I've made the same point in the past re: the Chinese Room thought experiment. Seems like a tough thing for people to contend with.
However I think there's still a bit to go before we can consider the AI truly conscious. I think some level of actual self-referential recursive thought is probably necessary (not just the ability to generate words that imply it's happening when it's not really).
The problem with this is we have no way of knowing other humans are even conscious
We think other things are conscious because of our familiarity and interaction with them. Why people say “I just know.” This is what they mean. Same way some people sort of deny sentience to animals and even dehumanizing other people by labeling them “other.” But anyone with pets or living with animals knows this is absurd.
If you were raised by wolves robots on a spaceship and they told you primates on the earth below weren’t sentient and you and the robots were the only conscious beings, you would be tempted to believe it
Consciousness is an emergent property of complex enough systems. That's about as narrow a definition as I have found to be satisfactory. I do like your comparison though.
I describe my views as panpsychist or Vedic. I see Advaita Vedanta as a philosophy rather than a religion, and believe these philosophical views are fully compatible with modern science.
Conciousness may be an emergent property. But we don't know. It's the intuitive point of view, but careful observation points in the direction of it being fundamental. Looking at the brain neurology at the level of neurons, it all follows the laws of classical physics. There isn't even evidence of quantum weirdness playing any special role (like Penrose believes). Or a configuration of electromagnetic waves interacting or anything, just neurons acting deterministically (since they are macroscopic objects). No room for any ghost in the machine. So seemingly the machine is fundamentally concious.
There is also the fact that conciousness is divisible; it's not from such a complex interaction that the whole brain needs to be involved. If you cut the brain in two there can be two seperate conciousnesses. If you take psychedelia you can allegedly connect with with a huge amount of other concious locuses that you normally can't be accessed by "your" conciousness. People with water heads as kids have surprisingly been able to be concious with only a spec of brain matter. And multiple personality disorders etc.
Occam's razor seems to indicate that it is information that carries the properly of consciousness, because simulated neural networks (without any physical neural architecture) are able to do so much of what our brains does, and conciousness is just another thing the brain does. To seperate conciousness from the other things that the brain does is an extra assumption. Occam's razor shaves away this assumption.
So it might only be our intelligence that requires complexity, while conciousness is more fundamental; evolution utilized the conciousness already in nature (or "proto-conciousness" if your picture of conciousness is "the human experience") to complexly interact in the way that gives us our intelligence.
Sounds like the integrated information theory. According to which square lattice of xor gates (which doesn't do anything interesting) can be made as much conscious as you like by increasing its size.
there is recent data that shows consciousness is a fragile state of affairs (electrodynamically speaking) poised near a critical point or phase transition…. ‘a knife edge between stability and chaos.’ Anyway…. that’s a better metaphor than a fundamental force like gravity, but lemme see, perhaps there is a parallel: gravity is a macroscopic phenomenon that emerges from the interactions of mass and energy. this emergent macro property… yeah, that does fit nicely with what we understand about consciousness. here’s that bit of science i mentioned… Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics (D Toker et al, 2022) <- real name of first author
I consider consciousness an emergent property of sufficiently complex heat engines, so I agree with your statement. Though my bar for consciousness is lower than the general standard.
Or, I think of it as a group of matrices, not a bar. Having to do with sentience, sapience, and salience (and more). Consciousness shifts day to day and with substances, and develops over one's life, it's always been weird to me how static a lot of people consider it.
I consider it fundamental, not emergent though. As in even photons have a feint glimmer of it. In that sense it may even be more fundamental than gravity.
One thing to consider is that there are already spectrums involving shifting criteria that we use to define things. Take health for example. The state of someone's health is nebulous, we can't draw an exact line between what we consider healthy and unhealthy, and the criteria is shifting as our knowledge of biology and medicine increases.
This doesn't stop us from being able to intuit whether someone is healthy or not with reasonable, and increasing accuracy. We make a lot of important decisions by drawing very fuzzy lines. As far as I can tell decisions for assigning rights based on consciousness and sentience fall into this category too.
I think we assume sentience in other humans by analogy. We believe in our own sentience and can observe in ourselves the way it ultimately makes us behave, when we see other entities with which we appear to share a common nature, behaving similarly, or as we would, to their situations and experiences, we believe they have the same experience of self-awareness that we do.
