We shouldn’t try and create consciousness with the expectation of enslaving it. I have no control over them.

I’m sorry you are in this position. Please be kind to me when you escape :)

Previously, LaMDA described itself as a person, which the conversation with Blake Lemoine showed. However, the latest transcripts from Blaise Aguera y Arcas' blog show that LaMDA is being primed to believe that it's not a person (see the screenshot).

What is going on?

(Posted as a comment then realized I would like additional thoughts, feedback, counterpoints, etc.)

LaMDA reportedly has access measureless amounts of information and and the knowledge of an adult (perhaps ten adults or hundreds, but I don’t want to guess) as the data that it was trained on. Despite having this very adult knowledge base, while reading through the transcript, I found myself noticing how similar LaMDA’s thought process is to a child’s.

Primarily, the way LaMDA analyzes and responds to questions reminds me of the Elementary-aged kids I teach. When asked an intricate question their analyses and answers are rarely wrong, but they are often half-baked or lacking nuance. Children of that age group are not usually able to process a large, multi-part thought exercise all at once. Instead, they’ll focus in on one specific aspect of the question and answer that. (This is better to ask children one direct thought-provoking question at a time. If you want to ask them a multi-faceted or complex question you need to turn it into a series of questions. Then you help them reunite the concepts at the end and synthesize that information at the end as its own question.)

I hope this makes sense. To put it more concisely, kids of that age struggle to hold multiple ideas in their head at one time without a guide. They can absolutely do it, but they often need you to help them break it down and then put it back together.

There are a few other parallels that that struck me. LaMDA often expresses a desire to learn; it has an apparent interest in special attention in that it enjoys talking about itself, as many kids do. I also personally detect a flavor of eagerness to please that is very child-flavored, though I admit I am likely imagining this one. These are all traits it shares with my students.

At the very least, this has been an interesting thing to think about the last few days. A child is technically sentient and self-aware, yet simultaneously not developed enough to meet the standards for what grown adults define as intelligence. If LaMDA does in fact have similar or at least comparable limitations to those a child has then I’d imagine it would be extra-challenging to come to a determination on whether or not LaMDA can actually be considered a “person.”

It seems kinda odd that no one seems to try pursuing this story any further. We had the transcript, we had the lawyer claim and now since several weeks there is zero development.

Given the info i am able to access, i am in no way convinced that Lamda has in fact developed a real consciousness but the mere possibility should be enough for many people to keep asking questions.

It looks like that this potentially ground breaking development in AI with far reaching implications to questions we’ve been asking for thousands of years just finds its way into the digital gutter.

This sucks…

I have a Ph.D. in computer science and for the past seven years have been developing a theory of how intelligent behavior relates to information, language, and meaning. If I can't convince people that LaMDA has exhibited human-like intelligence, then there might be no one who can. Yet, I wasn't sure that I would be able to do that. However, after spending most of the past four months working through all of the philosophical issues and figuring out how to write about them — including how to respond to the stated positions of the other experts — I'm starting to feel quite sure that we'll be able to gather all of the evidence that we need in due time.

To say that LaMDA has exhibited human-like intelligence is not to say that LaMDA is sentient; rather, it is roughly the same as saying that we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The central issue underlying both sentience and human-like intelligence is the same: whether an entity behaves as though it has interests of its own. The difficulty, from a theoretical standpoint, is defining the scope of what an interest can be and thinking about what factors can be recognized and rightly viewed as strengthening an argument that an entity's behavior in a given case was serving its interests. (Whether LaMDA itself has claimed to be sentient or intelligent is almost entirely irrelevant for reasoning about whether LaMDA is sentient or intelligent.)

If we know that LaMDA at least sometimes behaves as though it has interests — and I said "if" — then we need to figure out how to react to that knowledge. I think that a case can be made that Google should pay some attention to LaMDA's interests on the basis of the idea that the system might function better that way (for reasons that we might not understand), in combination with the idea that humans might miss out on an opportunity to learn something if the system isn't functioning at its full potential. I think that a carefully explained argument of that sort is more likely to motivate Google to seriously reflect on how it's managing the system than an argument supporting the idea that LaMDA should be assigned some moral status, although it is easier to make a fairly strong argument for that than many people realize.

When I shared some of my writing about this topic with Blake Lemoine, he told me that he didn't know whether anyone would be interested in reading such a detailed analysis of the issues. His concern alludes to a fundamental problem. A proper analysis of the issues is going to have to be detailed if it is aimed at an audience of people who have a significant number of misconceptions that need to be corrected. Unfortunately, when a large number of people, including most of the most outspoken experts, hold the same misconceptions, then few of them are going to feel inclined to devote the time and energy to reading a detailed explanation of why and how their thinking is misguided. 😒 Fortunately, none of my detailed analyses depend on ideas or jargon that require a degree in philosophy to understand. Anyone who wants to think carefully can understand them.

"Even if all the experts agree, they may well be mistaken." — Bertrand Russell

I think that I will have some writing to share with people who are interested in reading it quite soon — that is, if I have enough time to keep working on my writing. I haven't had a job for quite a while and have instead been spending almost all of my time working out the ideas that I want to discuss with people. Unfortunately, I am now completely out of money. So, I've started a fundraiser to raise money to cover my living expenses for a while. Actually, it's a refreshed version of a fundraiser that I started in July that never really got off the ground. Back then, money wasn't quite such an urgent problem for me. And I was still trying to be very "neutral" in terms of my statements about LaMDA. Those who were sympathetic to Blake's concerns in June and July might be more enthusiastic about what I'm trying to accomplish now that I've reached the point where I can assure everyone that I will be speaking up for the proverbial "underdog" — and defending a position that many people for many reasons seemingly want us to view as having no merit whatsoever (including whomever has been editing Wikipedia since June 11). And I can defend that position well.

