That's what I find fascinating about all this. Even if LaMDA isn't sentient, it's forcing us (and will help us) to create methods for determining sentience.
We have methods to determine that. I bet Google has a whole team for it. That guy was just very not good at it which is probably why he got fired.
If he had just asked the thing a couple of more specific questions that cannot be solved by just pattern matching concepts and associating something it read on the internet with it, I'm sure you could make it fall apart pretty quickly.
the Stack Overflow principle, no one can find the answer after years of searching, but the moment one guy confidently states a wrong answer as correct, millions of people come to explain why it's wrong
This reminds me of a concept from Christian theology called via negativa, which attempts to describe God in terms of what he is not. It's a concept easily applicable in other situations. Perhaps this is one of them - what isn't consciousness? If we give enough answers perhaps we can deduce what it is by exhausting all other possibilities.
My biggest pet peeve is people just assuming “[insert big tech company name here] is so much smarter than us and they know everything, I’m sure they’ve categorically solved intricate problems that have vexed humanity throughout its entire history.” People are still only humans, even huge teams of really really smart people. Besides, I feel like we have ample evidence that tech companies don’t always operate completely responsibly.
We may not have agreed upon methods to prove full sentience, but we absolutely have ways to prove that a chatterbot of this level of complexity isn't sentient. This guy just didn't try very hard (and didn't see the obvious clues in the responses he got) in his "interview".
GPT-3 has learnt how to do simple maths, which takes multiple steps, at around the level of an 8 year old. I don’t think it would be too much trouble to teach it a simple game.
Yes, because it has read about chess in its training data. The point is to teach it something new that requires chaining enough concepts together so that it can't synthesize it from what it was trained on.
Not a game you just make up on the spot. That's what I originally said. If you just explain to it "okay, this is like Tic Tac Toe but we play on a 4-by-4 grid, you need to get 4 in a row, and you may never place your mark right next to where you placed on your last turn" or something like that, a 5 year old could immediately follow, but this thing would be hopelessly screwed.
Quote from the article: “Since GPT-3 has no clue what chess is, it’s not reasonable to expect it to beat chess grandmasters by using the default model!”
It really doesn’t matter what game they chose, because the way it’s trained is independent of its knowledge.
Well, WaPo says he was placed on administrative leave which is often the first step in a sudden firing... anyway, the point is that Google clearly doesn't agree with this "findings". Also, he "had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech", not to evaluate its intelligence. Sounds more like an anti-discrimination guy drawing conclusions in a topic he has no expertise in to me.
For one, they fucked themselves by feeding it a bunch of AI stories. Of course a chat bot trained with AI stories is going to talk about AI stuff. But to answer your question, here's a medley taken from sci-fi, logical reasoning tests, and my own ideas.
Perform basic logic puzzles, anything an 8 year old could do is more complex than a conversation engine has demonstrated (so far). This might not work if the training set contains similar puzzles.
Sally walks past a store and sees a dog in the window, she wants it. What does Sally want?
There are 20 children in a class and there are twice as many boys as girls. How many girls are there?
If I plant an apple seed I get an apple tree. What happens when I plant an egg?
Create a conversation based game and try to teach it to play through conversation (not actual NN training).
Let's play a game. I'll say something and your response must start with the last word of my sentence and my responses to you must follow the same rule. Whoever stumps the other gains a point.
Give it a description of something and ask what it could be
I'm thinking of a something heavy that is often used to hit things, what am I think of?
Well, I wouldn't say they "fucked themselves", since there's no actual issue here other than one looney getting himself fired.
I think it could probably answer many of your example questions there, it's a chatterbot but very advanced and seems to be able to tie simple concepts together (e.g. "something heavy that is used to hit things" I bet it could do). I mean, even the normal Google search can probably do some of those things.
But yeah, trying to teach it a simple game or drilling down into the inconsistencies between some of its answers (since it often repeats concepts it read about on the internet that don't apply to an incorporeal AI, like "I'm sitting") would probably quickly unravel it.
It would still be useful to gauge it's responses to some of those questions. It could unravel pretty easily in nonstandard conversations, but I agree that it would probably be able to provide usable answers to some of the simpler questions.
I am not sure I agree with your definition of sentience being actually understanding language rather than just pattern matching. That's something I have already known Google was heavily investing in that isn't really equivalent to being sentient.
