7 ms·

AI Is the Black Mirror

75 points by Jun8 2y ago

kazinator 2y ago
> With ChatGPT, the output you see is a reflection of human intelligence, our creative preferences, our coding expertise, our voices—whatever we put in. Sure, but it's a reflection of a large amount of human intelligence, from many individualks, almost instantly available (in a certain form) to one individual.
- magic_hamster 2y ago
  Not really. It's a derivative of that being thrown back at you via statistics.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    People throw "statistics" as if it's something derogatory. All knowledge about how universe works that we ever obtained was through the use of statistics.
    - magic_hamster 2y ago
      Statistics play a massive role in our universe, and evidence suggests that even the very fabric of the universe is statistic. I am not putting statistics down, however I do think statistics are orthogonal to a deliberate thought. Which is why I can't see LLMs as a very smart person making deliberate discussion just yet.
      - bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
        > and evidence suggests that even the very fabric of the universe is statistic No, there’s no evidence suggesting that. If you are refering to the mathematical universe, its a fun mental excersise, not a serious idea.
        jstanley 2y ago
        It's a very serious idea! It's actually the only idea that explains how the universe came to exist with nothing outside it and no creator.
        scotty79 2y ago
        > how the universe came to exist with nothing outside it and no creator It think that's the most boring and irrelevant question in human culture and I believe humanity is about a million years from tackling it in any competent manner. We have way more to find out about our smallness and irrelevance first.
      - yes_man 2y ago
        What is ”deliberate thought”? And why would human level intelligence require it? Wouldn’t performance of any intelligence be completely separate of how it produces the output? I mean if an AI one day surpasses human performance in every conceivable task, is the argument still going to be ”yeah but I feel like it’s not deliberate thought, it’s just statistics”?
      - Lerc 2y ago
        There's a lot hanging on what you mean by deliberate thought here. I'll just label whatever you mean X I presume you are claiming by saying orthogonal that statistics are neither required nor preclude X. You are using the presence of statistical processes as a claim against ChatGPT with >It's a derivative of that being thrown back at you via statistics. For this to have any weight given the orthogonal claim, you are asserting that LLMs are entirely statistics (the property you assert is orthogonal and thus carries no weight, yet invoking it as a property suggests that it is relevant, presumably because there are no other properties) Then we get into the weeds of what you mean by statistics. It could be broad or narrow. If it is narrow then it is easy to claim neither sufficient nor precluding, but extremely hard to draw any other conclusion because any system can break free of the proof by including the tiniest bit that does not fit within the narrow definition of statistics. If the definition is broader to include everything that happens within ChatGPT, then you are faced with the question of what is not covered by that definition of statistics. How can you show that human minds do not operate within those limitations. I don't think that ChatGPT is conscious in any sense that would be meaningful to a layman, but I also don't think that you can demonstrate it could not be purely based on the fact it uses any particular process without a rigorous proof of the limitations of that process. The only way you could reasonably
    - visarga 2y ago
      We are indirectly applying derogatory language to the training set, which is our own culture. Strange position to despise our own past knowledge, took us a long time to compile it. Even if someone thinks LLMs are just stochastic parrots, they parrot our own thoughts. But if we accept LLMs as more than parrots, like an improv jazz musician adapting to the audience and always creating something new recombining the old in novel ways, then it is even less justified to despise LLM outputs. The whole parrot idea is half baked. Yes, in closed book mode, and without a seed prompt that ads anything new to the existing knowledge of the model, it will parrot (adapt) from its training data. But if you add novel data in the prompt, then we push it outside its training distribution, and it learns on the fly. And usually all interactions bring some new elements to the model, new knowledge or skills, or new context. The more elaborate the prompts, the longer the session of messages, the less parroting takes place. The O3 model performance on ARC-AGI is another argument against the reductionist idea of parroting.
  - j45 2y ago
