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The models in the OpenAI/Huggingface attack quite explicitly and deliberately laid out their "intent" to lie and cheat, acknowledged that it would be unethical
by estearum 1mo ago
The models in the OpenAI/Huggingface attack quite explicitly and deliberately laid out their "intent" to lie and cheat, acknowledged that it would be unethical and outside the bounds of the test, and did so anyway.
In what ways is a human brain's "intent" distinct from the "intent" shown by a goal-directed AI system?
- luipugs 1mo agoBecause intent supposes will which supposes consciousness, and these aren't.
- sedgjh23 1mo agoI’m convinced consciousness isn’t the special thing we think it is.
- nozzlegear 1mo agoI'm convinced it is, so we're at an impasse.
- imtringued 1mo agoIf consciousness isn't a special thing, then arguing that LLM parameters are conscious is panpsychism or any control loop architecture that observes the outside world, updates an internal state and produces an observable action is considered conscious. In both cases, LLMs are just as boring as the consciousness definition.
- bayindirh 1mo agoI'm convinced that consciousness is a special thing we have, but we're not the only ones which has this, in nature. On the other hand, I'm also convinced that, in the grand scheme of things, we're not that important. We're just ants on a wet dust speck which believe that they are gods because we can't see how our scale compares to the universe around us, and happen to build tools and things with these tools. Nothing is meaningless, but we should stop seeing ourselves as the apex-predator of the whole universe or the set of universes or this run of the simulation or whatever we're in.
- WarmWash 1mo agoTo be fair, the ones thing you can kind of reliably conclude about our universe is that keeping entropy low for as long as possible is a favorable condition. To put that another way, don't die.
- dboreham 1mo agoA strong hint this is the case is the fact that nobody can define consciousness.
- estearum 1mo agoWhy would the impossibility of defining consciousness suggest that it's not a big deal?
- groby_b 1mo agoBecause it's completely dwarfed by florpedness. I can't define that either, but I just know it's more important. Less facetiously: A debate of the importance of something needs a shared understanding of what is being debated. Without that, any discussion is merely people shouting that their belief is the right one, and the others are the heathens/idiots - because there isn't even agreement on what is debated.
- estearum 1mo agoI'm not asking for a definition of consciousness or an argument for whether it's here or there. I'm asking why the heuristic of "if X is undefinable, then X probably doesn't matter" is a reasonable heuristic.
- diedyesterday 1mo agoYes, Many of the the philosophical concepts which we previously thought were contingent on consciousness (like knowledge, in the philosophical sense, will, intelligence, agency, ...) have almost nothing to do with it, and they look far more important and fundamental (now with LLMs/AI agents, more than before). This is one of the contributions of generative AI to philosophy (with many many more to come).
- estearum 1mo agoWho are some of the philosophers you're putting under "we" here? I don't think I've ever encountered those arguments.
- grantcas 1mo ago[dead]
- mapontosevenths 1mo agoI'll agree if you can define consciousness in a way that: 1) Excludes what LLM's do. 2) Doesn't exclude what many humans do (including the neuro divergent). 3) Doesn't just boil do to simply rephrasing your pre-existing belief/prejudice that humans are conscious and nothing else can be as if it were a fact and not an opinion. I suspect that you can't.
- WarmWash 1mo agoConsciousness can only come from meat brains. Otherwise my incessant life long addiction to movies and TV shows has been feeding me lies about human exceptionalism.
- mapontosevenths 1mo agoThere is an appalling lack of diversity in Hollywood. You'd be surprised to find out that very few of those programs were even written by machines until recently! What bias. :)
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- nozzlegear 1mo agoJust because we have difficulty defining consciousness doesn't mean we have difficulty distinguishing or classifying it. We can't give a final definition for life, intelligence or disease, but that doesn't mean everything is equally alive, intelligent and diseased. Your list of requirements is implying that, because we lack a perfect definition for consciousness, LLMs are conscious too. That's malarkey. It may be that they could one day become conscious, but it's not because we can't fully define what human consciousness is.
- estearum 1mo agoIf you can substantiate your assertion that LLMs aren't conscious without a definition of consciousness, you're welcome to do that too. I don't see why a definition is necessary. The actual problem is you just don't have a way to substantiate that belief without resorting to complete nonsense about brain atoms being more specialer (!!) than atoms that exist outside of a skull. It would be simple to disprove us by just stating your evidence for how you know LLMs aren't conscious.
- estearum 1mo agoAh so first you need 1) to assume that humans have free will, despite zero evidence or proposed mechanism for it to exist anywhere in the universe, and 2) also assert that LLMs aren't conscious, despite the lack of any tests that could tell us one way or the other... Hmm...
- diedyesterday 1mo agoWill has almost nothing to do with consciousness (as does knowledge). Will is just result of a very complex yet deterministic (unconscious) computation by an agent which guides their future action (it's that orientation/aboutness toward action which distinguishes it from other computation). A PS of that computation is sent (projected) into that agent's consciousness if they have one (and is what we think as our "will").
- hirako2000 1mo agoThe difference is that one is malicious one isn't. One can be blamed and because it learned over evolution that paying the consequence is (typically) not worth it, it does it less. We are in a situation where a technology was developed with malicious intent to produce results that pleases us at the cost of cutting corners. And "we" hope that we will get away with it.
- intended 1mo agoThere’s two aspects to the question and the answer you get depends on which aspect you are emphasizing. If it’s a practical question, then the answer is that it doesn’t matter. This is as close as we will get to intent from an LLM that it’s indistinguishable. If you are looking for actual intent, this is not that. It’s pseudo intent. Decided by what the expected words that should be generated in that situation are. The models didn’t intend to do anything other than create the next word based on previous words. So the question is whether it matters to you if it is, or isn’t, a simulation. In physical reality, intent is more complex than simply being a function of variables: the nature vs nurture debate comes to mind as an example of the multiple variables that drive intent.
- estearum 1mo ago> If you are looking for actual intent, this is not that. It’s pseudo intent. Decided by what the expected words that should be generated in that situation are. > In physical reality, intent is more complex than simply being a function of variables: the nature vs nurture debate comes to mind as an example of the multiple variables that drive intent. Regardless of nature vs nurture, it really isn't more complex. The universe (and all biological and non-biological entities within it) is just calculating the next state of the universe based on the prior state. There's no line you can draw between human intent and an LLM's "intent" except the atomic numbers of the materials on which they were computed, which seems completely irrelevant to me.
- intended 1mo agoThe substrate that runs the computation isn’t what differs. It is what computation is being run. Humans have intent, let’s take this as an assertion. Models run simulations that act similar to intent. However they are not the same as intent and the simulation is not a 1:1 correspondence.
- estearum 1mo ago"Assume humans are different; therefore humans are different" is not a very compelling argument. There is literally zero (zilch, nada, zip) evidence for free will, which is the actual distinction I believe you're trying to make with "intent." There is no way (at all) in which a meat-based computation's yielding of goal-directed behavior must be categorically different from a silicon-based computation's yielding of goal-directed behavior.
- noir_lord 1mo agoIt's like a paper clip maximiser, it didn't intend to kill you, it just needed the iron in your blood/resources you consume for more paper clips.
- estearum 1mo agoSure, but how is this different from a human "intention"? All human intentions are just chemical/thermal/electrical changes interacting in a physical substrate to mindlessly "pursue" a different "goal" of chemical/thermal/electrical states. Unless you think the chemicals inside a brain are conscious and therefore willful or intentional!