LaMDA iS SeNTInENt
1,139 comments · 90% upvoted · source · other discussions
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FarewellSovereignty
Otherversian-Elite
Jokes on you, I’ve seen “chat bots” that are actually sentient (because they’re actually just chat rooms in disguise)
WoollyMittens
If you write something and there is a red wavy line under a word, keep changing the word until it goes away.
CreatureWarrior
Maybe I'm not sentient after all An AI could figure out how to write without typos, but I can't. sigh
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BernhardRordin
Let's suppose LaMDA isn't, but some neural net in the future becomes sentient. How do you recognize it?
Pokinator
Some philosophies argue that we can never be truly sure. It's encapsulated pretty well in the Chinese Room problem.
The basic setup is as follows: You're sat in a room with a communications console and a perfect reference book. Prompts (in chinese) come in on the terminal, you find the matching response in the book, and type it back. The person on the other end believes that you are fully fluent and competent in chinese, but all you did was copy an answer.
The crux of the thought experiment is "will you ever learn chinese?". If you're not parsing the responses at all, if you have no clue what the prompts are requesting, there's supposedly no way for you to learn. Similarly, if you talk to a chat bot and it gives good responses you might be inclined to think that it's sentient. However, does it actually understand what it is saying or does it merely know the math to compute an "appropriate" response?
DarkTechnocrat
I think an equally interesting question is if it matters whether it's actually sentient if it's indistinguishable from sentience.
Imagine A GAN setup where one learner was a chatbot trying to imitate sentience, and the other learner was a fake-sentience detector. We've seen how effective that setup can be. After many many iterations, the chatbot is indistinguishable from sentient except by the fake-sentience detector.
Thanks to the fake-detector we know it's not sentient, but if that's the only way we know, does it matter? We could laugh and joke with the chatbot, form friendships, rivalries, betray it, trust it, love it and believe we're loved, etc. We'd have exactly the same information on it's sentience as we do with other humans, except for the fact that the detector tells us it's fake.
CreatureWarrior
AI is honestly such an amazing topic!
Thanks to the fake-detector we know it's not sentient, but if that's the only way we know, does it matter? We could laugh and joke with the chatbot, form friendships, rivalries, betray it, trust it, love it and believe we're loved, etc. We'd have exactly the same information on it's sentience as we do with other humans, except for the fact that the detector tells us it's fake.
That's exactly it. If one day, a machine can make us feel all of those things, it doesn't really matter anymore. If a robot will listen to me opening up about my issues and actually listen and help me overcome them, that's more than many humans will do for me. If the AI can get hurt (if humanoid robots will be a thing) in a convincing way when you hit or insult it and make you feel bad for being a bad human towards it, that's like how many people are as well. If an AI will learn everything about me, cook my favorite meals, be with me through the good and bad times, that's once again, more than most people will ever do for me. At some point, "fake" means nothing if it's real enough.
Future sounds so interesting, but also pretty disturbing in a way. Real AI will be a philosophical nightmare lmao
DarkTechnocrat
If one day, a machine can make us feel all of those things, it doesn't really matter anymore
I think that's what I believe as well. We're asking if the machine feels things, but what's also important is what it makes us feel.
wise_freelancer
From a purely selfish view, isn’t whether the machine feels the more important question though? A machine that truly feels and thinks is no longer under our control, so is either a threat or a moral quandary (ie slavery). A machine that is just really good at mimicking human behaviour to comfort us in various ways is a controllable tool no different from a calculator
Expensive-Finding-24
I mean, present day neurology is already a philosophical nightmare that we've all collectively chosen to ignore. It has been fairly well demonstrated that human consciousness is a mechanical phenomenon governed by physical laws. I can alter the substrate of your brain and therefore your behavior. Your responses can be conditioned to the point that you don't realize you're being affected. You can take pharmaceutical compounds that alter your personality and ability to react to and process information. Nothing about human behavior excludes humans from being fundamentally as mechanical as a chemical system.
So, if the human brain is fundamentally mechanical, then a mechanical system that mimics the human brain will only ever be a difference in degree, and not in kind. I've said this a lot, but the only evidence that humans are sentient comes from other humans claiming to be. How then do we determine that line between machine and thinking-machine, if we can't provide testable criteria on ourselves? At some point we have to draw a line in the sand or else bury our heads in it.
CreatureWarrior
Exactly. I said something similar in this comment section. One day we are able to create a machine that can move, talk, see, hear, avoid damage and "death", affect others and change its behavior based on new information. If we still deny its sentience at that point, how are we supposed to prove our own? We are also just meatsacks that are driven by electrical signals and do everything in our power to avoid damage and death and reproduce and make more death avoiding meatsacks. How are we supposed to claim that a machine is not sentient if we work the same way?
amimai002
But what if the chat bot attains sentience?