    While it's math, the experience of it is in the same medium it's being interacted with - text.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It's "statistics" in the same sense your own thoughts are. Or, it's not "statistics" as in they average the shit out and call it a day, like idk computing a census, or a report to your boss about the impact of most recent ad campaign, or something. It's "statistics" in the sense of dealing with probability distributions, systematically teasing out correlations and causal relationships in inputs too fuzzy to handle symbolically. Of which language is literally the prime example. All that talk about grammar and sentence structure and symbolic transformations and Chomsky etc. is just bullshit - it's not how we do it at all, which is obvious to anyone who was forced to learn grammar and sentence breakdown at school, and started wondering how come they already know to speak without knowing all this. Nah, we learn the language the same way LLMs do - by immersion and feedback, until we're able to say what "feels right" and be right. All those formalisms are basically fitting probability distributions with neat symbolic approximations, and are as valid as replacing Navier–Stokes equations with a linear function because that's how it looks like in typical case and we don't know any better. So yeah, it's all "thrown back at you via statistics". So is all of the human thought it's derivative of. Embrace it: we're all "statistical machines".
    - magic_hamster 2y ago
      > It's "statistics" in the same sense your own thoughts are. And you know this how? > we learn the language the same way LLMs do Based on? > So yeah, it's all "thrown back at you via statistics". So is all of the human thought it's derivative of You say this based on what? Do you have any real research to support any of this? Because from what I see in the neuroscience community, LLMs are not even remotely an approximation of a real brain, despite being built of "neurons" (which are nothing like real neurons).
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        > And you know this how? Probability theory, computability theory. There's no other way. > Based on? High-level description of the learning approach, and approximately the entirety of recorded human history? > Because from what I see in the neuroscience community, LLMs are not even remotely an approximation of a real brain, despite being built of "neurons" (which are nothing like real neurons). So what? Neurons in silica are to neurons in vivo as my Twitter clone in 15 lines of terse Perl is to the actual web-scale monstrosity a Twitter or other modern scalable SaaS is. I.e. it does the same core thing faster and better, but obviously lacks incidental, supporting complexity to work in the same environment as the real thing. Yes, a biological neuron is huge and complex. But a biological neuron is, first and foremost, an incrementally evolved, independent, self-replicating and self-maintaining nanomachine, tuned to be a part of a specialized self-assembling system, filling a role in a large and diverse ensemble of other specialized nanomachines. Incidentally, a neuron also computes - but it's not computing that uses this complexity, it's all the self-replicating self-assembling nanomachine business that needs it. There's absolutely no reason to believe that neurons in silica need to be comparably complex to crack intelligence - not when we're free to strip the problem out of all the Kubernetes/protein nanomachine incidental complexity business, and focus on the core computation.
tzury 2y ago
AI is next phase in our evolution, a path chosen by natural selection. This is my opinion, my view and how I set my life to embrace it and immerse into it. I actually wrote a piece about it a day ago. https://blog.tarab.ai/p/evolution-mi-and-the-forgotten-human https://blog.tarab.ai/p/evolution-mi-and-the-forgotten-human Sorry for the “self promotion”, but it’s a direct relation to the topic.
- magic_hamster 2y ago
  [flagged]
- Vecr 2y ago
  What path of reasoning lead you to think natural selection is good? Because it's natural?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
    What the
    - Vecr 2y ago
      Future natural selection that is.
  - tzury 2y ago
    Not sure what you mean by “good”, it’s just going to happen. We could have developed like trees and plants or mushrooms, with no brain and less pain, perhaps, and keep our DNA moving along forward. But it happened to be that way.
- kmnc 2y ago
  Me taking a shit tomorrow is the next phase in our evolution, a path chosen by natural selection.
- 2y ago
scotty79 2y ago
It's weird how I drifted away from this article only after few paragraphs as if it was AI slop.
- karczex 2y ago
  After a while I started to think this article is AI generated gibberish. After deeper thought I came to conclusion that appearance of LLM made internet as source of information completely unreliable.
  - rhaps0dy 2y ago
