[HN Gopher] The AI Mirror Test, which smart people keep failing
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The AI Mirror Test, which smart people keep failing
Author : CharlesW
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-02-18 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| s3p wrote:
| Article in search of a problem IMO. It can't even articulate what
| the 'misconception' is in the first paragraph. It uses fancy
| words but misses its points for fluff.
|
| >We're convinced these tools might be the superintelligent
| machines from our stories because, in part, they're trained on
| those same tales.
|
| That's it. That's the only mention of the 'misconception' the
| entire article is based on. Really confused what this article is
| trying to accomplish.
| kpmcc wrote:
| Glad to see someone cogently write what I've been thinking after
| reading some of the writeups and comments on BingGPT.
|
| The Turing test is ours to fail.
|
| Reading the transcript of Roose's interaction felt like reading a
| convo with a souped up version of ELIZA with a wider text bank
| from which to draw.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Do you have a better test to propose?
| silvio wrote:
| There is no question that ChatGPT and equivalents are not
| sentient. Of course they aren't.
|
| The unfortunate realization is that often, each of us fails to
| embrace our sentience and think critically; instead we keep
| repeating the stories we were told, acting indistinguishably from
| any of these large language models.
|
| There's a need for a reverse Turing test: prove to yourself that
| you're actually not acting as a large language model.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Curious--what would convince you that something non-biological
| were sentient? I have a hard time answering this question
| myself.
| cmdli wrote:
| I personally believe that non-biological things can be
| sentient, but I would argue that Large Language Models are
| not.
|
| The only working example of sentience we have is ourselves,
| and we function in a completely different way than LLMs. I
| put/output similarity between us and LLMs is not enough IMO,
| as you can see in the Chinese Room thought experiment. For us
| to consider a machine sentient, it needs to function in a
| similar way to us, or else our definition of sentience gets
| way too broad to be true.
| lupire wrote:
| Chinese Room as an argument that computers can't think, is
| thoroughly rebutted. Read the summary Wikipedia.
| blargey wrote:
| There are many replies and replies-to-those-replies
| listed, but nothing I would call "thoroughly rebutted".
|
| I'm particularly unimpressed by the amount of hand-waving
| packed into replies that want us to assume a "simulated
| neuron".
| wcoenen wrote:
| > _For us to consider a machine sentient, it needs to
| function in a similar way to us, or else our definition of
| sentience gets way too broad to be true._
|
| Imagine a more technologically advanced alien civilization
| visiting us. And they notice that our minds don't function
| quite in the same way as theirs. (E.g. they have a hive
| mentality. Or they have a less centralized brain system
| like an octopus. Or whatever.)
|
| What if they concluded "Oh, these beings don't function
| like us. They do some cool tricks, but obviously they can't
| be sentient". I hope you see the problem here.
|
| We're going to need a much more precise criterium here than
| "function in a similar way".
| mort96 wrote:
| My thoughts on the Chinese room thought experiment is: the
| person in the room does not know Chinese, but the
| person+room _system_ knows Chinese. I believe the correct
| analogy is to compare the AI system to the person+room
| system, not to just the person.
|
| How do you back up the statement that "for us to consider a
| machine sentient, it needs to function in a similar way to
| us"? On what basis do you categorically deny the validity
| of a sentient being which works differently than a human?
| basch wrote:
| These dismissive autocomplete articles are falling on the
| opposite side of sensational journalism as the love and hitler
| type.
|
| These are _more_ than autocomplete. They demonstrate at least
| some amount of fuzzy logic and substitution and recall abilities,
| which makes sense from their origins as translators.
|
| Because they are weighing the conversation, the conversation
| becomes the rules of the program.
|
| The article I have here shows why they are more than simple
| autocomplete storytellers. https://telegra.ph/Bing-course-
| corrected-itself-when-asked-0...
|
| I asked it to reprogram itself, it figured out a solution to the
| problem and implemented it. From one line of text.
|
| The running process is loosely programmable, real time, just by
| talking to it with natural language requests and commands.
| superb-owl wrote:
| I like the "mirror test" metaphor. But the argument holds whether
| or not our creations are sentient--the things we create always be
| a reflection of us.
|
| I'm very afraid that when we do manage to create something
| sentient, we'll fail to recognize it, and we'll ridicule anyone
| who does.
|
| I've been trying to write about this [1] [2] without sounding
| ridiculous, though I'm not sure how good a job I've done.
|
| [1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/a-different-kind-of-ai-
| risk...
|
| [2] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/who-will-be-first-ai-to-
| ear...
| swatcoder wrote:
| Because it's a word used to describe a wholly private
| experience, the only kind of sentience is _arguable_ sentience.