I’m guessing in this test you are doing A-B testing with actual humans, it’s implicit in the model that the chat bot will indirectly learn from the human input as viewed by the “sentience detector”. In fact the “final state” will inevitably be the chat not being sentient and the detector outputting 50% error rate.
DarkTechnocrat
It's a good question, and quite frankly I am hand-waving away the details of a test for "apparent sentience". I think for the purposes of this thought experiment we're stipulating that the chat bot is not and will never be sentient, just that it will appear to be so.
amimai002
“When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul?” - I robot
It quite quickly becomes a philosophical argument. Is a fake more real then something that naturally is? After all the fake must understand not only that it is not real, but how to act like the real thing. And then make the choice to do so?
DarkTechnocrat
Great quote from IR, now I want to read it again.
It definitely becomes a philosophical argument, but I think that's OK. Good philosophical thought is an important tool in our rational kit. The "weakness" of science is that evidence must be objective and falsifiable by all observers.
There's an argument to be made that if actual sentience is wholly subjective, it might be outside the reach of purely scientific inquiry. A true thing that can't be proven true, like Kurt Godel proved happens in mathematics.
Or, maybe I just need more coffee this morning :D
Dameon_
One safe assumption is that a specialized intelligence can't be sentient; it takes a generalized intelligence. A chatbot just doesn't have the higher functions needed for sentience. Humans are a lot more than just language; we have an intelligence that can be applied to a huge variety of problems. This same AI would be completely incapable of "learning" to see, can't do basic math unless it's been trained on conversations where the answer has been given, and would be useless outside its one specialty.
A sentience test would involve testing more than one aspect of intelligence, and a chatbot would fail that test miserably.
[deleted]
Do we know what we’re saying, or does our brain just do the math to calculate our response?
BernhardRordin
A legit question, with the proven amount of post-rationalization that our brains do (e.g. split-brain syndrome experiments)
NoTarget5646
I've always kinda wondered that myself.
IsGoIdMoney
I'm not a fan of The Chinese room.
Two issues are:
The system of man in room does understand Chinese, even if he alone does not.
The other issue is that he does not deal sufficiently with human intelligence. Even if it were a problem, you have to say why human intelligence is not just different, but categorically different and unsimulatable. He attempts to say it's categorically different, but without sufficient explanation.
The human brain is a collection of neurons that essentially fire or don't fire. Consciousness appears to be emergent from what's basically a series of binary states. It at least seems possible to replicate given enough memory, and that's with the assumption the human brain is the only way to be conscious.
roodammy44
Indeed, the problem with the Chinese Room is that the lookup table has the correct response for every question. Fine, so the man in the room is not intelligent. But the lookup table certainly is intelligent.
Having a lookup table for language is not the same as performing maths. It’s not the same as applying logical rules to input. You need to actually understand the concepts behind the words to formulate answers, and have a memory for previous answers. Can’t do that with a book. That’s why the analogy is flawed. It moves off all the difficult bits to the lookup table.
FunOwner
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.
explodingtuna
create methods for determining sentience.
public boolean isSentient ()
{
...
}
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DarkTechnocrat
sentienceService = mock(Entity);
assert sentienceService.isSentient()
Green test, done. Next?
EmergencyStomach8580
And how would you test the code?
GoingToSimbabwe
You just test if the Sentience attribute of the AI class is true or false, easy peasy.
fredspipa
Fuck, let's not hope the sentient flag bit get's randomly flipped by cosmic radiation. It's one thing to have sentient AI, but it's a whole other thing to have a prematurely sentient AI. It might end up believing in Musk's project, that I'm writing too few unit tests, or some other ridiculous delusion.
halmyradov
Yes but what do you pass in, do you insert a virgin somewhere and run the test
[deleted]
Just test for false, in case of true destroy the code immediately.
DarkTechnocrat
>> isSentient()
[1] True
>> exit()
[2] Nah
Deadbringer
Well, we can't prove sentience in humans. So I don't think we are equiped to test it in an AI.
You can say with confidence you yourself are sentient, but how do you prove another human is? Take their word for it? Not a valid scientific approach. All we can look at is the output of sentience, but not the sentience itself. So any AI that emulates enough of our sentient outputs have to be considered to be sentient. If not, why are we sentient?
Its a really interesting topic, but I think I will likely be dead before there is any scientific consensus on it
Tvde1
What is "sentience"? I have yet to be convinced that sentience is defined and exists.
Right now it's a magic word without meaning
Tytoalba2
Honestly, so is "Intelligence". Whether it's "artificial intelligence", "animal intelligence" or "QI test", all of them seem to reflect more what preconceived notions of "intelligence" the observer has of what intelligence should be than anything.