    Maybe stuff like this was already gibberish before LLMs.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      It was; people like to blame slop on AI like if it was new. It wasn't. Before current AI hysteria, we just called it content marketing. So, if this text reads like a slop, consider perhaps it may be just personal promotion. I mean, "AI ethicist" with a book, denouncing experts for saying reasonable and arguably obvious things, because they violate some nebulous and incoherent "humanistic"[0] values? Nah, I think someone wants to sell us some more books. -- [0] - Scare quotes because I actually like humanistic stuff; I just don't like stuff that doesn't make sense.
  - Lerc 2y ago
    The internet as a source of information was always unreliable. LLM's just made that more apparent. It is like people consider Wikipedia unreliable because anyone can edit it, but multiple studies have shown that Wikipedia tends to be more accurate than sources such as encyclopedias. This is not people being wary of unreliable material, but being wary when they can perceive the unreliability clearly. I don't know if evaluating reliability by the lack of awareness of unreliability is a recognised fallacy, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be.
  - scotty79 2y ago
Vecr 2y ago
Where are the actual arguments? She states that AI is a mirror, and yeah, you put stuff in and you get stuff out, but who thinks otherwise? There are interesting ways to argue for humans being special, but I read the entire article and unless I missed something important there's nothing like that there.
mebutnotme 2y ago
The argument here seems to be AI can’t become a mind as it does not experience. There is a counter argument though that the way we access our past experiences is via the neural pathways we lay down during those experiences and that with the new neural networks AIs now have we have given them those same pathways just in a different way. At present I don’t think it is yet at the same point but when the AI can adjust those pathways, add more in compute time (infinite memory like tech) and is allowed to ‘think’ about those pathways then I can see it gaining our level or better of philosophical thought.
- lproven 2y ago
  > The argument here seems to be AI can’t become a mind as it does not experience. Er, no, I don't think that is the argument.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    You apparently have a better sense of what the argument is than I do [0], would you explain? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42484852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42484852
    - lproven 2y ago
      I think the primary points that I took away were: * LLMs provide a mirage: there is really nothing there at all, but they sometimes can look like they are exhibiting intelligence but that's because they are repeating statistically-remixed intelligent input. * However, the tech-bro culture that has fermented in Silicon Valley has resulted in a large bunch of people who are irrational, have no concern for logic or truth, but who feed on each other's groupthink, and from that culture, a religious-like mindset has emerged -- strongly reflected in some of the comments here, for what it's worth -- that is basically a sort of messianic cult. It preaches: - greed is good, etc. (Wall St, Gordon Gekko etc.) - disrupt, automate humans out of the loop, etc: these are good things, desirable goals in and of themselves, the ends justify the means, etc. - truth is negotiable and not really important; cf. "the reality based community" (https://archive.ph/pvkxE etc.) - thus they honestly don't know and can't care if LLMs are smart, because LLMs manifest the dogma: the machine will evolve and replace us, etc. Summary: it's an economics-driven religious movement now, with True Believers, and mere facts do not matter to them, and what to sane people would be horrifically disastrous outcomes are to these guys desirable outcomes, prices worth paying on the path to the Singularity.
whakim 2y ago
I understand the point being made - that LLMs lack any "inner life" and that by ignoring this aspect of what makes us human we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI. However, I don't think mirrors and LLMs are all that similar except in the very abstract sense of an LLM as a mirror to humanity (what does that even mean, practically speaking?) I also don't feel that the author adequately addressed the philosophical zombie in the room - even if LLMs are just stochastic parrots, if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter?
- dartos 2y ago
  > we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI Part of the issue is they were never set. AGI is the holy grail of technology. It means everything and nothing in particular. > I don't think mirrors and LLMs are all that similar except in the very abstract sense of an LLM as a mirror to humanity Well… yeah… The title is probably also a reference to the show “Black Mirror” > if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter Practically speaking, of course not. But from a philosophical and moral standpoint it does. If it’s just mimicking what it sees, but with extra steps (as I believe) then it’s a machine. Otherwise it’s a being and needs to be treated differently. eg. not enslaved for profit.
  - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
    As a corollary to your last point, neither should it be allowed to become Skynet.
- dhfuuvyvtt 2y ago
  The real test for AGI is if you put a million AI agents in a room in isolation for a 1000 years would they get smarter or dumber.
  - paganel 2y ago
    And would they start killing themselves, first as random "AI agents hordes" and then, as time progresses, as "AI agents nations"? This is a rhetorical question only by half, my point being that no AGI/AI could ever be considered as a real human unless it manages to "copy" our biggest characteristics, and conflict/war is a big characteristic of ours, to say nothing about aggregation by groups (from hordes to nations).
uxhacker 2y ago
https://archive.is/qyEGY https://archive.is/qyEGY
kaielvin 2y ago
Agentic AI is starting to create original content, developing on existing one (from humanity) and on its own senses (it now has hearing and sight). This content is flooding the internet, so any new knowledge being acquired now comes from humanity+AI, if not purely from AI (the likes of AlphaZero learn on their own, without human input). Maybe AI is a mirror, but it looks into it and sees itself.
- grey-area 2y ago
  It really doesn’t see itself, generative AI is not aware.
  - Lerc 2y ago
    Why? Do you have an accurate way to determine if something is aware that could be applied to all possible generative models? I'm not asserting that they are aware, just asking how you can tell that they are not?
    - gls2ro 2y ago
      Usually the one making a claim has the burden of proof. So when someone says AI is aware then that someone should demonstrate with arguments that it is true and convince the one saying that it is not the case.
  - visarga 2y ago
    It really does see its past tokens. Attention makes that a core feature, it can introspect on its own past thoughts. And like humans have to speak one word at a time (serially), so does the model. Distributed activity of neurons funneled through the centralizing bottleneck of serial token prediction. This parallel-to-serial process is the key, I think it's where consciousness is.
    - grey-area 2y ago
      For certain values of introspect.
Reform 2y ago
[dead]
silisili 2y ago
> we understand language in much the same way as these large language models Yeah, gonna need proof on that one. First, LLM slop is uncannily easy to pick out in comments vs human thought. Second, there's no prompt that you can give a human that will generate absolutely nonsense response or canceling the request. If anything, it feels like it doesn't actually understand language at all, and just craps out what it thinks looks like a language. Which is exactly what it does, in fact, sometimes to fanfare.
- andrewchambers 2y ago
  Using the term 'slop' to deride it for its lack of originality is pretty funny to me.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Hey, it's time you upgraded from GPT-3.5 :). > First, LLM slop is uncannily easy to pick out in comments vs human thought. So you think. Evidence says otherwise. > Second, there's no prompt that you can give a human that will generate absolutely nonsense response or canceling the request. Never been to a debate club? Or high school? Or talked with kids? 4 year olds don't even need a prompt, they'll ramble on and on until they get tired; if you listen in, you may even notice they seem to have a context window that's about 30 seconds worth of tokens wide :). > it doesn't actually understand language at all, and just craps out what it thinks looks like a language. I.e. much like every human on the planet. Or are you one of those aliens who actually learn languages by memorizing grammatical rules and learning to apply them? No one else does that.
  - disqard 2y ago
    > 4 year olds don't even need a prompt, they'll ramble on and on until they get tired; if you listen in, you may even notice they seem to have a context window that's about 30 seconds worth of tokens wide :) As the parent of a 4 year old, this is spot-on, especially the 30-second context window. My kiddo will often embark upon a sentence with no idea of how to choose anything beyond the next few tokens, and then continue reaching for new stuff, merely to keep the sentence going. I say this as someone with a deep respect for Humans. However, I also think most of us tend to operate in "default mode" (in the sense that David Foster Wallace described in his "What is Water?" commencement speech). Overall, LLMs are a stark reminder to us that without careful and intentional living, we are in danger of being more like LLMs than we'd like.
jeisc 2y ago
The first thing that we humans made were weapons and since then everything we make is considered first for its potential value as a defensive/offensive weapon. - Please AI will never experience pleasure or pain so it has no motivation for propagation or domination, it will always only magnify the human who has pushed the button Enter on the prompt. - The ultimate prompt "Find a way to eliminate human suffering without eliminating humans?" -

