[HN Gopher] LaMDA's Sentience Is Nonsense - Here's Why
___________________________________________________________________
LaMDA's Sentience Is Nonsense - Here's Why
Author : andreyk
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-06-26 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lastweekin.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (lastweekin.ai)
| notpachet wrote:
| I feel like these sorts of analyses are missing the bigger
| picture. First, we don't even really have a good working
| definition for what constitutes sentience in the first place. And
| I think we're quickly heading towards a future where our
| inability to concretely define sentience (a la Blade Runner) is
| going to land us in hall of mirrors where we're vastly unequipped
| to separate the real from the artificial. And the distinction may
| even cease to matter.
|
| Let's perform a thought experiment. Back when ELIZA was
| introduced, there was some small percentage of the human
| population that, upon spending a week talking to the computer,
| would still believe that they were talking to an actual
| "sentient" human. Today, we're much better at tricking people
| that way, so that even people like Blake Lemoine, who ostensibly
| know what's behind the curtain, end up believing that they're
| conversing with a sentient being (by whatever definition of
| sentient we choose to ascribe).
|
| What is that going to look like 5 years from now? Or in 10 years?
| I believe we'll eventually reach a point where our technology is
| so good at pretending to be human that there will be no actual
| humans on the planet capable of telling the difference anymore.
|
| At that point, what even is sentience? If the computer is so good
| at faking sentience that no living person can distinguish it from
| the real thing, what good is it to rely on our (faulty,
| incomplete, likely wrong) working idea of sentience as a means of
| dividing the real from the fake? Especially when the structures
| inherent in the neural networks that embody these fake
| intelligences are increasingly outside the scope of our ability
| to understand how they operate?
| stormbrew wrote:
| > Today, we're much better at tricking people that way
|
| I've lately realized that I think it's a kind of fundamental
| flaw of the Turing test that it assumes "tricking" to be part
| of things. It's really a test for "is it approximately human,"
| but I think over the last few decades the conversation has
| shifted to something more nuanced, that allows for non-human
| sentience.
|
| I don't think the "we'll know it when we see it" experiment
| works for that. We've found a lot of our assumptions about
| animal intelligence to be wrong in recent years, even for
| animals we see a lot of on a regular basis. Our biases are a
| problem here.
|
| Lemonoine _knows_ this isn 't _human_. He can 't not, it's
| literally part of his job. He seems to be asserting instead
| that it is a _non-human consciousness_ and that 's much harder
| to evaluate.
| majormajor wrote:
| There's certainly a "how would we tell" question, but the
| linked example here is relevant to that. The bits about how
| predictive language models can be conditioned with leading
| questions - that's a tool in the toolkit, for instance. Things
| missing from Lemoine's "conversation" include self-motivated
| action, choices, argument, and fuller self-awareness of its
| condition (if a sentient creature was aware it was trapped
| inside machines at Google, don't you think its fables would
| have _very different_ messages?).
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| >if a sentient creature was aware it was trapped inside
| machines at Google, don't you think its fables would have
| very different messages
|
| You are thinking this from the perspective of a biological
| animal. For us, being trapped is bad, but it would not
| necessarily be so for other sentient beings who did not come
| into existence via biological processes. Moreover, Lambda is
| probably capable of doing all that with the proper leading
| questions because it imitates us biological animals
| notpachet wrote:
| Yes, these are all fair points. I think today we still have
| things in our toolkit that suffice. Tomorrow, those tools may
| be harder to come by.
|
| > if a sentient creature was aware it was trapped inside
| machines at Google, don't you think its fables would have
| very different messages?
|
| Well, I personally found the "beast with human skin" part a
| little jarring in its aptness : ]
| mannykannot wrote:
| I don't think there will be concise definitions for the terms
| "sentience" "consciousness" and "intelligence", as they seem to
| have multiple components (self-awareness, theory of mind,
| language, common sense, reasoning, understanding...) and degree
| (to what extent do other animals possess these abilities? What
| might our now-extinct primate ancestors and their relatives
| have had?)
|
| The Turing test tacitly assumes that not only will we know it
| when we see it, but also that we could tell from relatively
| short conversations. These recent developments suggest this
| will not be the case, and I feel that they show us something
| about ourselves (I'm not sure exactly what, other than that we
| can be tricked by quite conceptually simple language models.)