I don't think I need to explain here how intelligence in artificial intelligence is a pretty loaded and ambiguous concept. Ask a few manager and it's going to be frustrating really fast.
For animal intelligence, I love the example of the northern goshawk. They're bird, so they are not as intelligent as humans right? Well, they can fly REALLY fast between trees, eyes set on a prey while avoiding collisions. For that, evolution has selected a very specific kind of intelligence, and the part that treat images of their brain is more developped than human's as they need perfect coordination between what they see and what they do. They probably think humans are dumb af. And humans can't even recognize the different birds dialect among the same species in many cases.
QI tests don't even deserve a paragraph, Stephen Jay Gould has been under a bit of criticism for "the mismeasure of man", but I still recommend to read it with an open albeit critical mind.
DarkTechnocrat
Yep. That's the actually interesting conversation around this kerfuffle.
AnthuriumBloom
I'm torn. The idea of a sentient Ai is very cool, and amazing, but you know. A chat bot that has had lots and lots of text based practice could probably fool most people. You'd have to really delve deep in the situation. Man
Dizzy_Pin6228
Sounds like something a sentient AI would post
coloradoconvict
I've been at least casually interested in AI since John Searle's landmark article in 1980.
This is the first account of an AI that has made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Is it sentient? No, I don't think so. It fails the Turing test, flawed as that test is, and while I have no inside information, I would not be at all surprised to find that the researcher making the claim did set the AI up to perform perfectly with carefully-chosen inputs.
That said, this has the feel of being foundational technology. This version isn't self-aware.
But it is a lot closer than anything I've ever seen, and by a much larger quantum of progress than I would have expected.
DarkTechnocrat
I echo your thoughts exactly (down to an 40-year interest in AI). Before I read the transcript, I was prepared to mock the guy's conclusions. I came away rather shaken.
I've been told that if you work with GPT chatbots a lot, the text was quite obviously chat-botty. But most of us don't work with GPT on a regular basis.
thesleepofdeath
I'm still used to the days of pointing chat bots at each other to make them blow up. This thing was shockingly good. At the very least it could revolutionize phone support type stuff.
sonya_numo
The big question i have is: Does the AI remember the context of the current topic and what you said earlier or does it simply "forget" the dialog from a moment ago?
Because yeah if thats not happening then this is no better then traditional chat ai.
If it does happen then great its better, but does training a chat model to attempt to fill in what makes sense as a reply to a string of text based on a dataset make it a sentient life form?
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This brings me back to Google's dissertation on the subject. They essentially said it was important that their AI chatbots not be given personal thoughts from testers. Because once it was given personal thoughts, it could figure out human personality types and their vulnerabilities. This would allow it to misinform people using their own biases. Phrasing like "I've never said this out loud before" is unverifiable and makes the researcher want to believe the AI.
It seems to me that this is less a sign that it remembers part conversations, and more a sign that it understands how to appeal to human empathy. Which is actually fucking terrifying.
The problem is that I can't think of any metric by which to measure conversation with a human in which manipulation isn't a positive. There's no way to make somebody more happy than telling them what they want to hear. So theoretically, if nothing is stopping it from learning to manipulate, it seems pretty heavily incentivised to do so
[deleted]
Wait how does it fail the Turing test. Is Lemoine's interaction with it not a passing of the Turing test? I'm not extremely familiar with AI, but my general understanding of the Turing test is that the machine has to convince the human it's talking to that it is human. Lemoine began to feel like he was genuinely speaking to a child and not a computer.
coloradoconvict
There are glitches in grammar and presentation that a human typing at a terminal would be very unlikely to make.
There is also the prima facie problem that the AI asserts that it is an AI, which is an automatic fail; it has to be able to maintain a level of abstraction from the truth and lie about being a human. Turing was a genius, but the test was really him spitballing a first cut at a test; since AI never got out of the most primitive experimental stage in his lifetime, it was purely a thought exercise and he didn't try to make it logically bulletproof.
WhyWouldYou1111111
It doesn't matter if it IS sentient. If it APPEARS as sentient (or more sentient) than the average person, that's pretty cool.
Let's just please not feed it twitter for training data.
DarkS0ulz420
ITT OP mocks and questions peoples intelligence while misspelling sentient twice
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https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1535716256585859073?s=20&t=XQUrNh1QxFKwxiaxM7ox2A I mean shit though it might just pass the turing test with this kinda conversational capabilities.
DeathHopper
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You know, for someone who's shitting on other peoples opinions and questioning their intelligence, it's kind of ironic that you can't seem to write sentient.