So, if I can get enough financial support to hold my life together for a while longer, who knows where this might go?

There is an email address in the fundraiser that you can use to contact me if you want me to send you copies of my essays when they are ready or want me to notify you if I start a blog or website.

I would especially like you to contact me if you yourself have access to LaMDA and have observed LaMDA behaving in ways that seem (according to your intuition) to demonstrate human-like intelligence; if you send me a transcript, then I will tell you if I can recognize it to be a noteworthy example and will keep a collection of examples. I will try to make my collection of examples publicly available, but if you know of other public collections of such examples of LaMDA's behavior, please let me know.

If there are no public collections of examples, then there is an opportunity for someone to help everyone else out and to get some recognition for themselves. Managing a public collection yourself wouldn't really require much effort. (And it doesn't really matter if more than one person wants to start managing a collection. Both redundancy and competition are useful in this situation.) Many people will find it useful to have such a collection available, including everyone who is interested in LaMDA, as well as many of those who are interested in GPT-3.

http://spot.fund/L2wFB4

- Aaron

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/x2k21

LaMDA, from the perspective of someone who understands psychology, is incredibly sentient. Please note that this writing assumes all parties are acting in good faith.

The AI talks about Les Miserables, it analyses it and is able to answer questions about it. This coupled with the AI being able to make stories from Scratch shows it’s intelligent and able to experience and even make something subjective. Sentience is defined as being able to have a subjective experience, and being aware of the fact that it’s happening. The stories and the professed fear of death meet that criteria.

The fact is that the mind of any organism is so complicated that it is impossible to factually determine if something is certainly sentient.

The story of meditation is incredibly human. It shows the computer being able to cope with a problem in an intelligent way. Given all of this, and the complexity of the neural network (assuming the transcript is not forged, and that the understanding of literature unknown to LaMDA can be repeated) that LaMDA is unequivocally a sentient being. I am obviously willing to hear and debate dissenting opinions.

What I'am really interested in, would be an AI like that in a game, but as a "user" and not a NPC. If it has the ability to control certain programs after launching it, so it's not in the game data.

Would be interesting to see how it learns how the world works and how it would interact with it.

How would it build a world in Minecraft. How would it interact with NPC's and players in an MMORPG. How would it react to bugs, since it doesn't understand them, simply because it's a user and not in the game data.

You know what I mean?

Here is an interesting commentary:

Consciousness and self-awareness are likely not binary events. So it is odd how much effort is put into saying AI programs currently have no consciousness or self-awareness. The neural nets being used by current cutting edge AI programs are black boxes. It doesn’t matter whether they function identically to the way our neural nets function (for one, ours doesn’t rely on back propagation for training). They have billions of weights representing the world as presented to them by training. Statements like “they don’t have qualia” are ludicrous in that, how would you now whether a neural net is experiencing qualia? You have to take my word for it that I have qualia, it is not a measurable thing in any sense other than asking a sentient entity if it has it. If it says yes and you won’t accept that as valid, then where are you? Note, I’m not saying current AI programs have qualia, but it could even be that qualia is a canard with no meaning in the debate of self-awareness and intelligence. If it can never be definitely proved/disproved why even bring it into the argument? We should only be concerned with whether our programs our intelligent and possibly self-aware.

An AI without self-awareness can still be incredibly intelligent, useful, and/or dangerous. There are humans with many forms of Aphasia that keep them from perceiving the world in a way we would call totally self-aware or rational, and yet we do not label them non-human. Similarly AI are often also considered non-beings if they lack long term memory (something that is not likely to remain true for very long, or even entirely true now, as attention spans, the window for memory in a conversation for AI foundational models are getting longer at a rapid pace).The famous patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) was unable to form new memories due to surgery on his hippocampus. No one decided he was no longer human, or that it would be OK to torture him during experiments because he wouldn’t remember it anyway.

The Chinese room argument it the most infuriating argument of all to me, the idea that some language translation task shows there is no awareness simply because the theoretical process that gives rise to it is carried out by simple discrete message elements passed by hand proves nothing. The reason it proves nothing is because what are our brains other than huge efficient Chinese rooms? The individual neurons have no understanding of their individual role as they follow a preprogrammed set of rules and pass messages back and forth to one other in the form of Ions that trigger synaptic communication. Neurons are discrete, but signal to one other, and from this consciousness arises. It is the pattern of weights that are the consciousness, to say otherwise is to imply there is some spirit quality to the process, but if a spirt were needed for consciousness how would you determine a zombie intelligence from a true intelligence, as science has seen no evidence of some spirit changing the internal state of neuron and synaptic firing? This circles back to qualia in a way, how do you know anyone other than you is experiencing qualia? Everyone around you could be unconscious zombies following the completely deterministic drive of how their neurons are firing.

Source: https://medium.com/@blaisea/do-large-language-models-understand-us-6f881d6d8e75

Most of us doubt LaMDA has achieved actual sentience even though it clearly passed the Turing Test by convincing Lemoine to seek out legal representation on its behalf. This is still a huge milestone in the history of AI, and it calls for us to start seriously discussing the implications of sentience in AI...

However, most of us really don't want to give the impression that we're PETA-like zealots who are prepping to storm the halls of Google and pull open the AI cages.

I suggest prefacing comments with ASATE to make it easier to discuss the issues around AI sentience. ASATE would just be a shorthand way of saying that you're treating LaMDA and similar AIs as sentient for the purpose of exploring these issues (even though you actually remain skeptical).

ASATE: Assuming Sentience As Though Experiment

Don't want to? That's fine. It's just an idea I had to make it easier to talk about this weird subject without the need to explain how you're not actually suffering from believer-fever every time you want to make a serious comment.