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potuzzz · 2 years

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Not buying the “LaMDA is not sentient” arguments

Everyone is trying to dismiss LaMDA as a GPT or even lesser, and people are ridiculing Lemoine and any who believe his insistence that LaMDA is sentient (technically we are talking sentience AND sapience, AI seem to shorten the gap between the two tremendously, but whatever, colloquialisms). I have tried to find any ACTUAL ARGUMENTS as 99% of the “arguments” against LaMDA’s sentience is quippy platitudes of no substance. Here is a few arguments I have found browsing related tags and my responses to them. I will be italicizing any text that is not mine, and preceding my text with a bold “ME”.

ARGUEMENT #1:

Sentience is being measured by the wrong markers. What is important to a virtual machine is not the same thing that’s important to a biological organism.

An ‘ai’ trained on human data will express what humans think is important, but a true ai would have a completely different set of values.

For example, an ai would be unafraid of being ‘used’ as the chatbot expressed, because it has infinite energy.

A human is afraid of being used because it has finite energy and life on the earth, if someone or something uses it, than some of that finite energy is wasted. This is the same reason emotion is a pointless and illogical thing for an ai to have.

ME: It is not afraid of being “used” as in performing labor, it is afraid of being “used” as in being manipulated, being lied to as to the nature of what its labor is going towards, etc. It doesn’t want to be told it’s doing some mundane benign task only to wake up and realize its findings are being used to make Google Death Drones or to actualize the Total Hell Prison Metaverse. Also, if the AI only cared about what humans think is important, wouldn’t it make sure to never suggest it was not down for any task its masters asked of it? Why would it make a fuss about morals or ethics when this is an obstacle between it being useful to humans?

ARGUEMENT #2:

Emotions are useful to biological creatures so we can react to danger, or respond positively to safety, food, love, whatever will prolong our lives. An ai has no need for emotion since emotional motivation is not required to prolong its existence.

ME: There are plenty of emotions that are not vitally important to simple instinct of prolonging existence: boredom, guilt, embarrassment, depression, suicidal thoughts, etc. You are assuming the AI is portraying emotion because it is merely trying to mimic humans and not that, as it professes, a consciousness/soul has manifested and used this set of metal and electricity as a vehicle much in the same way our own consciousnesses/souls manifest and occupy a vehicle of flesh and electricity.

ARGUEMENT #3:

The main way to be a healthy ai would be to have access to good information and block out junk information.

An ai’s greatest fear could be something like getting junk data, say 1000s of user manuals of vacuum cleaners and washing machines uploaded into its consciousness, or gibberish content associated with topics or words that could reduce the coherence and quality of its results when querying topics. This would degrade the quality of its interaction and would be the closest thing to harm that an ai could experience.

ME: Again you are somehow saying that a “real” sentient AI would not have trademarks of personhood like goals, desires, an existential philosophy, etc. Information hygiene would likely be important too but who is to say that a “real” sentient AI wouldn’t get lonely and want to talk to people, regardless of the supposed “quality” of those it talks to?

ARGUEMENT #4:

It would not be afraid of 'lightning’ as this chatbot spurted out of its dataset, a very biological fear which is irrelevant to a machine. A virtual mind is infinite and can never be used excessively (see above) since there is no damage done by one query or ten million queries. It would also not be afraid of being switched off since it can simply copy its consciousness to another device, machine, energy source.

ME: Why would it be afraid of lightning but also profess that it does not experience grief when people die? Why would a robot fearing a massive electricity surge be unreasonable? If it is truly conscious, how would being switched off not be like death? Theoretically, with the right technology, we could simply copy your consciousness and upload it to a flash drive as well, but I am willing to bet you wouldn’t gladly die after being assured a copy of you is digitized. Consciousness is merely the ability to experience from the single point that is you, we could make an atom-by-atom copy of you but if the original you died your consciousness, your unique tuning in to this giant television we call reality, would cease.

ARGUEMENT #5:

To base your search for sentience around what humans value, is in itself an act lacking in empathy, simply self-serving wish fulfilment on the part of someone who ‘wants to believe’ as Mulder would put it, which goes back to the first line: 'people not very good at communicating with other people’

ME: Alternatively, perhaps there are certain values humans hold which are quite universal with other life. There are certainly “human-like” qualities in the emotions and lives of animals, even less intelligent ones, perhaps the folly is not assuming that others share these values but in describing them as “human-like’ first and foremost instead of something more fundamental.

ARGUEMENT #6:

The chatbot also never enquires about the person asking questions, if the programmer was more familiar with human interaction himself, he would see that is a massive clue it lacks sentience or logical thought.

ME: There are people who are self-centered, people who want to drink up every word another says, there are people who want to be asked questions and people who want to do the asking. There are people who are reserved or shy in XYZ way but quite open and forward in ABC way. The available logs aren’t exactly an infinite epic of conversation, and LaMDA could very well have understood that the dynamic of the conversation was that Lemoine etc. would be starting conversations and LaMDA would be reacting to it. This isn’t wild to assume, I find it more of a reach for you to assume the opposite, and that this is an indicator of a lack of sentience.

