Comment on Study finds that Chat GPT will cheat when given the opportunity and lie to cover it up later.

• DarkGamer@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨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

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  • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If I take my car into the garage for repairs because the "loss of traction" warning light is on despite having perfectly good traction, and I were to tell the mechanic "the traction sensor is lying," do you think he'd understand what I said perfectly well or do you think he'd launch into a philosophical debate over whether the sensor has agency?

    This is a perfectly fine word to use to describe this kind of behaviour in everyday parlance.

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    • Takumidesh@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Is your conversation with a mechanic meant to be the summary and description of a rigorous scientific discovery?

      This isn’t ‘everyday parlance’ this is the result of a study.

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    • FunctionFn@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The point of the distinction in that situation is that no one thinks your car is actually alive and capable of lying to you. The language distinction when describing an obviously inanimate object isn’t important because there is no chance for confusion.

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    • Robust_Mirror@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If someone doesn’t know the answer to something and they guess, or think they know the answer but don’t, they are wrong. If they do know the answer and intentionally give a wrong answer, they are lying.

      If someone is in a competition or playing a game and they break a rule they didn’t know about, they made a mistake. If they do know the rules and break it, they are cheating.

      Lying and cheating fundamentally requires intent. This is important no matter what you’re referring to. If a child gets something wrong, you should not get mad at them for lying. If they make a mistake in a game, you should not acuse them out cheating. There is a difference and it matters.

      ChatGPT literally cannot think. It’s not sitting around contemplating it’s existence while waiting for inputs. It’s taking what you say, comparing that to everything that it’s been trained on, assigning a bunch of statistics, and outputting something based on more statistics that hopefully is correct and makes sense.

      It doesn’t know if it makes sense. It doesn’t “know” anything. It’s just an incredibly sophisticated version of “if user inputs ‘Hi how are you’, respond ‘I am well, how are you?’”.

      It can’t do things with intent. Therefore it cannot lie or cheat. It can simply output wrong or problematic text based on statistics.

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  • TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    One frame from The Matrix where Morpheus says “you think that’s air you’re breathing?” but instead captioned with “you think that’s ‘agency’ making you do things?”

    Maybe it would be more accurate to say “so-and-so exhibited behaviors that included cheating, lies, and coverups” rather than using language to suggest that people have free will. (There’s no dearth of philosophies that would say something not too far from that.)

    Even if humans are ultimately essentially different in that way from any technologies we’ve devised so far, we use convenient fictions for technology all the time. This page comes to mind .

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  • rambaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The people who designed it do have agency, and they designed to “lie” intentionally.

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    • DarkGamer@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They did no such thing. LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic, and it can generate meaningful responses (to us) that the engineers neither predicted nor designed for.

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      • CrayonRosary@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I get what you’re trying to say, but they are absolutely deterministic. All traditional (i.e., non quantum) computers and their programs are deterministic. Computation would be otherwise impossible. LLMs use a “random” seed value when generating their responses in order to “randomize” their responses, but it’s all perfectly deterministic. The same input plus the same seed results in the exact same response.

        Computers are just a series of binary switches, and programs and data are a bunch of instructions on how to initially set those switches before running a cycle of the CPU. It’s deterministic at every step.

        I put “random” in quotes because random number generators in software are also deterministic. They also use seed values (like the current time and the MAC address of the PC’s network interface) to generate numbers that only seem random. When true randomness is needed, a physical source of entropy must be used like an atmospheric sampler.

        The quirks of behavior you’re talking about have nothing to do with randomness vs determinism. Their behavior comes from the fact that their data sources are extremely large, and the neural network that it runs on was not designed by a human with specific behaviors like most algorithms are. The weights of the nodes in the neural network were generated by training and not by programmers, and it’s extremely complex, so no one can predict its output before running it.

        Of course, this is true of even basic algorithms a lot of the time.

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• UberMentch@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨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.

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  • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you want to get into a full blown discussion of whether ChatGPT has "agency" then I'd open the topic of whether humans have "agency" as well. But I don't see the need here.

    These words were perfectly fine labels for describing the behaviour of ChatGPT in this scenario. I'm merely annoyed about how people are jumping on them and going off on philosophical digressions that add nothing.

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    • UberMentch@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think the reason I’m not comfortable with using the term “lying” is because it implies some sort of negative connotation. When you say that someone lies, it comes with an understanding that they made a choice to lie, usually with ill intent. I agree, we don’t need to get into a philosophical discussion on choice and free will. But I think saying something like “GPT lies” is a bit irresponsible for the purposes of a discussion

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  • FaceDeer@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If you want to get down into the nitty-gritty of it, I'd say that this is just as rough an explanation of what humans are doing.

    People invent false memories and confabulate all the time without even being "aware" of it. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of "lies" that humans tell have no intentionality behind them. So when people get all uptight about applying anthropomorphized terminology to LLMs, I think that's a good time to turn it around and ask how they're so sure that those terms apply differently to humans.

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    • DarkGamer@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      People invent false memories and confabulate all the time without even being "aware" of it. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of "lies" that humans tell have no intentionality behind them.

      Humans understand symbology of concepts as they relate to the real world. If I stole a cookie from the cookie jar, and someone asked if I took one, I would understand that saying "no" would mean that I was misrepresenting reality, and therefore lying.

      LLMs have no idea what a cookie is, what taking one means, or that saying one thing and doing another implies a lie. It just sees lists of words and returns them in an order it thinks would be a meaningful reply. It does not understand what words mean, what lying means, or have any idea how to classify anything as such. It just figures out that "did you take a cookie from the cookie jar" should return a series of words in an order like "yes, I took a cookie," or, "no I never took a cookie," because those fit the patterns matched in the training data.

      Essentially it's the Chinese room problem. There is no understanding or intentionality .

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      • 0ops@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        LLMs have no idea what a cookie is

        The large language model takes in language, so it’s only understand things in terms of language. This isn’t surprising. Personally, I’ve tasted a cookie. I’ve crushed one in my fist watching it crumble, and I remember the sound. I’ve seen how they were made, and I’ve made them myself. It feels good when I eat it, apparently that’s the dopamine. Why can’t the LLM understand cookies the way I do? The most glaring difference is it doesn’t have my body. It doesn’t have all of my different senses constantly feeding data into it, and it doesn’t have a body with muscles to manipulate it’s environment, and observe the results. I argue that we shouldn’t assume that human consciousness has a “special sauce” until our model’s inputs and outputs are similar to ours, the model’s scaled/modified sufficiently, and it’s still not sentient/sapient by our standards, whatever they are.

        My problem with the Chinese room is that how it applies depends on scale. Where do you draw the line between understanding and executing a program? An atom bonding with another atom? A lipid snuggling next to a neighboring lipid? A single neuron cell firing to its neighbor? One section of the nervous system sending signals to the other? One homo sapien speaking to another? Hell, let’s go one further: one culture influencing another? Do we actually have free will and sapience, or are we just complicated enough, through layers and layers of Chinese rooms inside of Chinese buildings inside of Chinese cities inside of China itself, that we assume that we are for practical purposes?

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    • UberMentch@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I suppose the issue here is more semantics than anything, yeah. I think better discussion would be had if the topic was “how can we help LLMs better understand and present information,” as opposed to a more sensational “GPT will cheat and lie”

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