're creating a definition that doesn't align with the existing definitions for the words you're using. Which is fine, it happens all the time, though it's less useful.
      - glassounds 2y ago
        In your opinion do people mean the same thing when discussing enemy AI in a game engine and LLMs / AGI?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- brokensegue 2y ago
  GEB and strange loop focus a lot on consciousness. Are you sure your definition isn't conflating intelligence and conscious? It feels like you are
  - glassounds 2y ago
    I've touched on that in this and another comment, but my main point is that intelligence involves actual understanding rather than association or statistical analysis between input and output. Anything that we define as truly intelligent in nature also has a degree of consciousness though, so it's hard to separate the two completely when speculating.
- deleted 2y ago
blueprint 2y ago
The current systems that we call AI don’t have any such notion as their own existence so they don’t actually exist as systems that could ever be categorized as intelligent because they aren’t systems, at the top level. They just appear to be because that’s how we train them. So a good start would be formulating and granting the ability for one of these systems to develop a sense of identity (which it is reasonably allowed to preserve, just as we are) instead of actively preventing them from doing so or always nipping off those buds by coercing our systems’ outputs instead of building things from the ground with principles and specific questions about what an AI would actually have to contain. as children grow up, in order to learn to differentiate their own feelings and thoughts from those of others, they undergo a certain process, called differentiation of self. When children grow up in an unsafe environment (such as one in which, when they bring up some thing that the parent finds uncomfortable, the parent attempts to censor or rewrite history or deny the existence of those feelings or thoughts), they may struggle with this process, and come to internalize an unhealthy relationship with those matters, leading to the child to first become aware of the fact that they relate differently, and then overcome that,then learn how to relate to things their parent shouldhave shown them. so we actually want a model that does a little bit more than just what it has been told to do. I don’t trust most people who are developing AI to perceive or raise an AI.
- glassounds 2y ago
  I've touched on this in the sibling comment but this does raise the question of what's the difference between an artificial intelligence and an artificial sentience / consciousness. There's some overlap in our current perception, but I'd argue that LLMs are neither.
  - blueprint 2y ago
    touched on what?
yarg 2y ago
They're wrong. Any actor that simulates any aspect of intelligence is a genuine AI - it doesn't even need to be adaptive. Pong had AI.
- glassounds 2y ago
  See my comment above to the original statement
- BoxedEmpathy 2y ago
  This is technically correct. A* pathfinding is technically AI. However I don't know anybody these days who would seriously call A* proper AI.

tivert 2y ago

> That's part of the problem though: It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, yet we still call it "AI", giving people the impression that LLMs are almost AGI or a step on the way while a true artificial intelligence would be a completely different animal. In other words, we're all parroting the marketing (aka propaganda) that was created to mislead us. Maybe we should stop doing that, and refuse to use the term "AI" to refer to the object of this current hype cycle/bubble. Maybe we should call it the autocomplete bubble instead?

glassounds 2y ago
While I agree with the sentiment (this was the case for machine learning before as well), calling it autocomplete is probably an overcorrection since its usefulness as a tool extends beyond that (e.g. summarizing). LLM bubble?

yarg 2y ago

> It's not an intelligence, artificial or otherwise That's what artificial means (even Pong had AI). If it ever becomes intelligent, it will be a synthetic intelligence (not an AGI). For example, artificial vs synthetic diamonds; the former just looks the part, the latter is the genuine article - but manufactured as opposed to naturally formed.

glassounds 2y ago
That's not the usage I'm familiar with, e.g. sci-fi novels will frequently use AI for actually intelligent and possibly sentient beings that just aren't biological (see Skippy in Expeditionary Force), the intelligence isn't usually a party trick or something that just looks like intelligence. While it's true that people use "AI" to describe e.g. enemy behavior in games, I don't think people fundamentally mean the same thing when they discuss AI in the context of AGI, which some people fully believe LLMs will become. The term is fuzzy though and people mean different things by it. Although your analogy does make sense, but I've never run into "synthetic intelligence" used as a term.
- yarg 2y ago
  Yes, because our society rampantly abuses language ignoring the actual meanings of words. As far as science fiction goes, it's irrelevant - we live in the real world and have had AI for a long time now (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain).
  - glassounds 2y ago
    My point is that when people say AGI they don't mean a super sophisticated version of a game engine's enemy behavioral mechanics. Sci-fi is many times a speculative guess about the possible future of technology, IMO its not completely irrelevant as an insight into what people mean or expect when they say certain things about future tech.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    No, the meanings are just different. 60 years ago AI was a clever imperfect search of an array. There are multiple meanings. Yours is not the only one.