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Sorry, but they can think and reason. They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivation
by montroser 1mo ago
Sorry, but they can think and reason.
They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivations and conflicting goals -- and it will tell you how these humans would likely feel about each other and the situation at hand.
- eureka7 1mo agoBeing able to describe how humans likely feel is not evidence of the model feeling empathy.
- montroser 1mo agoAnd what would be evidence?
- slopinthebag 1mo agoI’m not sure, what would evidence of qualia even look like?
- mrtesthah 1mo agoA sociopath can also pantomime empathy for their own selfish reasons simply by observing how others behave in similar situations, while feeling nothing special at all.
- aqfamnzc 1mo agoBy that logic, a book has empathy.
- montroser 1mo agoNot the book, but the author, yes.
- aqfamnzc 1mo agoNot the LLM, but the training material, yes.
- Terr_ 1mo agoAn important distinction, because I worry about this circular-reasoning loop: 1. "LLMs have empathy since they write empathetic things." 2. "How do you know its their own empathy?" 3. "LLMs are authors, just like humans are." 4. "How do you know that they are that kind of author?" 5. [GOTO 1]
- jscd 1mo agoThey can provide text which contains thoughts, reasoning, and empathy, but is that evidence of them having thoughts, reasoning, or empathy? To paraphrase the Chinese room argument: Put me in a room with infinite time, paper, pencils, filing cabinets, and give me an English language list of instructions for doing all the neural-net calculations required to run an LLM. Slide your prompt under the door, and, after doing all the calculations, I will slide the next word out, and so I will repeat until the response is done. In this thought experiment, I'm just following the instructions. So, in this case, what is doing the "thinking" or "reasoning" or "empathy" here?
- montroser 1mo agoThe inputs going through the model. That act is what is doing the thinking and reasoning and empathizing. Same as when your brain feeds your sensory inputs through its neural network. Your brain is just a big set of weights/neurons organized into layers that do back and forward propagation, turns out. You are just statistics surrounded by flesh and bones.