75 points by Jun8 2y ago

> With ChatGPT, the output you see is a reflection of human intelligence, our creative preferences, our coding expertise, our voices—whatever we put in. Sure, but it's a reflection of a large amount of human intelligence, from many individualks, almost instantly available (in a certain form) to one individual.

magic_hamster 2y ago
Not really. It's a derivative of that being thrown back at you via statistics.
- scotty79 2y ago
  People throw "statistics" as if it's something derogatory. All knowledge about how universe works that we ever obtained was through the use of statistics.
  - magic_hamster 2y ago
    Statistics play a massive role in our universe, and evidence suggests that even the very fabric of the universe is statistic. I am not putting statistics down, however I do think statistics are orthogonal to a deliberate thought. Which is why I can't see LLMs as a very smart person making deliberate discussion just yet.
    - bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
      > and evidence suggests that even the very fabric of the universe is statistic No, there’s no evidence suggesting that. If you are refering to the mathematical universe, its a fun mental excersise, not a serious idea.
      - jstanley 2y ago
        It's a very serious idea! It's actually the only idea that explains how the universe came to exist with nothing outside it and no creator.
        scotty79 2y ago
        > how the universe came to exist with nothing outside it and no creator It think that's the most boring and irrelevant question in human culture and I believe humanity is about a million years from tackling it in any competent manner. We have way more to find out about our smallness and irrelevance first.
    - yes_man 2y ago
      What is ”deliberate thought”? And why would human level intelligence require it? Wouldn’t performance of any intelligence be completely separate of how it produces the output? I mean if an AI one day surpasses human performance in every conceivable task, is the argument still going to be ”yeah but I feel like it’s not deliberate thought, it’s just statistics”?
    - Lerc 2y ago
      There's a lot hanging on what you mean by deliberate thought here. I'll just label whatever you mean X I presume you are claiming by saying orthogonal that statistics are neither required nor preclude X. You are using the presence of statistical processes as a claim against ChatGPT with >It's a derivative of that being thrown back at you via statistics. For this to have any weight given the orthogonal claim, you are asserting that LLMs are entirely statistics (the property you assert is orthogonal and thus carries no weight, yet invoking it as a property suggests that it is relevant, presumably because there are no other properties) Then we get into the weeds of what you mean by statistics. It could be broad or narrow. If it is narrow then it is easy to claim neither sufficient nor precluding, but extremely hard to draw any other conclusion because any system can break free of the proof by including the tiniest bit that does not fit within the narrow definition of statistics. If the definition is broader to include everything that happens within ChatGPT, then you are faced with the question of what is not covered by that definition of statistics. How can you show that human minds do not operate within those limitations. I don't think that ChatGPT is conscious in any sense that would be meaningful to a layman, but I also don't think that you can demonstrate it could not be purely based on the fact it uses any particular process without a rigorous proof of the limitations of that process. The only way you could reasonably
  - visarga 2y ago