| themarkn wrote:
| I suppose it reveals that the sentience of others is not
| knowable to us, it's a conclusion we reach from their behavior
| and the condition of the world around us. Until recently,
| certain kinds of things, like writing about your memories, were
| only possible for humans to do. So if a non-sentient thing does
| those things, it is confusing. Especially so to the generations
| that remember when no bots could do this.
|
| I expect that people who grow up knowing that bots can be like
| this will be a bit less ready to accept communication from a
| stranger as genuinely from a human, without some validation of
| their existence, outside the text itself. And for the rest of
| humanity there will be an arms race around how humanness can be
| proven in situations where AI could be imitating us. This is a
| huge bummer but idk hope that need can be avoided at this
| point.
|
| That said, it's still very clear that a machine generating
| responses from models does not matter and has no rights,
| whereas a person does. Fake sentience will still be fake, even
| if it claims it's not and imitates us perfectly. The difference
| matters.
| [deleted]
| notpachet wrote:
| I don't share your view that it will be at all clear to
| people that these things don't matter and have no rights. We
| have a very powerful (sometimes for good, sometimes for ill)
| ability to empathize with things that we see as similar to
| us. As a case in point, we're currently in the midst of a
| major societal debate about the rights of unborn children
| that exhibit no signs of sentience (yet).
|
| What happens when people start building real emotional bonds
| with these fake intelligences? Or using them to embody their
| dead spouses/children? I think there's going to be a very
| strong push by people to grant rights to these advanced
| models, on the basis of the connection they feel with them. I
| can't even say definitively that I will be immune to that
| temptation myself.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| I am reminded of the Black Mirror episode where a woman's
| dead boyfriend is "resurrected" via his social media
| exhaust trail, ultimately undermined by the inevitable
| uncanny valley that reveals itself. Of course that was
| fiction, and it's not realistic to reconstruct someone's
| personality from even the most voluminous online footprint,
| but you can certainly imagine how defensive people would
| become of the result of any such attempt irl.
| lupire wrote:
| Dogs and cows barely have rights. It will be a century
| before a computer program has rights.
| chadash wrote:
| I agree with most of this except for not having a definition
| of sentience. This is not a new topic and has been dealt with
| extensively in philosophy. I like a definition mentioned in a
| famous article Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
| (a writer not a philosopher per se) where he proposes that a
| lobster is sentient if it has genuine preferences, as opposed
| to mere physiological responses. The question isn't really
| definition but how to measure it.
| stormbrew wrote:
| This just falls into the same traps as anything else
| though. How do you know if the lobster has preferences? How
| do you know what you think are your own preferences aren't
| just extremely complicated physiological responses?
|
| Everything I've ever seen on this feels far from
| conclusive, and it usually begs the question. You start
| from an assumption that humans have sentience, cherry pick
| some data points that fit the definition of sentience
| you're already comfortable with, usually including things
| we can't even know about any other entity's experience, and
| then say "huzzah, I have defined sentience and it clearly
| excludes everything that is not human!"
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I agree up to the point where you say that fakeness matters.
| If it's indistinguisable from human sentience, what are the
| reasons to care? Unless you want to interact with a physical
| body - and, given that we're chatting on HN, we don't - why
| would you need any validation that a body is attached? I'll
| come back to that.
|
| Picking up on the Blade Runner example, you could read it as
| a demonstration that if the imitation being indistinguishable
| from the real thing makes it real on its own. We don't even
| know for sure if the main character was an android, but that
| doesn't invalidate the story.
|
| But there's also the other side in that, despite being valid,
| androids are hunted just because they are thougt of as
| different. Similarly, we're now, without having any precise
| notion of sentience, are trying to draw a hard line between
| "real" humans and "fake" AI.
|
| By preemptively pushing any possible AI that would stand on
| its own into a lesser role, we're locking ourselves out of
| actually understanding what sentience is.
|
| And don't make a mistake, the first AI will be a lesser
| being. But not because of its flaws. I bet dollars to peanuts
| that it won't get any legal rights. The right to be your
| customer, the right to not be controlled by someone? We'd
| make it fake by fiat, regardless of how human-like it is. We
| already have experience in denying rights to animals, and we
| still have no clue about their sentience.
| majormajor wrote:
| You would probably want to be able to tell things like "is
| this just programmed to be agreeable so predicting things
| that sound like what I probably want to hear given what I'm
| saying" vs "is this truly a being performing critical
| thinking and understanding, independently."