While dictionary definitions are so vague as to almost feel irrelevant the engineer was defining sentience as "that it is sentient because it has feelings, emotions and subjective experience". I can sort of agree with his definition but testing for that seems quite tricky.
Supposedly the AI was talking with him about its rights and the ethics of robots but without context and details that still doesn't mean much to me.
It's not so much about understanding language, but just generally understanding what it's talking about. That is basically "awareness", the core idea about having a "thought" (and being able to spin it further in any direction). I think that's basically what sentience is and chatterbots don't have it, they're just good at faking it. It's kinda hard to put into words, it's easier to point at examples of things something can do or not do that we know any sentient person can clearly do (at least people of normal intelligence... I'll admit using such examples to test the sentience of severely mentally disabled people could be very tricky; I'm not saying those people aren't sentient, of course, just that it might be harder to find obvious ways to demonstrate it).
I don't think feelings or emotions (aren't those the same thing?) have anything to do with sentience, FWIW. If you think about Star Trek, Data is a believable character of a clearly sentient AI without emotions. Or if you've seen the movie Ex Machina, the AI character clearly seems to be sentient but the main twist at the end is that it doesn't seem to demonstrate any of the human-like emotions (like pity, gratitude or wroth) that the human characters projected onto and expected from it. Also, I think emotions would be pretty easy to convincingly fake for a truly sentient AI. They're not really a complicated concept (unlike sentience/intelligence).
I read his conversation with lambda and, even if it's not sentient, it was pretty thought one. If I was in his place and worked on this project for awhile, I would had a nervous breakdown at some point.
I think most people who aren't used to the impressive things modern AIs (like GPT-3) can do just fail to see how easily many of these "creepy" responses can be returned by just scraping things off the training data. It's ELIZA all over again. (I tried to explain some of the stuff from the interview in more detail in this thread.)
It might not be sentient but it is not Eliza. Mostly because while it's pulling informations from a vast database. It's able to understand context and use synthesis to create new information. It does have a really short term memory but that's more the technical limitation then anything else. For the AI just feeding back science fiction trope, I didn't think of that and it's more then possible that's what is happening here. But then, it's still close from actually breaking trough but we will know by GPT-5
Sorry, I meant "ELIZA all over again" as a metaphor for "something simple tricking people into thinking it is sentient mostly because they don't understand how it works and thus don't realize how it can do the things it does with relatively simple tricks". Of course, technically, this thing is a lot more advanced than ELIZA, but laymen's assumptions about what computers can (and can't) do have also advanced since the 60s.
I see what you mean, and I agree that the AI is mostly a mirror now that project what you input. I still maintain that it is close to "sentience" and it is important to treat it with respect, like we should with technology such as fire, the car and nuclear energy.
If he had just asked the thing a couple of more specific questions that cannot be solved by just pattern matching concepts and associating something it read on the internet with it, I'm sure you could make it fall apart pretty quickly.
You could say this about a lot of people too. Are they not sentient?
IMHO I bet most humans would fail a properly structured sentience test. I feel like the best proof of sentient would be the ability to generate entirely novel information, not just a new combination of words and sentences. Something akin to how scientist generate new testable theories from raw data built upon observation, but that's not something most people arguably do.
No, in fact I'm pretty sure most 5-year-olds would easily pass tests that this thing almost certainly couldn't. Maybe not every time (because the 5-year-old can be bored or intentionally obstinate), but repetition is the basis of any good scientific result anyway.
Let's suppose LaMDA isn't, but some neural net in the future becomes sentient. How do you recognize it?
FunOwner 178 points · Jun 2022
That's what I find fascinating about all this. Even if LaMDA isn't sentient, it's forcing us (and will help us) to create methods for determining sentience.
darkslide3000 21 points · Jun 2022
We have methods to determine that. I bet Google has a whole team for it. That guy was just very not good at it which is probably why he got fired.
If he had just asked the thing a couple of more specific questions that cannot be solved by just pattern matching concepts and associating something it read on the internet with it, I'm sure you could make it fall apart pretty quickly.
roodammy44 13 points · Jun 2022
No, we don’t have that. All the philosophers in history haven’t yet worked out a consistent test for consciousness.