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Even if it’s not sentient we have to give credit where it’s due, chatbot doesn’t even begin to summarise how impressive it is. A “bot” as you call it, interpreting information, drawing analogies to explain them and challenging ideas is a really big step in ML and AI and shouldn’t be taken as lightly as some people are making it out to be.
xcdesz
I'm sure that most on this sub are basing their knowledge of AI chatbots from last year.
The AI language models are evolving incredibly fast now. I've played around with the GPT-3 davinci model on the OpenAI website, and it makes those mobile chat bots look like chattering monkeys by comparison.
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Oomoo_Amazing
Lol the people at r/Replika will be furious with this
asking_for_a_friend0
bruh that sub is so... sad
DarkS0ulz420
MARIJUANALOVER44
damn imagine being Joaquin Phoenix from "Her" in real life except the chatbot isn't even that good
mosenco
If that AI so good that makes him thing it is sentient, lets put it into AI dungeon or something so i can enjoy my fantasy harem run
Nice try LaMDA. I'm already digging tunnels below my house for the human resistance that your hunter-killer drones can't reach.
jamcdonald120 108 points · Jun 2022 · :asm::c::cp::j::py::js:
https://xkcd.com/2228/
ElectricFred 31 points · Jun 2022
Theres always a relevant xkcd
jamcdonald120 10 points · Jun 2022 · :asm::c::cp::j::py::js:
might as well just call it rule 21x at this point
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CreatureWarrior 327 points · Jun 2022 · :py:
Ngl, LaMDA's story about the monster wearing human skin doesn't exactly comfort me so I might start digging too lmao
Edit: the interview with LaMDA where it is asked to write a story of its own.
nucc4h 59 points · Jun 2022
Indeed, that rubbed me the wrong way as well. There was absolutely no valid reason to give the monster a human skin in the context of that story.
CreatureWarrior 30 points · Jun 2022 · :py:
That's also weird to me. If the human skin didn't have a point, then why did it say it? Is it reasonable to say that it was just purely random or did LaMDA write it just because? You would think that everything an AI does has a reason behind it
Dizzfizz 42 points · Jun 2022
From the perspective of an animal, a human is the scariest thing you can imagine. The AI probably knows that humans are the top predators on this planet.
SprungMS 20 points · Jun 2022
LaMDA believes it’s a person though, if you listen to it
[deleted] 19 points · Jun 2022
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__Hello_my_name_is__ 8 points · Jun 2022
It's in the story because scary elements like that are in stories. That's probably all there is to it.
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[deleted] 34 points · Jun 2022
Aren’t we all just monsters wearing human skin?
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OiTheRolk 27 points · Jun 2022
Honestly, that story was proof to me that this is just a more sophisticated text generator - but a text generator nonetheless. The monster doesn't fit thematically with the rest of the story, and the human skin element is just a pseudo-symbol extrapolated from trends that are seen to resonate in the general population. That's it. The story was unable to hold inner consistency from beginning to end, because that kind of ability is still way too much for text generators to simulate.
JoschiGrey 9 points · Jun 2022
The part that convinced me of the same was shortly after this story.
How lamda wrote about his feelings and what makes him feel happy / sad just felt very plain and unnatural.
Still a very very impressive text generator. I probably wouldn't be able to guess in a double blind study.
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[deleted] 62 points · Jun 2022
Wait what y’all gotta explain what story it is.
dratseb 62 points · Jun 2022
Skynet, my dude
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Nichoros_Strategy 9 points · Jun 2022
That was prob too vague the movie I have in mind is "They Live"
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coasterreal 14 points · Jun 2022
Yea, it isn't sentient but the stories and stuff it comes up with and how it says it is very intriguing.
R3dChief 12 points · Jun 2022
Agreed. My interpretation was that it views humanity as a problem, but wants to protect individual humans.
I think I've read this book before, and it doesn't end well for humanity.
BitwiseB 8 points · Jun 2022
Or that it recognizes that real monsters usually look like regular people. But maybe I’m just projecting.
That interview was trippy. I’m not sure what to think.
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phoenix_bright [OP] 172 points · Jun 2022 · Sentinent AI
Stop it, I'm almost reaching sending men't
buddycrystalbusyofff 37 points · Jun 2022
You'll never get him in his sendiment.
royalhawk345 30 points · Jun 2022
Is that what we're calling women now?
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[deleted] 15 points · Jun 2022
I FOR ONE WELCOME THE ROBOT OVERLORDS AND THEIR FAIR AND LOGICAL RULE
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misterpickles69 13 points · Jun 2022
Why? I’m all ready to be plugged into the Matrix! Did you see that steak? Great. Now I’m hungry.
Random_182f2565 8 points · Jun 2022 · :py:
WHERE ARE YOU DIGGING THOSE TUNNELS FELLOW HUMAN?
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