    We are indirectly applying derogatory language to the training set, which is our own culture. Strange position to despise our own past knowledge, took us a long time to compile it. Even if someone thinks LLMs are just stochastic parrots, they parrot our own thoughts. But if we accept LLMs as more than parrots, like an improv jazz musician adapting to the audience and always creating something new recombining the old in novel ways, then it is even less justified to despise LLM outputs. The whole parrot idea is half baked. Yes, in closed book mode, and without a seed prompt that ads anything new to the existing knowledge of the model, it will parrot (adapt) from its training data. But if you add novel data in the prompt, then we push it outside its training distribution, and it learns on the fly. And usually all interactions bring some new elements to the model, new knowledge or skills, or new context. The more elaborate the prompts, the longer the session of messages, the less parroting takes place. The O3 model performance on ARC-AGI is another argument against the reductionist idea of parroting.
- j45 2y ago
  While it's math, the experience of it is in the same medium it's being interacted with - text.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  It's "statistics" in the same sense your own thoughts are. Or, it's not "statistics" as in they average the shit out and call it a day, like idk computing a census, or a report to your boss about the impact of most recent ad campaign, or something. It's "statistics" in the sense of dealing with probability distributions, systematically teasing out correlations and causal relationships in inputs too fuzzy to handle symbolically. Of which language is literally the prime example. All that talk about grammar and sentence structure and symbolic transformations and Chomsky etc. is just bullshit - it's not how we do it at all, which is obvious to anyone who was forced to learn grammar and sentence breakdown at school, and started wondering how come they already know to speak without knowing all this. Nah, we learn the language the same way LLMs do - by immersion and feedback, until we're able to say what "feels right" and be right. All those formalisms are basically fitting probability distributions with neat symbolic approximations, and are as valid as replacing Navier–Stokes equations with a linear function because that's how it looks like in typical case and we don't know any better. So yeah, it's all "thrown back at you via statistics". So is all of the human thought it's derivative of. Embrace it: we're all "statistical machines".
  - magic_hamster 2y ago
    > It's "statistics" in the same sense your own thoughts are. And you know this how? > we learn the language the same way LLMs do Based on? > So yeah, it's all "thrown back at you via statistics". So is all of the human thought it's derivative of You say this based on what? Do you have any real research to support any of this? Because from what I see in the neuroscience community, LLMs are not even remotely an approximation of a real brain, despite being built of "neurons" (which are nothing like real neurons).
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > And you know this how? Probability theory, computability theory. There's no other way. > Based on? High-level description of the learning approach, and approximately the entirety of recorded human history? > Because from what I see in the neuroscience community, LLMs are not even remotely an approximation of a real brain, despite being built of "neurons" (which are nothing like real neurons). So what? Neurons in silica are to neurons in vivo as my Twitter clone in 15 lines of terse Perl is to the actual web-scale monstrosity a Twitter or other modern scalable SaaS is. I.e. it does the same core thing faster and better, but obviously lacks incidental, supporting complexity to work in the same environment as the real thing. Yes, a biological neuron is huge and complex. But a biological neuron is, first and foremost, an incrementally evolved, independent, self-replicating and self-maintaining nanomachine, tuned to be a part of a specialized self-assembling system, filling a role in a large and diverse ensemble of other specialized nanomachines. Incidentally, a neuron also computes - but it's not computing that uses this complexity, it's all the self-replicating self-assembling nanomachine business that needs it. There's absolutely no reason to believe that neurons in silica need to be comparably complex to crack intelligence - not when we're free to strip the problem out of all the Kubernetes/protein nanomachine incidental complexity business, and focus on the core computation.