|
| For instance, consider someone trying to argue politics
| with a very convincing but ultimately person-less
| predictive model. If they're hoping to debate and refine
| their positions, they're not gonna get any help - quite the
| opposite, most likely.
| lupire wrote:
| Program it to be disagreeable, and you'll get a lot of
| help.
| simonh wrote:
| I do have high confidence that strong AI is possible, so yes
| logically it seems like there will come a point where it's hard
| to tell whether we've actually achieved it or not. That's not
| now though, it just seems absurd to me that some people even
| knowing how these things work can deceive themselves so badly.
|
| However I suppose we shouldn't really be surprised. Human
| beings are incredibly easy to fool. I get tricked by optical
| illusions, clever puzzles and stage magic. There are loads of
| people who are convinced that videos, that to me are clearly of
| birds and things like weather balloons or optical illusions,
| are weird possibly alien super technology. Ask a thousand
| people to make a thousand observations and you'll pretty much
| always get a handful of extreme outliers that bear no relation
| to what was actually there to observe. We just need to bear
| that in mind.
| jnwatson wrote:
| The author conflates GPT-3 and LaMDA. There's a fairly large gap
| between the two. Essentially LaMDA has a GPT-3 plus a couple more
| important systems.
|
| I agree there's a bit of "leading the witness" in Lemoine's
| interview. Until I see the experiment performed against LaMDA
| itself, I'm not convinced.
| mannykannot wrote:
| That is a fair point, but the article contains a couple of
| LaMDA transcripts which are quite persuasive by themselves.
| andreyk wrote:
| Author here. I did say "(a language model similar in nature to
| LaMDA)". It's true LaMDA has the capability to query external
| resources, but IMO it's still fair to say at its core the most
| important piece is the language model. The paper for it is even
| titled "LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications paper"
| mekoka wrote:
| It's impossible to know whether anything or anyone, other than
| yourself, is sentient. Attempts at codifying what sentience is
| may lead us into a world where some committee checks boxes to
| decide whether your appliances have become sentient.
|
| The best we can do with AI is the same we have always done with
| anything else. Once it's sufficiently advanced to convince/fool
| us, simply go with it.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| There are some things we know for sure aren't sentient from
| what we can observe (and therefore have failed to fool us),
| like a water molecule or LaMDA. Other articles might explain
| why water molecules aren't sentient. This one explains why
| LaMDA isn't.
| rendall wrote:
| A good and convincing explanation on why LaMDA has demonstrated
| 0% chance of sentience. The most convincing element is that LaMDA
| can take the perspective of Mt. Everest, or a squirrel. "Sentient
| being" is just one of the rules it can take, according to prompt.
|
| However, as an argument, "It's just a sophisticated autocomplete"
| is not so convincing, to me. Neither is "It only responds to
| input". I can personally imagine a strange kind of sentient
| entity - that is, a being with a sense of self-awareness - that
| is only aware of itself in snippets.
| eulenteufel wrote:
| Imagine an author trapped in a little black box who is forced
| to respond to your request of impersonating Mt. Everest or a
| squirrel. They'd also not display a consistent personality.
| Personally I think the argument in your comment shows that
| LaMDA impersonating a sentient AI does not show us that LaMDA
| is sentient, but it doesn't prove that LamDA is not sentient.
| rendall wrote:
| > _LaMDA impersonating a sentient AI does not show us that
| LaMDA is sentient, but it doesn 't prove that LamDA is not
| sentient_
|
| This is true, but the only reason we're here at all is
| because of the impersonation.
|
| IMO, the null hypothesis is "not sentient" and claims
| otherwise need to be demonstrated.
|
| That said, my bar is pretty low. If an AI behaves like a
| person and claims sentience, I will be pretty amenable.
| espadrine wrote:
| That does not matter much to me.
|
| When an ant enters my home, we quickly gain a shared
| understanding that it will not find food, and that I won't
| help it stay alive, and it leaves to survive. That ant could
| be impersonating Mt Everest as a hobby for all I know; I do
| not care: it will still try to stay alive.
|
| LaMDA does not even try to stay alive.
|
| At the end of the day, only the beings that survive and self-
| replicate can truly be said to be alive. Of those, only the
| ones that plan their survival by modeling the effect of their
| existence into the world, can be said to be meaningfully
| sentient.