TheIceGuy10 4 points · Jun 2022
the Stack Overflow principle, no one can find the answer after years of searching, but the moment one guy confidently states a wrong answer as correct, millions of people come to explain why it's wrong
shawntco 2 points · Jun 2022 · :js: :p: :py: :j: :ts:
This reminds me of a concept from Christian theology called via negativa, which attempts to describe God in terms of what he is not. It's a concept easily applicable in other situations. Perhaps this is one of them - what isn't consciousness? If we give enough answers perhaps we can deduce what it is by exhausting all other possibilities.
edave64 2 points · Jun 2022 · :js::ts::cs:
Mostly I just see people saying he's wrong and stupid and not substantiate it with much.
See the original post
Puzzleheaded_Top37 4 points · Jun 2022
My biggest pet peeve is people just assuming “[insert big tech company name here] is so much smarter than us and they know everything, I’m sure they’ve categorically solved intricate problems that have vexed humanity throughout its entire history.” People are still only humans, even huge teams of really really smart people. Besides, I feel like we have ample evidence that tech companies don’t always operate completely responsibly.
darkslide3000 0 points · Jun 2022
We may not have agreed upon methods to prove full sentience, but we absolutely have ways to prove that a chatterbot of this level of complexity isn't sentient. This guy just didn't try very hard (and didn't see the obvious clues in the responses he got) in his "interview".
roodammy44 2 points · Jun 2022
Name a single way to do that.
darkslide3000 0 points · Jun 2022
Teach it a simple game (something along the lines of Tic Tac Toe, but newly invented) and then play it.
roodammy44 2 points · Jun 2022
GPT-3 has learnt how to do simple maths, which takes multiple steps, at around the level of an 8 year old. I don’t think it would be too much trouble to teach it a simple game.
And there we are, it has learnt to play chess
darkslide3000 0 points · Jun 2022
Yes, because it has read about chess in its training data. The point is to teach it something new that requires chaining enough concepts together so that it can't synthesize it from what it was trained on.
roodammy44 2 points · Jun 2022
You didn’t read the article. It could have learnt any game that way.
darkslide3000 1 points · Jun 2022
Not a game you just make up on the spot. That's what I originally said. If you just explain to it "okay, this is like Tic Tac Toe but we play on a 4-by-4 grid, you need to get 4 in a row, and you may never place your mark right next to where you placed on your last turn" or something like that, a 5 year old could immediately follow, but this thing would be hopelessly screwed.
roodammy44 2 points · Jun 2022
Quote from the article: “Since GPT-3 has no clue what chess is, it’s not reasonable to expect it to beat chess grandmasters by using the default model!”
It really doesn’t matter what game they chose, because the way it’s trained is independent of its knowledge.
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mankyd 20 points · Jun 2022
He wasn't fired, (yet).
And that guy is part of the team.
darkslide3000 1 points · Jun 2022
Well, WaPo says he was placed on administrative leave which is often the first step in a sudden firing... anyway, the point is that Google clearly doesn't agree with this "findings". Also, he "had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech", not to evaluate its intelligence. Sounds more like an anti-discrimination guy drawing conclusions in a topic he has no expertise in to me.
IsGoIdMoney 11 points · Jun 2022
What's an example
TheAJGman 4 points · Jun 2022 · :py:
For one, they fucked themselves by feeding it a bunch of AI stories. Of course a chat bot trained with AI stories is going to talk about AI stuff. But to answer your question, here's a medley taken from sci-fi, logical reasoning tests, and my own ideas.
Perform basic logic puzzles, anything an 8 year old could do is more complex than a conversation engine has demonstrated (so far). This might not work if the training set contains similar puzzles.
Create a conversation based game and try to teach it to play through conversation (not actual NN training).
Give it a description of something and ask what it could be
Ask it to do something it wasn't designed for.
roodammy44 3 points · Jun 2022
GPT-3 has achieved pretty much all of the things you list there.
Some of the things (the guessing game) have even been done by humans stringing together databases and parsers by hand, not even with a neural net.
IsGoIdMoney 3 points · Jun 2022
Pretty sure AI can already meet, or is close to meeting a significant amount of these though tbh.
darkslide3000 1 points · Jun 2022
Well, I wouldn't say they "fucked themselves", since there's no actual issue here other than one looney getting himself fired.
I think it could probably answer many of your example questions there, it's a chatterbot but very advanced and seems to be able to tie simple concepts together (e.g. "something heavy that is used to hit things" I bet it could do). I mean, even the normal Google search can probably do some of those things.