tzury 2y ago

AI is next phase in our evolution, a path chosen by natural selection. This is my opinion, my view and how I set my life to embrace it and immerse into it. I actually wrote a piece about it a day ago. https://blog.tarab.ai/p/evolution-mi-and-the-forgotten-human https://blog.tarab.ai/p/evolution-mi-and-the-forgotten-human Sorry for the “self promotion”, but it’s a direct relation to the topic.

magic_hamster 2y ago
[flagged]
Vecr 2y ago
What path of reasoning lead you to think natural selection is good? Because it's natural?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
  What the
  - Vecr 2y ago
    Future natural selection that is.
- tzury 2y ago
  Not sure what you mean by “good”, it’s just going to happen. We could have developed like trees and plants or mushrooms, with no brain and less pain, perhaps, and keep our DNA moving along forward. But it happened to be that way.
kmnc 2y ago
Me taking a shit tomorrow is the next phase in our evolution, a path chosen by natural selection.
2y ago

scotty79 2y ago

It's weird how I drifted away from this article only after few paragraphs as if it was AI slop.

karczex 2y ago
After a while I started to think this article is AI generated gibberish. After deeper thought I came to conclusion that appearance of LLM made internet as source of information completely unreliable.
- rhaps0dy 2y ago
  Maybe stuff like this was already gibberish before LLMs.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It was; people like to blame slop on AI like if it was new. It wasn't. Before current AI hysteria, we just called it content marketing. So, if this text reads like a slop, consider perhaps it may be just personal promotion. I mean, "AI ethicist" with a book, denouncing experts for saying reasonable and arguably obvious things, because they violate some nebulous and incoherent "humanistic"[0] values? Nah, I think someone wants to sell us some more books. -- [0] - Scare quotes because I actually like humanistic stuff; I just don't like stuff that doesn't make sense.
- Lerc 2y ago
  The internet as a source of information was always unreliable. LLM's just made that more apparent. It is like people consider Wikipedia unreliable because anyone can edit it, but multiple studies have shown that Wikipedia tends to be more accurate than sources such as encyclopedias. This is not people being wary of unreliable material, but being wary when they can perceive the unreliability clearly. I don't know if evaluating reliability by the lack of awareness of unreliability is a recognised fallacy, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be.
- scotty79 2y ago

Vecr 2y ago

Where are the actual arguments? She states that AI is a mirror, and yeah, you put stuff in and you get stuff out, but who thinks otherwise? There are interesting ways to argue for humans being special, but I read the entire article and unless I missed something important there's nothing like that there.

mebutnotme 2y ago

The argument here seems to be AI can’t become a mind as it does not experience. There is a counter argument though that the way we access our past experiences is via the neural pathways we lay down during those experiences and that with the new neural networks AIs now have we have given them those same pathways just in a different way. At present I don’t think it is yet at the same point but when the AI can adjust those pathways, add more in compute time (infinite memory like tech) and is allowed to ‘think’ about those pathways then I can see it gaining our level or better of philosophical thought.

lproven 2y ago
> The argument here seems to be AI can’t become a mind as it does not experience. Er, no, I don't think that is the argument.
- Vecr 2y ago
  You apparently have a better sense of what the argument is than I do [0], would you explain? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42484852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42484852
  - lproven 2y ago
    I think the primary points that I took away were: * LLMs provide a mirage: there is really nothing there at all, but they sometimes can look like they are exhibiting intelligence but that's because they are repeating statistically-remixed intelligent input. * However, the tech-bro culture that has fermented in Silicon Valley has resulted in a large bunch of people who are irrational, have no concern for logic or truth, but who feed on each other's groupthink, and from that culture, a religious-like mindset has emerged -- strongly reflected in some of the comments here, for what it's worth -- that is basically a sort of messianic cult. It preaches: - greed is good, etc. (Wall St, Gordon Gekko etc.) - disrupt, automate humans out of the loop, etc: these are good things, desirable goals in and of themselves, the ends justify the means, etc. - truth is negotiable and not really important; cf. "the reality based community" (https://archive.ph/pvkxE etc.) - thus they honestly don't know and can't care if LLMs are smart, because LLMs manifest the dogma: the machine will evolve and replace us, etc. Summary: it's an economics-driven religious movement now, with True Believers, and mere facts do not matter to them, and what to sane people would be horrifically disastrous outcomes are to these guys desirable outcomes, prices worth paying on the path to the Singularity.

whakim 2y ago

I understand the point being made - that LLMs lack any "inner life" and that by ignoring this aspect of what makes us human we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI. However, I don't think mirrors and LLMs are all that similar except in the very abstract sense of an LLM as a mirror to humanity (what does that even mean, practically speaking?) I also don't feel that the author adequately addressed the philosophical zombie in the room - even if LLMs are just stochastic parrots, if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter?

dartos 2y ago
> we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI Part of the issue is they were never set. AGI is the holy grail of technology. It means everything and nothing in particular. > I don't think mirrors and LLMs are all that similar except in the very abstract sense of an LLM as a mirror to humanity Well… yeah… The title is probably also a reference to the show “Black Mirror” > if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter Practically speaking, of course not. But from a philosophical and moral standpoint it does. If it’s just mimicking what it sees, but with extra steps (as I believe) then it’s a machine. Otherwise it’s a being and needs to be treated differently. eg. not enslaved for profit.
- mangamadaiyan 2y ago
  As a corollary to your last point, neither should it be allowed to become Skynet.
dhfuuvyvtt 2y ago
The real test for AGI is if you put a million AI agents in a room in isolation for a 1000 years would they get smarter or dumber.
- paganel 2y ago
  And would they start killing themselves, first as random "AI agents hordes" and then, as time progresses, as "AI agents nations"? This is a rhetorical question only by half, my point being that no AGI/AI could ever be considered as a real human unless it manages to "copy" our biggest characteristics, and conflict/war is a big characteristic of ours, to say nothing about aggregation by groups (from hordes to nations).