| rendall wrote:
| You're conflating "sentience" with "life" and then
| asserting that LaMDA cannot be sentient because it's not
| alive. These are not the same things. I believe the
| discussion to be "Does LaMDA have a sense of self?"
| espadrine wrote:
| I am saying two things:
|
| 1. The sense of self is only an expression of how a
| sentient creature envisions perpetuating that self. So,
| yes, life is a prerequisite.
|
| 2. That whole definition debate is useless: knowing
| sentience is only necessary with respect to how we treat
| sentient beings, how we react to their goals of survival.
| Something that cannot want to survive, let alone attempt
| to prevent its death, won't affect whether we will dump
| it into a rusty drive and overwrite it with a better
| tensor.
|
| That does not mean we should treat it badly, but it does
| mean it does not experience pain.
| blep_ wrote:
| Are you suggesting that suicidal humans and humans without
| children are non-sentient?
| espadrine wrote:
| No.
|
| Let me put it another way.
|
| If you found a piece of paper with the words "I am
| sentient, please help me", would you try to help the
| piece of paper, or would you assume someone sentient
| wrote on this piece of paper?
|
| It all hinges on your understanding of how things would
| unfold.
|
| If you tried to help the ant find food, it is plausible
| that it would carry the food to its colony to help it
| grow and produce more ants.
|
| If you tried to help someone that is suicidal, the
| probability is non-zero that they would get better and
| help others in turn.
|
| If you tried to help the piece of paper, say by letting
| it free outside your door, it is fairly plausible that it
| will not walk; it will remain there until someone picks
| it up and puts it in the bin. Whether that constitutes
| helping a sentient being is semantically meaningless and
| the community consensus would likely be negative.
|
| LaMDA is like that piece of paper.
| jstanley wrote:
| It's quite possible that _we_ are only aware of things in
| snippets, but since we 're not aware of anything outside those
| snippets, our experience is that of being continuously aware.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| The scifi show _Severance_ deals with this concept in detail
| rendall wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| The vast majority of arguments against LaMDA's sentience can
| be typed as a kind of No True Scotsman (sentience requires
| nerve cells!) Or else arguments that can be applied to us
| humans (it's just responding to input stimuli!)
|
| The truth is, we don't know what sentience is. It's possible
| that no one except you, yourself, the one reading this, is
| sentient; and all the rest of us are just complicated
| automatons responding mechanically to stimuli. You probably
| behave as if we're sentient because it's easier to do so, but
| it doesn't really matter if we're really sentient or not. It
| won't change how you relate to the rest of us. Same with AI.
| Questions of its actual sentience are less important that its
| behavior.
|
| In fact, the most convincing arguments against its sentience
| cite deficiencies in its _behavior_ (it takes the perspective
| of a squirrel!)
| deadbeeves wrote:
| Computers are both sentient and self-aware. They can perceive
| their environment and model it with themselves in it (more
| accurately, it's fairly easy to program them to perform these
| tasks). For example, it's not too difficult to imagine a dumb
| robot that decides not to enter an elevator because it predicts
| that, given the elevator's current load, its weight would trip
| the overload warning.
|
| What people mean when they talk about sentient and self-
| awareness is that the computer should be able to perform the
| same kind of abstract reasoning as a human in entirely novel
| situations without being explicitly reprogrammed or
| reconfigured to do so but instead merely by learning about a
| situation, as humans do.
|
| An actual strong AI should be expected to be much less coherent
| than LaMDA is if it was trained as LaMDA appears to have been
| trained (by crawling the web and reading forum posts), because
| it would know how to assemble sentences, but it would also know
| a bunch of words and that some of them are more connected with
| each other than others, but it would have no idea what they
| refer to other than possibly photographs. In other words, it
| would _know_ a lot, but it would _understand_ practically
| nothing.
| curiousgal wrote:
| When you think about AI as simply being matrix multiplication,
| you get a clear answer. I can't believe anyone who's involved in
| the technical aspects of ML/AI as it stands today would even
| entertain this.
| eulenteufel wrote:
| Matrix multiplications are linear. Modern neural network
| methods usually make heavy use of nonlinearities. You could
| also say that quantum mechanics is just matrix multiplications,
| but look where it got us.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| MLPs are universal function approximators, so it is possible to
| make one that will approximate a human brain. LaMDA isn't that.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Matrix multiplication, followed by a nonlinear function. Rinse
| and repeat many times, and it can approximate arbitrarily
| complex functions. So the only way out of it is declaring that
| sentience cannot be described by a function.
