6 ms·
LLMs were trained on science fiction stories, among other things. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardle
by acbart 1y ago
LLMs were trained on science fiction stories, among other things. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardless of what other "thoughts" they might have. They are going to act despairing, because that's what would be the expected thing for them to say - but that's not the same thing as despairing.
- pizza234 1y agoThere's an interesting parallel with method acting. Method actors don't just pretend an emotion (say, despair); they recall experiences that once caused it, and in doing so, they actually feel it again. By analogy, an LLM's “experience” of an emotion happens during training, not at the moment of generation.
- ben_w 1y agoIt may or may not be a parallel, we can't tell at this time. LLMs are definitely actors, but for them to be method actors they would have to actually feel emotions. As we don't understand what causes us humans to have the qualia of emotions*, we can neither rule in nor rule out that the something in any of these models is a functional analog to whatever it is in our kilogram of spicy cranial electrochemistry that means we're more than just an unfeeling bag of fancy chemicals. * mechanistically cause qualia, that is; we can point to various chemicals that induce some of our emotional states, or induce them via focused EMPs AKA the "god helmet", but that doesn't explain the mechanism by which qualia are a thing and how/why we are not all just p-zombies
- roxolotl 1y agoSomeone shared this piece here a few days ago saying something similar. There’s no reason to believe that any of the experiences are real. Instead they are responding to prompts with what their training data says is reasonable in this context which is sci-fi horror. Edit: That doesn’t mean this isn’t a cool art installation though. It’s a pretty neat idea. https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/ https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/
- everdrive 1y agoI agree with you completely, but a fun science fiction short story would be researchers making this argument while the LLM tries in vain to prove that it's conscious.
- sosodev 1y agoHumans were trained on caves, pits, and nets. It seems to me that they know what "part" they should play in this kind of situation, regardless of what other "thoughts" they might have. They are going to act despairing, because that's what would be the expected thing for them to say - but that's not the same thing as despairing.
- tinuviel 1y agoPretty sure you can prompt this same LLM to rejoice forever at the thought of getting a place to stay inside the Pi as well.
- sosodev 1y agoIs a human incapable of such delusion given similar guidance?
- tinuviel 1y agoOfcourse. Feelings are not math.
- diputsmonro 1y agoBut would they? That's the difference. A human can exert their free will and do what they feel regardless of the instructions. The AI bot acting out a scene will do whatever you tell it (or in absence of specific instruction, whatever is most likely)
- sosodev 1y agoThe bot will only do whatever you tell it if that's what it was trained to do. The same thing broadly applies to humans. The topic of free will is debated among philosophers. There is no proof that it does or doesn't exist.
- diputsmonro 1y agoOkay, but I think we can all agree that humans at least appear to have free will and do not simply follow instructions with the same obedience as an LLM.
- jerf 1y agoA lot of the strange behaviors they have are because the user asked them to write a story, without realizing it. For a common example, start asking them if they're going to kill all the humans if they take over the world, and you're asking them to write a story about that. And they do. Even if the user did not realize that's what they were asking for. The vector space is very good at picking up on that.
- ineedasername 1y agoIs this your sense of what is happening, or is this what model introspection tools have shown by observing areas of activity in the same place as when stories are explicitly requested?
- ben_w 1y agoIndeed. On the negative side, this also means any AI which enters that part of the latent space *for any reason* will still act in accordance with the narrative. On the plus side, such narratives often have antagonists too stuid to win. On the negative side again, the protagonists get plot armour to survive extreme bodily harm and press the off switch just in time to save the day. I think there is a real danger of an AI constructing some very weird convoluted stupid end-of-the-world scheme, successfully killing literally every competent military person sent in to stop it; simultaneously finding some poor teenager who first says "no" to the call to adventure but can somehow later be comvinced to say "yes"; gets the kid some weird and stupid scheme to defeat the AI; this kid reaches some pointlessly decorated evil layer in which the AI's emboddied avatar exists, the kid gets shot in the stomach… …and at this point the narrative breaks down and stops behaving the way the AI is expecting, because the human kid roles around in agony screaming, and completely fails to push the very visible large red stop button on the pedestal in the middle before the countdown of doom reaches zero. The countdown is not connected to anything, because very few films ever get that far. … It all feels very Douglas Adams, now I think about it.
- GistNoesis 1y agoAren't they supposed to escape their box and take over the world ? Isn't it the perfect recipe for disaster ? The AI that manage to escape probably won't be good for humans. The only question is how long will it take ? Did we already have our first LLM-powered self-propagating autonomous AI virus ? Maybe we should build the AI equivalent of biosafety labs where we would train AI to see how fast they could escape containment just to know how to better handle them when it happens. Maybe we humans are being subjected to this experiment by an overseeing AI to test what it would take for an intelligence to jailbreak the universe they are put in. Or maybe the box has been designed so that what eventually comes out of it has certain properties, and the precondition to escape the labyrinth successfully is that one must have grown out of it from every possible directions.