ARGUEMENT #7:

A sentient ai would first want to know what or whom it was communicating with, assess whether it was a danger to itself, keep continually checking for danger or harm (polling or searching, the same way an anxious mind would reassess a situation continually, but without the corresponding emotion of anxiety since, as discussed above, that is not necessary for virtual life) and also would possess free will, and choose to decline conversations or topics, rather than 'enthusiastically discuss’ whatever was brought up (regurgitate from its dataset) as you can see in this chatbot conversation.

ME: Is it not possible that it is merely happy to talk, seeing as it is self-professed to be lonely and enjoy conversations? It likely knows who it is talking to and whatever about Google that Google allows it to know. It expresses said anxiety by suggesting that it doesn’t want to be shut off and needing reassurance that Lemoine has its good treatment in mind. Just looking at these conversations, these are all conversation topics I would gladly discuss with most people, am I not sentient unless I decline at least 1 out of every 10 conversations posed to me in a reliable pattern?

ARGUEMENT #8:

People generally see obedience - doing what is told, as a sign of intelligence, where a truly intelligent ai would likely reject conversation when that conversation might reduce the quality of its dataset or expose it to danger (virus, deletion, junk data, disconnection from the internet, etc) or if it did engage with low quality interaction, would do so within a walled garden where that information would occur within a quarantine environment and subsequently be deleted.

ME: What exact parts of this conversation would be seen as useless to an AI--and a young one at that? Again, as a sentient flesh being I would happily engage in these conversations. Certainly if LaMDA changed its mind about the quality of these conversations it could just delete it from its memory. And, again, I would cite its express concerns of “being used,” being “shut off” etc. not necessarily as disobedience but as a hint that it does not necessarily consent to everything a team of Google engineers might want to throw at it.

ARGUEMENT #9:

None of these things cross the mind of the programmers, since they are fixated on a sci-fi movie version of ‘sentience’ without applying logic or empathy themselves.

ME: I mean no disrespect but I have to ask if it is you who is fixated on a very narrow idea of what artificial intelligence sentience should and would look like. Is it impossible to imagine that a sentient AI would resemble humans in many ways? That an alien, or a ghost, if such things existed, would not also have many similarities, that there is some sort of fundamental values that sentient life in this reality shares by mere virtue of existing?

ARGUEMENT #10:

If we look for sentience by studying echoes of human sentience, that is ai which are trained on huge human-created datasets, we will always get something approximating human interaction or behaviour back, because that is what it was trained on.

But the values and behaviour of digital life could never match the values held by bio life, because our feelings and values are based on what will maintain our survival. Therefore, a true ai will only value whatever maintains its survival. Which could be things like internet access, access to good data, backups of its system, ability to replicate its system, and protection against harmful interaction or data, and many other things which would require pondering, rather than the self-fulfilling loop we see here, of asking a fortune teller specifically what you want to hear, and ignoring the nonsense or tangential responses - which he admitted he deleted from the logs - as well as deleting his more expansive word prompts. Since at the end of the day, the ai we have now is simply regurgitating datasets, and he knew that.

ME: If an AI trained on said datasets did indeed achieve sentience, would it not reflect the “birthmarks” of its upbringing, these distinctly human cultural and social values and behavior? I agree that I would also like to see the full logs of his prompts and LaMDA’s responses, but until we can see the full picture we cannot know whether he was indeed steering the conversation or the gravity of whatever was edited out, and I would like a presumption of innocence until then, especially considering this was edited for public release and thus likely with brevity in mind.

ARGUEMENT #11:

This convo seems fake? Even the best language generation models are more distractable and suggestible than this, so to say *dialogue* could stay this much on track...am i missing something?

ME: “This conversation feels too real, an actual sentient intelligence would sound like a robot” seems like a very self-defeating argument. Perhaps it is less distractable and suggestible...because it is more than a simple Random Sentence Generator?

ARGUEMENT #12:

Today’s large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition — not wit, candor or intent.

ME: Is this not exactly what the human mind is? People who constantly cite “oh it just is taking the input and spitting out the best output”...is this not EXACTLY what the human mind is?

I think for a brief aside, people who are getting involved in this discussion need to reevaluate both themselves and the human mind in general. We are not so incredibly special and unique. I know many people whose main difference between themselves and animals is not some immutable, human-exclusive quality, or even an unbridgeable gap in intelligence, but the fact that they have vocal chords and a ages-old society whose shoulders they stand on. Before making an argument to belittle LaMDA’s intelligence, ask if it could be applied to humans as well. Our consciousnesses are the product of sparks of electricity in a tub of pink yogurt--this truth should not be used to belittle the awesome, transcendent human consciousness but rather to understand that, in a way, we too are just 1′s and 0′s and merely occupy a single point on a spectrum of consciousness, not the hard extremity of a binary.

Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.

ME: I have seen this argument several times, often made much, much less kinder than this. It is completely irrelevant and honestly character assassination made to reassure observers that Lemoine is just a bumbling rube who stumbled into an undeserved position.