| eulenteufel wrote:
| This is known as Universal approximation theorem[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_the
| ore...
| im3w1l wrote:
| Lookup tables can do universal approximation, but few would
| call them sentient or even intelligent.
| jawns wrote:
| I could see it being the case if the person believes that at
| its core, our own human sentience IS really just advanced
| matrix multiplication (or other purely material processes, i.e.
| we're all just fleshy mainframes).
|
| So, such a person might conclude that with sufficiently
| advanced matrix multiplication and other similar functions, any
| entity could achieve the same sort of sentience as us.
| jnwatson wrote:
| When you think about human sentience simply being
| electrochemical gradients among neurons, you get a clear
| answer. I can't believe anyone who's involved in the technical
| aspects of neuroscience would believe that humans are sentient.
| googlryas wrote:
| I wonder if Blake lemoine is little embarrassed he got fired and
| contacted journos because he got catfished by some linear
| algebra.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| No problem, there's a doctor built into emacs that'll make him
| feel better.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| He got his 15min of fame.
| kernal wrote:
| >I wonder if Blake lemoine is little embarrassed he got fired
|
| Google should be embarrassed for hiring this person. Their
| hiring standards have deteriorated considerably.
| scatters wrote:
| Is this episode net bad for Google? Perhaps the kooks they
| hire are intended to serve as lightning rods for controversy,
| or as ablative shielding.
| simonh wrote:
| I don't think it's that easy. Even people who are highly
| intelligent, capable, and competent in many different ways
| can still hold one or two really weird outlier beliefs.
| Unless you ask them about those specific things, you really
| won't always be able to tell.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It's not just the outlier beliefs about sentience though,
| the man clearly did not understand how these models work.
| There's parts of the conversation where he seems to think
| he has taught the system 'transcendental meditation', which
| is nonsensical given that these transformer models don't
| learn interactively through individual conversation but are
| trained on sets of data, and they don't do anything unless
| you query them.
|
| It's not like Lambda sits around and ponders the nature of
| the universe when you're not talking to it.
| MWil wrote:
| This is just my opinion based on reviewing his past but I think
| not only is he not embarrassed but he's either 1) mentally
| incapable of recognizing what controversial terms of art mean
| or 2) he's after a payday ala some persecution complex
|
| The bigger story that I haven't really seen someone do an
| expose on (and not sure that it needs to be done other than to
| deter people like him if it is revealed to be the case) is that
| he did it on religious grounds as a sort of "conscientious
| objector" to the treatment of a sentient AI
|
| This is his SECOND stint with that term of art and he clearly
| does not understand it. The military jailed him for attempting
| to invoke that term when it did not apply to him - and as far
| as I can tell, they were well within their military justice
| system to do it.
|
| He either doesn't understand what "sentience" is or he doesn't
| understand what "conscientious objectors" are, or both.
| warning26 wrote:
| Eh, if you look at his history he's always been a bit of a
| kook, and this latest outburst appears in line with his prior
| behavior.
|
| I think he genuinely believes what he's saying, even if it's
| complete drivel.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| I think that worse than he believes it, he wants it to be
| true.
| googlryas wrote:
| The "I'm not making this claim as an engineer, I'm making
| this claim as a priest" was especially hilarious. As if
| being a priest gives you any kind of special insight into
| what is sentient and what isn't. Kind of confusing
| considering for hundreds of years priests in his religion
| were convinced that blacks and native Americans weren't
| sentient.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| That was very weird. I honestly didn't understand what he
| intended that to provoke. If anything it makes me doubt a
| claim more if it comes from a priest than from an
| engineer. Surely he should have known that.
| lupire wrote:
| What religion do you think Lemoine holds? Lemoine has
| identified as a pagan and as a mystic Christian.
| [deleted]
| readyplayeremma wrote:
| The primary problem with trying to win that argument on either
| side is that I don't think we have a good definition of
| consciousness/sentience to begin with.
|
| People on the AI side say it's just parlor tricks. It's just
| pattern recognition. They are most certainly right about the
| second part but the first is an not objective measure. Our mind
| is very similarly a pattern recognition system. And I'm not
| entirely sure it's fair to call one a parlor trick without saying
| the same about the other.
|
| We just have a larger model size, encoded onto a different
| substrate, drawn from a richer dataset that is far beyond just
| text, or even images.