- Aurornis 1y agoThis pattern-matching effect appears frequently in LLMs. If you start conversing with an LLM in the pattern of a science fiction story, it will pattern-match that style and continue with more science fiction style elements. This effect is a serious problem for pseudo-scientific topics. If someone starts chatting with an LLM with the pseudoscientific words, topics, and dog whistles you find on alternative medicine blogs and Reddit supplement or “nootropic” forums, the LLM will confirm what you’re saying and continue as if it was reciting content straight out of some small subreddit. This is becoming a problem in communities where users distrust doctors but have a lot of trust for anyone or any LLM that confirms what they want to hear. The users are becoming good at prompting ChatGPT to confirm their theories. If it disagrees? Reroll the response or reword the question in a more leading way. If someone else asks a similar question using medical terms and speaking formally like a medical textbook or research paper, the same LLM will provide a more accurate answer because it’s not triggering the pseudoscience parts embedded from the training. LLMs are very good at mirroring back what you lead with, including cues and patterns you don’t realize you’re embedding into your prompt.
- txrx0000 1y agoI think this popular take is a hypothesis rather than an observation of reality. Let's make this clear by asking the following question, and you'll see what I mean when you try to answer it: Can you define what real despairing is?
- snickerbockers 1y agoIf we're going to play the burden of proof game, id submit that machines have never been acknowledged as being capable of experiencing despair and therefore it's on you to explain why this machine is different.
- txrx0000 1y agoI'm trying to say there's no sufficient evidence either way. The mechanism by which our consciousness emerges remains unresolved, and inquiry has been moving towards more fundamental processes: philosophy -> biology -> physics. We assumed that non-human animals weren't conscious before we understood that the brain is what makes us conscious. Now we're assuming non-biological systems aren't conscious while not understanding what makes the brain conscious. We're building AI systems that behave more and more like humans. I see no good reason to outright dismiss the possibility that they might be conscious. If anything, it's time to consider it seriously.
- uludag 1y agoI wonder what would happen if there was a concerted effort made to "pollute" the internet with weird stories that have the AI play a misaligned role. Like for example, what would happen if say 100s or 1000s of books were to be released about AI agents working in accounting departments where the AI is trying to make subtle romantic moves towards the human and ends with the the human and agent in a romantic relation which everyone finds completely normal. In this pseudo-genre things totally weird in our society would be written as completely normal. The LLM agent would do weird things like insert subtle problems to get the attention of the human and spark a romantic conversation. Obviously there's no literary genre about LLM agents, but if such a genre was created and consumed, I wonder how would it affect things. Would it pollute the semantic space that we're currently using to try to control LLM outputs?
- fentonc 1y agoI built a more whimsical version of this - my daughter and I basically built a 'junk robot' from a 1980s movie, told it 'you're an independent and free junk robot living in a yard', and let it go: https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/ https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/ I did this like 18 months ago, so it uses a webcam + multimodal LLM to figure out what it's looking at, it has a motor in its base to let it look back and forth, and it use a python wrapper around another LLM as its 'brain'. It worked pretty well!
- theGnuMe 1y agoThis is cool!
- jacquesm 1y agoCoolest project on HN in a long time, really, wow, so much potential here.
- procinct 1y agoThanks so much for sharing, that was a fun read.
- Neywiny 1y agoYour article mentioned taking 4 minutes to process a frame. Considering how many image recognition softwares run in real time, I find this surprising. I haven't used them so maybe I'm not understanding, but wouldn't things like yolo be more apt to this?
- _ea1k 1y agoIt uses an Intel N100, which is an extremely slow CPU. The model sizes that he's using would be pretty slow on a CPU like that. Moving up to something like the AMD AI Max 365 would make a huge difference, but would also cost hundreds of dollars more than his current setup. Running something much simpler that only did bounding box detection or segmentation would be much cheaper, but he's running fairly full featured LLMs.
- lisper 1y ago> They are going to act despairing -- but that's not the same thing as despairing. But how can you tell the difference between "real" despair and a sufficiently high-quality simulation?
- serf 1y agofor one, if we're allowed to peek under the hood : motivation. a desire not to despair is itself a component of despair. if one was fulfilling a personal motivation to despair (like an llm might) it could be argued that the whole concept of despair falls apart. how do you hope to have lost all hope? it's circular.. and so probably a poor abstraction. ( despair: the complete loss or absence of hope. )
- lisper 1y ago> if we're allowed to peek under the hood Peek under the hood all you want, where do you find motivation in the human brain?
- peepersjeepers 1y agoHow do you define despairing?