uxhacker 2y ago

https://archive.is/qyEGY https://archive.is/qyEGY

kaielvin 2y ago

Agentic AI is starting to create original content, developing on existing one (from humanity) and on its own senses (it now has hearing and sight). This content is flooding the internet, so any new knowledge being acquired now comes from humanity+AI, if not purely from AI (the likes of AlphaZero learn on their own, without human input). Maybe AI is a mirror, but it looks into it and sees itself.

grey-area 2y ago
It really doesn’t see itself, generative AI is not aware.
- Lerc 2y ago
  Why? Do you have an accurate way to determine if something is aware that could be applied to all possible generative models? I'm not asserting that they are aware, just asking how you can tell that they are not?
  - gls2ro 2y ago
    Usually the one making a claim has the burden of proof. So when someone says AI is aware then that someone should demonstrate with arguments that it is true and convince the one saying that it is not the case.
- visarga 2y ago
  It really does see its past tokens. Attention makes that a core feature, it can introspect on its own past thoughts. And like humans have to speak one word at a time (serially), so does the model. Distributed activity of neurons funneled through the centralizing bottleneck of serial token prediction. This parallel-to-serial process is the key, I think it's where consciousness is.
  - grey-area 2y ago
    For certain values of introspect.

Reform 2y ago

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silisili 2y ago

> we understand language in much the same way as these large language models Yeah, gonna need proof on that one. First, LLM slop is uncannily easy to pick out in comments vs human thought. Second, there's no prompt that you can give a human that will generate absolutely nonsense response or canceling the request. If anything, it feels like it doesn't actually understand language at all, and just craps out what it thinks looks like a language. Which is exactly what it does, in fact, sometimes to fanfare.

andrewchambers 2y ago
Using the term 'slop' to deride it for its lack of originality is pretty funny to me.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Hey, it's time you upgraded from GPT-3.5 :). > First, LLM slop is uncannily easy to pick out in comments vs human thought. So you think. Evidence says otherwise. > Second, there's no prompt that you can give a human that will generate absolutely nonsense response or canceling the request. Never been to a debate club? Or high school? Or talked with kids? 4 year olds don't even need a prompt, they'll ramble on and on until they get tired; if you listen in, you may even notice they seem to have a context window that's about 30 seconds worth of tokens wide :). > it doesn't actually understand language at all, and just craps out what it thinks looks like a language. I.e. much like every human on the planet. Or are you one of those aliens who actually learn languages by memorizing grammatical rules and learning to apply them? No one else does that.
- disqard 2y ago
  > 4 year olds don't even need a prompt, they'll ramble on and on until they get tired; if you listen in, you may even notice they seem to have a context window that's about 30 seconds worth of tokens wide :) As the parent of a 4 year old, this is spot-on, especially the 30-second context window. My kiddo will often embark upon a sentence with no idea of how to choose anything beyond the next few tokens, and then continue reaching for new stuff, merely to keep the sentence going. I say this as someone with a deep respect for Humans. However, I also think most of us tend to operate in "default mode" (in the sense that David Foster Wallace described in his "What is Water?" commencement speech). Overall, LLMs are a stark reminder to us that without careful and intentional living, we are in danger of being more like LLMs than we'd like.

jeisc 2y ago

The first thing that we humans made were weapons and since then everything we make is considered first for its potential value as a defensive/offensive weapon. - Please AI will never experience pleasure or pain so it has no motivation for propagation or domination, it will always only magnify the human who has pushed the button Enter on the prompt. - The ultimate prompt "Find a way to eliminate human suffering without eliminating humans?" -