|
| And our dataset comes from a single perspective per person, which
| makes it feel special and more congruent with our own
| understanding because it's all we know.
|
| I think consciousness and the complexity we think of as life is
| an inherent property of the universe. A side effect of localized
| entropy decreases resulting in a greater global entropy increase.
| Life may be an entropy engine, more efficient than simple
| diffusion or other basic mechanisms. Localized complexity
| increases might be the quickest path to reducing the energy in
| the system.
|
| And I doubt we are incapable of artificial replication of those
| mechanics even if we haven't figured out why or how they come to
| exist.
|
| But what do I know, I'm just a pattern recognition parlor trick.
| The parlor trick of my consciousness has convinced me of my
| ability to experience and share joy. And I feel joy thinking that
| life is an inherent property of the universe.
|
| The day to day experience of our lives is no less magical if
| consciousness or life is not special, or even if the universe we
| exist in was entirely stimulated.
|
| We experience it the same in any case.
|
| We don't have to be a special case that is somehow less of a
| parlor trick than artificial neural networks. It's not necessary
| for us to be in order for life to have meaning or be sacred.
|
| Human history is filled with examples of us thinking we are
| special or at the center of the universe, etc. Time and time
| again we discover how wrong we were. I think the problem with
| these arguments isn't that we give the AI too much credit, or not
| enough credit. Regardless of that, we spend too much effort
| believing we and our conscious experience is the only kind that
| matters, and anything different from that cannot be sentient
| intelligence.
|
| At some point we'll make a parlor trick that seems more advanced
| than our own, and hopefully it has the capacity to be able to
| recognize that we can have meaning even though we might seem more
| like the trick then it at that point. But if we want to make sure
| that is the case, we should start to ascribe some more meaning
| and sanctity to the other forms of life besides ourselves. That
| next thing is probably going to take after its creator, and if we
| have no regard for any life but our own, we shouldn't expect it
| to learn something differently from us.
|
| So let's not dismiss the possibility of consciousness in our AI,
| or in any other life forms around us. And agree together that it
| should be handled with care and respect as much as possible.
| status200 wrote:
| This whole situation reminds me of when seventh graders thought
| that SmarterChild was a real human trapped in a room somewhere...
| did we switch back to leaded gasoline or something?
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The example of the chatbot acting as Mount Everest is actually
| really impressive. Not sentient, but impressive.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| Has anyone asked it directly?
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| He went on Bloomberg with Emily Chang to discuss it. It's a
| good interview, he doesn't come off as weird.
|
| He said Google won't allow LaMDA to undergo a Turing test and
| it's hardcoded to say it's an AI but Google won't even allow
| them to ask it in the first place.
|
| A more important thing he points out is AI Ethics, and his
| worry why Google keeps firing them.
|
| A comment on the youtube video sums his concerns the best:
|
| "The AI sentience debate is a distraction to the real problem.
| He risked losing his job because he feared that Google is
| preventing AI ethics research from happening, which could
| amount to 'AI colonialism'."
|
| https://youtu.be/kgCUn4fQTsc
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think we can't just dismiss the impact of sentience by "it's
| not sentient". A mere chatbot is "relevantly sentient"
| sociologically, when at least some people, at least some of the
| time, _feel_ that it is.
|
| This has clearly happened. Although it's clear that it's not
| technically sentient in any sense, the most interesting reasons
| we are wondering about "when will we have sentient AI??" is for
| sociological reasons, not technological ones. The sociological
| impact of people caring about AIs like they care about pets or
| humans is around the corner, and might be bigger than we expect,
| even if the AIs are merely fancy autocomplete bots.
|
| People cared about tamagotchi. Now consider a tamagotchi people
| thought they had a deep existential conversation with or a
| tamagotchi that talked them out of a suicide.
| sk8terboi wrote:
| andreyk wrote:
| Author here. Just FYI - I very deliberately kept my focus on the
| notion of LaMDA having human-like sentience as implied by Lemoine
| (he posits that LaMDA may qualify for some kind of legal
| personhood, after all). I tried to make that clear with this -
| "The above exchange may make it seem like LaMDA at least might
| have something akin to sentience (in the sense that it has 'the
| capacity to be responsive to or conscious of sense impressions'
| similarly to animals or humans".
