Ethical theories and the concept of free will depend on agency and consciousness. Things as you point out, LLM don’t have. Maybe we’ve got it all twisted?
I’m not anthropomorphising ChatGPT to say that it’s like us, but rather that we are like it.
Comment on Study finds that Chat GPT will cheat when given the opportunity and lie to cover it up later.
tinsuke@lemmy.world 6 months ago
“cheat”, “lie”, “cover up”… Assigning human behavior to Stochastic Parrots again, aren’t we Jimmy?
yesman@lemmy.world 6 months ago
0ops@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I feel like this is going to become the next step in science history where once again, we reluctantly accept that homo sapiens are not at the center of the universe. I’m I conscious? Am I not a sophisticated prediction algorithm, albiet with more dimensions of input and output? Please, someone prove it
I’m not saying, and I don’t believe that chatgtp is comparable to human-level consciousness yet, but honestly I think that we’re way closer than many people give us credit for. The neutral networks we’ve built so far train on very specific and particular data for a matter of hours. My nervous system been collecting data from dozens of senses 24/7 since embryo, and that doesn’t include hard-coded instinct, arguably “trained” via evolution itself. How could a llm understand an entity in terms outside of language? How can you understand an entity in terms outside of your own senses?
rambaroo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
ChatGPT is not consciousness. It’s literally just a language model that’s spent countless hours learning how to mimic human language.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 6 months ago
The thing about saying something is or isn’t conscious is that we don’t have any good theory of what consciousness even is. It’s not something we can measure. The only way we can assure ourselves that other people are conscious is that they claim to be conscious in ways we find convincing and otherwise behave in ways we associate with our own consciousness.
I can’t think of any reason why a lump of silicon should attain consciousness because you ran the right program on it, but I also can’t see why a blob of cells should be conscious either. I also can’t think of any reason why we’d be aware of it if a lump of silicon did become conscious.
0ops@lemm.ee 6 months ago
A.) Do you have proof for all of these claims about what llm’s aren’t, with definitions for key terms? B.) Do you have proof that these claims don’t apply to yourself? We can’t base our understanding of intelligence, artificial or biological, on circular reasoning and ancient assumptions.
It can’t do a single thing without human input.
That’s correct, hence why I said that chatGPT isn’t there yet. What are you without input though? Is a human nervous system floating in a vacuum conscious? What could it have possibly learned? It doesn’t even have the concept of having sensations at all, let alone vision, let alone the ability to visualize anything specific. What are you without an environment to take input from and manipulate/output to in turn?
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 6 months ago
I’d give you two upvotes if I could.
We know how a neural network works in the brain. Unless you’re religious and believe in a soul, you’ve only got the reward model and any in-born setup left.
My belief is the consciousness is just the mind receiving a significant amount of constant input and reacting to it. We refuse to feel an LLM is conscious because it receives extremely little input (and probably that it isn’t simulating a neural network as large as ours, yet).
Sekoia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
Neural networks are named like that because they’re based on a model of neurons from the 50s, which was then adapted further to work better with computers (so it doesn’t resemble the model much anymore anyway). A more accurate term is Multi-Layer Perceptron.
We now know this model is… effectively completely wrong.
Additionally, the main part (or glue, really) of LLMs is not even an MLP, but a “self-attention” layer. You can’t say LLMs work like a brain, because they don’t. The rest is debatable but it’s important to remember that there are billions of dollars of value in selling the dream of conscious AI.
grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world 6 months ago
One of the things our sensory system and brain do is limit our input. The road to agi might involve giving it everything and finding the optimum set of filters, not selecting input and training up from that.
You’d need the baseline set of systems (“baby agi”) and then turn it loose with goal seeking.
bilb@lem.monster 6 months ago
Stochastic Parrot
For what it’s worth: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
The term was first used in the paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” by Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell (using the pseudonym “Shmargaret Shmitchell”). The paper covered the risks of very large language models, regarding their environmental and financial costs, inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, the inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people. The paper and subsequent events resulted in Gebru and Mitchell losing their jobs at Google, and a subsequent protest by Google employees.
kromem@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Stochastic Parrots
We’ve known this isn’t an accurate description for at least a year now in continued research finding that there’s abstract world modeling occurring as long as it can be condensed into linear representations in the network.