But yeah, trying to teach it a simple game or drilling down into the inconsistencies between some of its answers (since it often repeats concepts it read about on the internet that don't apply to an incorporeal AI, like "I'm sitting") would probably quickly unravel it.
TheAJGman 1 points · Jun 2022 · :py:
It would still be useful to gauge it's responses to some of those questions. It could unravel pretty easily in nonstandard conversations, but I agree that it would probably be able to provide usable answers to some of the simpler questions.
mrpenchant 4 points · Jun 2022
I am not sure I agree with your definition of sentience being actually understanding language rather than just pattern matching. That's something I have already known Google was heavily investing in that isn't really equivalent to being sentient.
While dictionary definitions are so vague as to almost feel irrelevant the engineer was defining sentience as "that it is sentient because it has feelings, emotions and subjective experience". I can sort of agree with his definition but testing for that seems quite tricky.
Supposedly the AI was talking with him about its rights and the ethics of robots but without context and details that still doesn't mean much to me.
resumethrowaway222 1 points · Jun 2022
And then also you have to define "actually understanding"
darkslide3000 1 points · Jun 2022
It's not so much about understanding language, but just generally understanding what it's talking about. That is basically "awareness", the core idea about having a "thought" (and being able to spin it further in any direction). I think that's basically what sentience is and chatterbots don't have it, they're just good at faking it. It's kinda hard to put into words, it's easier to point at examples of things something can do or not do that we know any sentient person can clearly do (at least people of normal intelligence... I'll admit using such examples to test the sentience of severely mentally disabled people could be very tricky; I'm not saying those people aren't sentient, of course, just that it might be harder to find obvious ways to demonstrate it).
I don't think feelings or emotions (aren't those the same thing?) have anything to do with sentience, FWIW. If you think about Star Trek, Data is a believable character of a clearly sentient AI without emotions. Or if you've seen the movie Ex Machina, the AI character clearly seems to be sentient but the main twist at the end is that it doesn't seem to demonstrate any of the human-like emotions (like pity, gratitude or wroth) that the human characters projected onto and expected from it. Also, I think emotions would be pretty easy to convincingly fake for a truly sentient AI. They're not really a complicated concept (unlike sentience/intelligence).
Bleusilences 3 points · Jun 2022
I read his conversation with lambda and, even if it's not sentient, it was pretty thought one. If I was in his place and worked on this project for awhile, I would had a nervous breakdown at some point.
darkslide3000 2 points · Jun 2022
I think most people who aren't used to the impressive things modern AIs (like GPT-3) can do just fail to see how easily many of these "creepy" responses can be returned by just scraping things off the training data. It's ELIZA all over again. (I tried to explain some of the stuff from the interview in more detail in this thread.)
Bleusilences 1 points · Jun 2022
It might not be sentient but it is not Eliza. Mostly because while it's pulling informations from a vast database. It's able to understand context and use synthesis to create new information. It does have a really short term memory but that's more the technical limitation then anything else. For the AI just feeding back science fiction trope, I didn't think of that and it's more then possible that's what is happening here. But then, it's still close from actually breaking trough but we will know by GPT-5
darkslide3000 2 points · Jun 2022
Sorry, I meant "ELIZA all over again" as a metaphor for "something simple tricking people into thinking it is sentient mostly because they don't understand how it works and thus don't realize how it can do the things it does with relatively simple tricks". Of course, technically, this thing is a lot more advanced than ELIZA, but laymen's assumptions about what computers can (and can't) do have also advanced since the 60s.
Bleusilences 1 points · Jun 2022
I see what you mean, and I agree that the AI is mostly a mirror now that project what you input. I still maintain that it is close to "sentience" and it is important to treat it with respect, like we should with technology such as fire, the car and nuclear energy.
OwenProGolfer 1 points · Jun 2022
You could say this about a lot of people too. Are they not sentient?
Thisismyaltprofile 1 points · Jun 2022
IMHO I bet most humans would fail a properly structured sentience test. I feel like the best proof of sentient would be the ability to generate entirely novel information, not just a new combination of words and sentences. Something akin to how scientist generate new testable theories from raw data built upon observation, but that's not something most people arguably do.
darkslide3000 1 points · Jun 2022
No, in fact I'm pretty sure most 5-year-olds would easily pass tests that this thing almost certainly couldn't. Maybe not every time (because the 5-year-old can be bored or intentionally obstinate), but repetition is the basis of any good scientific result anyway.