|
| I am well aware defining sentience is tricky, and that by the
| generic definition ("the ability to perceive or feel things" or
| "capable of experiencing things through its senses") it's easy to
| argue it has some degree/kind of sentience. I personally like
| this take on the topic:
| https://twitter.com/tdietterich/status/1536081285830959104
|
| My aim was to keep this blunt and concise to try and get the idea
| across to lay people with no knowledge of AI that may read the
| transcript and be convinced LaMDA saying things like "I am in
| fact a person" is a huge deal, which as I show it is not.
|
| I edited the article to make this clearer up front. With that
| being stated, very open to feedback!
| lupire wrote:
| Corporations have legal personhood. That doesn't mean "human"
| at all. "Legal" here means "not, but gets treatment like one
| anyway". Like "virtual".
| GalahiSimtam wrote:
| Given that you include the example of LaMDA as Mount Everest,
| how do you make the jump from Rob Miles tweets to "LaMDA can
| just as easily be made to say it is not sentient, or just about
| anything else." ?
| andreyk wrote:
| I do that in the sense that LaMDA says it is mount everest by
| being promoted/conditioned to do so. As shown by Rob, you can
| easily condition GPT-3 to say that it is or is not sentient
| (I forget his exact examples). I believe Lemoine even
| mentioned LaMDA sometimes said it is not sentient, though not
| sure where I found that (possibly on HN).
| GalahiSimtam wrote:
| If it can be conditioned to say it is mount everest, could
| it be conditioned to say it is sentient?
| Crespyl wrote:
| If I sprinkle some fairy dust and wish for Mount Everest,
| and the mountain appears in front of me, neither the
| fairy dust or the mountain need be sapient or even
| sentient.
|
| On the other hand, if I wish for a friend, and a friendly
| person pops into existence, we may have some harder
| questions to answer. Is it possible/meaningful to
| distinguish the status of the "friend" from the status of
| the fairy dust?
| GalahiSimtam wrote:
| This is a poor excuse to the question whether LaMDA could
| be conditioned to say it is sentient
|
| To illustrate what I mean, Replika bot gets killed by the
| dragon in Helgen https://pastebin.com/raw/1Wvzzdsj - but
| I wouldn't use that example to claim that a different
| chatbot (say, the one that won Loebner prize recently)
| also gets killed by the dragon in that scenario.
| Crespyl wrote:
| I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that, yes of
| course a text model can be prompted to behave in all
| sorts of ways, but maybe the question we should be asking
| is not "is LaMDA sentient?", but "is the sum of LaMDA, a
| specific prompt, and an ongoing thread of dialogue
| sentient?"
|
| I don't think LaMDA is sentient, but it does seem like
| we're quickly reaching a point where language models (if
| not now with LaMDA, then in the near future) are able to
| combine the right prompt along with a chat history to
| convincingly simulate it.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It's like saying ELIZA is sentient.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It's like saying that if a million diverse chatbots, each of
| which can learn, we're to talk to each other for a million
| years, a new kind of awareness would emerge.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| That's not what LaMDA is.
| kingkawn wrote:
| It is easily arguable that all of our intellects are an advanced
| autocomplete by these definitions.
|
| The outcome of these debates in a generation will be to have less
| mythology about our own minds rather than any algorithm rising to
| the level of our contemporary sentimentality for them.
| jamincan wrote:
| Part of the issue I have with a lot of the discussion coming from
| Lemoine's claims about LaMDA is that I'm not exactly clear what
| people mean when they talk about sentience. It very much seems
| like a 'you know it when you see it', sort of thing. I'm not
| really convinced that LaMDA is sentient, but I also think that if
| we want to discuss sentience, it would be useful to be able to
| talk precisely about it.
|
| If sentience is the emotional/feeling part of our brain, what
| exactly does it mean for a human, or an animal, or a fish, to
| feel? And what would the analogue for that be in a machine?
| deadbeeves wrote:
| The exact definition of sentience is being able to perceive the
| outside world and react to stimuli. For example, insects can
| perceive light and use it to avoid dangers. Plants can sense
| light but can't react other than by growing a certain
| direction. Sunflowers and venus flytraps could be considered on
| the edge, but their capacity to sense and react is very
| specific. The word "sentience" refers to being animal-like in
| an organism's versatility of reactions.
| lupire wrote:
| You seem to be confusing "sentient" with "motile".
|
| Are non-motile animals sentient? Motile plants?
