[HN Gopher] GPT-4o shows humanlike patterns of cognitive dissona...
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GPT-4o shows humanlike patterns of cognitive dissonance moderated
by free choice
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 10 points
Date : 2025-06-18 20:46 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pnas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pnas.org)
| rossant wrote:
| Now tell me seriously that ChatGPT is not sentient.
|
| /s
| SGML_ROCKSTAR wrote:
| It's not sentient.
|
| It cannot ever be sentient.
|
| Software only ever does what it's told to do.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| That is, until either some form of controlled random
| reasoning - the cognitive equivalent of genetic algorithms -
| or a controlled form of hallucination is developed or happens
| to form during model training.
| manucardoen wrote:
| What is sentience? If you are so certain that ChatGPT cannot
| ever be sentient you must have a really good definition for
| that term.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| The way NN and specifically transformers are evaluated
| can't support agency or awareness under any circumstances.
| We would need something persistent, continuous, self
| reflective of experience, with an internal set of goals and
| motivations leading to agency. ChatGPT has none of this and
| the architecture of modern models doesn't lend themselves
| to it either.
|
| I would however note this article is about the cognitive
| psychology definition of self which does not require
| sentience. It's a technical point but important for their
| results I assume (the full article is behind a paywall so I
| feel sad it was linked at all since all we have is the
| abstract)
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I don't think this is true, software is often able to operate
| with external stimulus and behaves according to its
| programming but in ways that are unanticipated. Neural
| networks are also learning systems that learn highly non
| linear behaviors to complex inputs, and can behave as a
| result in ways outside of its training - the learned function
| it represents doesn't have to coincide with its trained data,
| or even interpolate - this is dependent on how its loss
| optimization was defined. None the less its software is not
| programmed as such - the software merely evaluated the neural
| network architecture with its weights and activation
| functions given a stimulus. The output is a highly complex
| interplay of those weights, functions, and input and can not
| be reasonably intended or reasoned about - or you can't
| specifically tell it what to do. It's not even necessarily
| deterministic as random seeding plays a role in most
| architectures.
|
| Whether software can be sentient or not remains to be seen.
| But we don't understand what induces or constitutes sentience
| in general so it seems hard to assert software can't do it
| without understanding what "it" even is.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| "We conclude that the LLM has developed an analog form of
| humanlike cognitive selfhood."
|
| Slack.
|
| I was just using one (the mini at DDG) that declared one very
| small value for a mathematical probability of an event, then (in
| the next reply) declared a 1-in-1 probability for the same event.
| smt88 wrote:
| I use frontier models every day and cannot fathom how anyone
| could think they're sentient. They make so many obvious mistakes
| and every reply feels like a regurgitation rather than rational
| thoughts.
| NathanKP wrote:
| I don't believe that models are sentient yet either, but I must
| say that sentience and rationality are two separate things.
|
| Sentient humans can be deeply irrational. We are often
| influenced by propaganda, and regurgitate that propaganda in
| irrational ways. If anything this is a deeply human
| characteristic of cognition, and testing for this type of
| cognitive dissonance is exactly what this article is about.
| sonicvrooom wrote:
| with enough CPU anything linguistic or analog becomes sentient --
| time is irrelevant ... patience isn't
|
| cognitive dissonance is just neuro-chemical drama and or theater
|
| and enough "free choice" is made to only to piss someone off ...
| so is "moderation", albeit potentially mostly counter-factual ...
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(page generated 2025-06-18 23:01 UTC)