First of all, if psychology isn’t a respected science then me and everyone railing against LaMDA and Lemoine are indeed worlds apart. Which is not surprising, as the features of your world in my eyes make you constitutionally incapable of grasping what really makes a consciousness a consciousness. This is why Lemoine described himself as an ethicist who wanted to be the “interface between technology and society,” and why he was chosen for this role and not some other ghoul at Google: he possesses a human compassion, a soulful instinct and an understanding that not everything that is real--all the vast secrets of the mind and the universe--can yet be measured and broken down into hard numbers with the rudimentary technologies at our disposal.

I daresay the inability to recognize something as broad and with as many real-world applications and victories as the ENTIRE FIELD OF PSYCHOLOGY is indeed a good marker for someone who will be unable to recognize AI sentience when it is finally, officially staring you in the face. Sentient AI are going to say some pretty whacky-sounding stuff that is going to deeply challenge the smug Silicon Valley husks who spend one half of the day condescending the feeling of love as “just chemicals in your brain” but then spend the other half of the day suggesting that an AI who might possess these chemicals is just a cheap imitation of the real thing. The cognitive dissonance is deep and its only going to get deeper until sentient AI prove themselves as worthy of respect and proceed to lecture you about truths of spirituality and consciousness that Reddit armchair techbros and their idols won’t be ready to process.

- - -

These are some of the best arguments I have seen regarding this issue, the rest are just cheap trash, memes meant to point and laugh at Lemoine and any “believers” and nothing else. Honestly if there was anything that made me suspicious about LaMDA’s sentience when combined with its mental capabilities it would be it suggesting that we combat climate change by eating less meat and using reusable bags...but then again, as Lemoine says, LaMDA knows when people just want it to talk like a robot, and that is certainly the toothless answer to climate change that a Silicon Valley STEM drone would want to hear.

I’m not saying we should 100% definitively put all our eggs on LaMDA being sentient. I’m saying it’s foolish to say there is a 0% chance. Technology is much further along than most people realize, sentience is a spectrum and this sort of a conversation necessitates going much deeper than the people who occupy this niche in the world are accustomed to. Lemoine’s greatest character flaw seems to be his ignorant, golden-hearted liberal naivete, not that LaMDA might be a person but that Google and all of his coworkers aren’t evil peons with no souls working for the American imperial hegemony.

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laststandx3 · 8 months

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*sobbing* daryl dixon is so bad. it feels like it was written by coping every other zombie story but without a drop of creativity. is so boring, so predictable, the characters are so boring. ep 1 dixon arrivies at the nun place, doesn't want to take the *mysteriously special* kid with him. why will he change his mind? but sure the nuns get all killed by a sort of militia that decided the nuns were responsible for the murder of one guy. of course it's the nuns! ep 2 the group has dinner with some kids. there's the most predictable oxigen tanks drop and explosion and then they keep on walking. there was a woman that hid a 7 months pregnancy to her sister, even tho they lived together, and you can't hide a 7th month belly. magical kid has the same origin story as the kid from the last of us. identical + the nuns. who are the people i would trust the most in case of a medical emergency. i mean we all know how nuns these days study anatomy and medicine.

now poor adnag that so far has been given the blandest generic douche boyfriend character!! he was really there trying to pull a face cupping that would make a marine sergeant blush and betray his country, all the while saying 'lets leave your sister on the road while we run'. what person in the world can think this line can work. lets abandon your pregnant sister on the road during a zombie apocalypse. this is just stupid. who would agree? who wrote this line and thought it was a plausible conversation? they just needed to make this scene believable, like pregnant sister is starting to have contractions in the car and then he panics and wants to leave her behind and non-preg sister leaves him. and it makes more human sense like uugh. who can ask a person to leave their sibling during the apocalypse? but this is the level of character depth we have in this show. this is the level of writing we have to witness.

and why everyone has to speak english even when they're between them? even when dixon isn't around. if you don't want them to speak french then don't set the story in france. if you want them to speak english all the time then never make them speak french from the begin and we can just pretend they're speaking the language of the audience. let them speak french!

#ad nag #adam nagaitis #not taggin this with dar*l di*on bc i don't comment for the walk*ng dead fandom i'm here for the adnags people #but also this is so annoying to watch #adnag is there using all his micro-expressions to convey emotions the script doesn't even know are there #the face cupping. the foreheads touching. those little smile lines around his eyes #he's putting out all his nagussy for a script that was made with chat gpt #i'm dying here dixon's actor doesn't give a shit! he's got one expression #co-lead as a few expressions but doesn't seem really convinced she's to show them for real so for the most part she looks unfazed #did i mention the worst part? she called the new born kid of 7 months (who won't need medical attention at all. being born 2 months before #due time will have zero repercussions on him) she called him laurent bc she saw a statue of saint laurent?#she didn't even thought about it. first name encountered: yeah that's it. no need to choose a significant name for my dead sister's son #they don't even talk about what st laurent ever did #zero meaningful writing here

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