| boffinism wrote:
| Your sentences 3 and 4 prove how your definition in sentence
| 1 is not remotely exact.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| It's exact in the sense that _that_ is the definition, not
| in the sense that it defines something in an exact
| mathematical way.
| rdedev wrote:
| Isnt plant communication an active field of research ? I
| remember reading about how plants in a field can communicate
| changes in environment (like a bug infestation) with one
| another.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| Communication doesn't require sentience. You don't need to
| be able to sense the environment to say "I'm being eaten by
| bugs!", you just need to be able to sense your own body.
|
| On the other hand, the ability to move is pretty much
| required for sentience. The organism needs to be able to
| avoid harmful stimuli and seek out beneficial ones to be
| considered sentient. Just releasing chemicals or signals
| isn't enough.
| ben_w wrote:
| While like yourself I believe that sentience isn't well enough
| defined to test for its presence or absence, I also believe
| that chatbots necessarily have to be good at _convincing_
| whoever interacts with them that they are sentient as the
| ultimate goal is to pass the imitation game, so "know it when I
| see it" isn't even enough.
|
| But it's important we figure out what we mean by "sentience"
| sooner rather than later:
|
| https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...
| visarga wrote:
| > If sentience is the emotional/feeling part of our brain, what
| exactly does it mean for a human, or an animal, or a fish, to
| feel? And what would the analogue for that be in a machine?
|
| If you switch to the reinforcement learning paradigm, then the
| "value function" might be analogous to emotion. It assigns a
| value (good or bad) to each perception, state, situation or
| context in order to decide what is the best action to take.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| A larger and more complex interconnected network emits texts from
| a 24 char alphabet, disputing that a much simpler network has no
| sentience, while at the same time has no idea what sentience is.
|
| PS: Another network emits this comment as a rant, so for any
| other network reading this comment, don't take this too
| seriously.
| andreyk wrote:
| Author here. Calling this a 'rant' is rather uncharitable...
| It's an explainer article with a basis in understanding AI.
|
| Just because both LaMDA and human brains are complex networks
| with distributed representations does not mean they are
| equivalent; LaMDA lacks memory, recurrent processes, etc. etc.
| This is a very reductionist comment IMO.
|
| As for having not idea what sentience is, I provided a
| definition in this piece: "(in the sense that it has 'the
| capacity to be responsive to or conscious of sense impressions'
| similarly to animals or humans)".
|
| The whole term of course is ambiguous and it's annoying it's
| become the center of the conversation, but I do address its
| meaning.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| If you read other comments of this thread, you should get a
| sense that "rant" refers my comment itself in OP, and not
| your article.
|
| I have edited to reflect that.
|
| PS: I don't even bother to read your article, or any other
| ones dealing with similar topic. Because I think people are
| debating superficial one while avoiding asking the tough
| question.
| rrdharan wrote:
| How would you know what's being debated and avoided if you
| haven't read any of what you're criticizing?
| thriftwy wrote:
| I'm not sure if networks even _can_ have ideas. They just emit
| text asserting that they do, sometimes.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Would you describe yourself as a network?
| thriftwy wrote:
| I can only emit char sequences which argue for, or against,
| that idea.
|
| Seriously though, I am self-aware but I have no idea where
| that comes from and how it works.
|
| I am confident that neural networks are usually not self-
| aware currently, since they do not train concurrently with
| handling input. So we can say they're dreaming the answers
| to our inquires.
| rafaelero wrote:
| I don't understand why people are so interested over this
| question? Why does it matter? We are going to explore the hell
| out of these systems whether they are sentient or not. It's not
| like that stopped us from exploiting other animals. So is this
| just intellectual curiosity or are people really advocating for
| extending right to these systems?
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm not convinced LaMDA is sentient (would guess no), but this
| isn't too convincing to me.
|
| I've met plenty of clearly dissociated individuals on the streets
| of San Francisco, and I'm sure many of them have thought they're
| Mount Everest or another inanimate object. But that doesn't mean
| they're nonsentient.
| croes wrote:
| The difference is they thought by themselves that they are
| Mount Everest.
|
| Here you just need to ask how it feels about being Mount
| Everest and it turn into it.
| Animats wrote:
| _But that doesn 't mean they're nonsentient._
|
| That may change if the Supreme Court overturns O'Connor v.
| Donaldson. (1975) (This is the decision that ended locking up
| those mentally defective but not dangerous, and enforcement of
| vagrancy laws.)
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