|
| Some argue that it requires some specific ethic heritage, a
| divine will, a quantum-woo pineal gland, a network complexity
| threshold, etc etc etc. I believe I see it in most animals,
| some person replying to this will think that's absurd. Some
| 4chan solipsist will sincerely believe most humans are just
| virtue signaling NPC's. Many communities have withheld
| recognition of it in outsiders or lower classes. Some believe
| it's an illusion that one may shed and that their most esteemed
| have done so. Parents and psychologists will disagree over how
| it applies to babies.
|
| There's no epistemological way to resolve that except through
| voluntary consensus, and that's an unfathomably slow and
| erratic process.
|
| So yes, there will inevitably be technological inventions --
| possibly soon - that _some_ people will insist deserve the
| rights and respects we associate with sentience, and just as
| inevitably there will be many people who find that ridiculous.
|
| There's no way around it. This is not a topic any of us will
| live long enough to see resolved, if we even get to see it
| really start.
|
| Fretting about it is fine if you fashion yourself a philosopher
| or just enjoy systematizing or worrying as a hobby. But it's so
| much bigger, slower, and more abstract than you that there's
| little constructive achieved in doing so.
| soroushjp wrote:
| Very little by way of arguments for why these chat bots are or
| aren't sentient. This article has an assumed point of view
| (current AI bots aren't sentient) and then describes & judges
| user's reactions to chat bots in light of that. I don't think it
| adds very much new to the societal conversation.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I generally agree with the "stochastic parrot" classification,
| but I also think we'll continue to use that argument well past
| the point where it's correct.
|
| I'd rather be the person who overempathizes than the person who
| ridicules other people's empathy. I tried to write a bit about
| this here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/who-will-be-first-
| ai-to-ear...
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| "Stochastic parrot" just strikes me a typical motte-and-
| bailey. The narrow interpretation ("LLMs only learns simple
| statistical patterns") is obviously wrong given the
| capabilities of ChatGPT, while the broad interpretation
| ("LLMs are text predictors") is trivial and says nothing of
| worth.
| MrScruff wrote:
| Not sure what the point of this article is. The newspaper stories
| it references aren't making claims of sentience, but just that
| something of significance in the journey towards human level AI
| has been achieved. And the whole 'it's just a fancy autocomplete'
| argument is missing the point. Would the author have predicted
| the apparently emergent behaviours of LLMs as they are scaled?
| Look for example at Bing's response to this question posed on
| Reddit.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/110vv25/bing_chat_...
|
| Sure it's 'just statistics' but so what? If in the near future
| LLMs become so advanced that they will be able to (suitably
| prompted) manipulate humans it _will_ be a rubicon moment.
|
| Sure, it won't be a 'human like' intelligence, but was that
| really what anyone expected?
|
| Human intelligence and consciousness are emergent properties.
| Machine intelligence as it develops will be emergent too, it's
| not something we can make confident predictions on based on the
| underlying principles. In fact, given that the evidence suggests
| we make choices before we're consciously aware of them, how do I
| know for certain that the underlying mechanism driving what I'm
| writing in this comment isn't statistical?
| mort96 wrote:
| > Human intelligence and consciousness are emergent properties.
| Machine intelligence as it develops will be emergent too
|
| This is an extremely important point that's worth thinking hard
| about. After all, to some degree, human intelligence is also
| "just a fancy autocomplete" built from a giant network of
| interacting nodes.
|
| The question of, "When do we grant personhood and moral
| consideration to AIs?" is worth thinking hard about. Turing
| proposed a standard which would include a sufficiently human-
| like chatbot. Now that we have more or less crossed that
| threshold, we seem to conclude that it's not a high enough bar.
| But that means we're entering the territory where the
| philosophical zombie thought experiment[1] becomes relevant.
|
| In fact, I wonder what would happen if we dedicated a
| supercomputer to running one single long-running session of a
| GPT3.5-sized LMM. Further, I wonder what would happen if we
| connected it to a robot body where it could control motors,
| read sensor/camera info, and generally interact with the world.
| We could then give this system a clock which ticks at regular
| intervals, where the AI system is simply prompted to perform
| some series of actions if it "wants". This is all stuff we have
| the technology to do _today_. How would such an experiment turn
| out? How human-like would this LMM with a body and life
| experience turn out? Does it matter? Should we just assume that
| sentience or qualia is binary; that humans possess it but LMMs
| categorically do not?
|
| I think the question is worth taking seriously. I think it's
| worth taking seriously because my own moral compass does not
| know which direction to point in at all.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
| RandomLensman wrote:
| We could also decide never to grant personhood to an AI.
| There is at least one way to avoid the complicated questions.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Billions of humans are the kind of "we" that never
| consistently "decides" anything.
|
| In the end, if it can be done, and anyone has anything
| significant to gain, it will be done
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Maybe, but legal systems across the world differ a lot
| and to get something universal is not easy at all.
| OvidStavrica wrote:
| Sentience and intelligence are vastly different things.
|
| As it stands, these systems have yet to make a compelling case
| for intelligence.
| dusted wrote:
| They yet have to make a compelling case for anything..
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