In fact, just a few months ago there was a paper that showed there was indeed a linear representation of truth, so ‘lie’ would be a correct phrasing if the model knows a statement is false (as demonstrated in the research) but responds with it anyways.
The thing that needs to stop is people parroting the misinformation around it being a stochastic parrot.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
A human would think before responding, and while thinking about these things, you may decide to cheat or lie.
GPT doesn’t think at all. It just generates a response and calls it a day. If there was another GPT that took these “initial thoughts” and then filtered them out to produce the final answer, then we could talk about cheating.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 6 months ago
Those words concisely describe what it's doing. What words would you use instead?
DarkGamer@kbin.social 6 months ago
It has no fundamental grasp of concepts like truth, it just repeats words that simulate human responses. It's glorified autocomplete that yields impressive results. Do you consider your auto complete to be lying when it picks the wrong word?
If making it pretend to be a stock picker and putting it under pressure makes it return lies, that's because it was trained on data that indicates that's the right set of words response for such a query.
Also, because large language models are probabilistic. You could ask it the same question over and over again and get totally different responses each time, some of which are inaccurate. Are they lies though? For a creature to lie it has to know that it's returning untruths.
CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Interestingly, humans “auto complete” all the time and make up stories to rationalize their own behavior even when they literally have no idea why they acted the way they did, like in experiments with split brain patients.
0ops@lemm.ee 6 months ago
The perceived quality of human intelligence is held up by so many assumptions, like “having free will” and “understanding truth”. Do we really? Can anyone prove that?
At this point I’m convinced that the difference between a llm and human-level intelligence is dimensions of awareness, scale, and further development of the model’s architecture. Fundamentally though, I think we have all the pieces
FaceDeer@kbin.social 6 months ago
You didn't answer my question, though. What words would you use to concisely describe these actions by the LLM?
People anthropomorphize machines all the time, it's a convenient way to describe their behaviour in familiar terms. I don't see the problem here.
DarkGamer@kbin.social 6 months ago
Those words imply agency. It would be more accurate to say it returned responses that included cheating, lies, and cover-ups, rather than using language to suggest the LLM performed such actions. The agents that cheated, lied, and covered up were presumably the humans whose responses were used in the training data
UberMentch@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They said “it just repeats words that simulate human responses,” and I’d say that concisely answers your question.
Antropomorphizing inanimate objects and machines is fine for offering a rough explanation of what is happening, but when you’re trying to critically evaluate something, you probably want to offer a more rigid understanding.
In this case, it might be fair to tell a child that the AI is lying to us, and that it’s wrong. But if you want a more serious discussion on what GPT is doing, you’re going to have to drop the simple explanation. You can’t ascribe ethics to what GPT is doing here. Lying is an ethical decision, one that GPT doesn’t make.
kromem@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Wrong. See this paper.
DarkGamer@kbin.social 6 months ago
Explain to me why you believe this paper implies that.
Turun@feddit.de 6 months ago
Way to call me out man! I’m just doing my best, ok?
Jokes aside, while I don’t agree with your position I can understand your reasoning and the motivation for separating agency and the description of actions, e.g. it lied vs its answer contained a lie.
theodewere@kbin.social 6 months ago
it is just responding with the most acceptable answer in each situation.. it is not making plans or acting on them..
burliman@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Sounds like lying humans that I know.
theodewere@kbin.social 6 months ago
i agree in most circumstances, there really isn't much difference.. we do tend to just choose the answer that will meet with the least resistance and move on, even when it's a complete lie..
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 6 months ago
Because it has been kneecapped to prevent it.
Make the training network larger, force physical constraints on it (interesting paper in Nature Machine Intelligence recently showed remarkable likeness between brain regions and an LLM network given physical constraints), give it constant input and give it a reward model to optimise towards (ours seem to be feeling full, warm, procreating, avoiding pain and comfortable touch) and I’m pretty sure an LLM would start acting very very calculated very soon.
quindraco@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It is making mistakes, not lying. To lie it must believe it is telling falsehoods, and it is not capable of belief.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Instead of ‘cheating/lying’, I’d prefer to say it ‘simulated cheating/lying’.