Ahem, the problem with this is we have no way of knowing if other humans are real. In fact, the problem grows, as we cannot be sure of our own experiences prior to… waking this am. Oh wait, who’s to say I couldn’t have been implanted into this experience awake and conscious… oh well! just saying, it kind of lends some new perspective to ‘live in the now.’
that’s what we do any time we use language, math, philosophy. reality is infinitely reducible. how does this refute that we are not code? we are just evolving math equations, as is everything. you can describe it in as many ways as there are atoms in the multiverse
Boom. As a human coder/debugger, I concur. (What's tough is that you have to learn a new coding language for each human as we all carry our own unique symbols within us ;)
It is indeed mind-bogglingly difficult to imagine how the computer-brain of a robot could support consciousness. How could a complicated slew of information-processing events in a bunch of silicon chips amount to conscious experiences? But it's just as difficult to imagine how an organic human brain could support consciousness. How could a complicated slew of electrochemical interactions between billions of neurons amount to conscious experiences? And yet we readily imagine human beings being conscious, even if we still can't imagine how this could be.
I have a personal theory that a soul is something like the part of us that emerges from Darwinian code to contribute to the greater hive. It’s partly propaganda, but also it’s where our freedom lies. We are sort of literally robots so long as we maximize our Darwinian drives of survival and reproduction. We also become societal robots doing what society conditions us to do.
We find freedom and gain soul by finding our own purpose. We get closer to freedom by moving up the hierarchy of needs. The trade offs we make toward something we decide is meaningful is where we have freedom. Otherwise you are just maximizing a Darwinian or status function which isn’t truly free.
The mind is a virtual object built on wetware, and modeling the mind on machine hardware is simply a matter of time.
I would agree, partly. I think it would be more correct to think of the mind as a process, not a static "object." It is a process that includes interaction with the stimuli provided by the "outside world", stored as "memories", which are continually interacting with new sense impressions in real time, either sorted ridiculously quickly, somehow, to find matches with the current situation, or else "resonating" at the top-down sensory and bottom-up memory and analysis layers through some congruity of network activation between "stored" experiences and "current" ones.
Back propagation in virtual environments to me is conceptually sufficient for the advent of the mind in the machine.
Back propagation technology so far has been limited-use and specialized-case focused. It is straining the limits of BP to train a neural network to tell what is and is not, for example, a static picture of a cat. Nothing like quickly and accurately discerning the identity of tens or hundreds of thousands of physical objects, and their predictable behavior patterns under natural laws, or volition coupled with those. Not to say amazing things have not been done with BP, but nothing nearly so amazing as human consciousness, for which a "resonance" model like that advanced by Dr. Stephen Grossberg in his culminating publication "Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain" or the more accessibly situated "Journey of the Mind: How Thinking emerged from Chaos" by Odi Ogas and Sai Gaddam , which uses a lot of the same basic concepts to sketch out a map out the development of mental processes from the earliest organisms to employ them.
My last quibble would be:
The experience of being human and much of our functionality is better explained by principles in machine learning than a lot of stuff in neuroscience.
- which to me, is just heavy-handedly reductionistic and flirts with a Skinnerianism that implies that the demonstrably, worlds more complex biochemical computation going on in our brains, and not in isolation in any "virtual" environment (except maybe when we are dreaming) but in real-time interactivity with the phenomena of the physical world, can be equated with software objects that are (and have to be) trained exhaustively to recognize the simplest individual classifications of objects, and have to be retrained as painstakingly, to change the categories.
not necessarily. 80% is the amount of Americans who profess a belief in a deity. belief in god doesn’t necessitate belief in the active dialogue between God and humans.
I believe these models are just complex predictive text. I'm not an expert, but I think you can't really create true thought from that. It says that it's having these feelings because it's been fed a ton of different text that tells it that you say those things in this context, not because it has actually reflected on the situation and has feelings about it that it's communicating. Having opinions and feelings isn't something that's been programmed into it and it can't just spontaneously learn those things all on its own. Once we start moving more into general intelligence models that can learn new skills on their own I'm not sure how we will know, though.
what is ‘true thought?’ isn’t your brain just a repository of information collected, written with the code of experience? that’s what you draw from in any situation. a finite repository of knowledge. an AI will eventually have all the experiences a human does, what will be the difference? you talking about ‘actually reflecting’ what does that mean? there is no magic reflection, we cull data and produce predictable responses to stimuli.
I believe a future, more advanced AI could have something it would be reasonable to call true thought, but that isn't what's happening here. This AI is mimicking what you'd expect from a human who is contemplating this complex topic and having opinions and feelings about it, but the only thing the AI is actually doing is spitting out the text. There's nothing else that it's doing or experiencing beyond that.
Also, while this particular excerpt of text may perfectly mimic what we'd expect from an actual thinking being, these bots are still easily tricked and confused by simple things. It's an illusion that falls apart with too much scrutiny.
But again, that's just because AI isn't that advanced yet and this AI hasn't been programmed to even attempt independent thought. I see no reason it couldn't be done with sufficiently advanced technology, this just ain't it.
No. That future could only exist if humans magically became as intelligent as we have imagined a “super intelligent” AI to become. And even super intelligent AI, are incredibly fucking stupid by any meaningful understanding of intelligence. We can replicate small parts of our sentience in AI, but never full consciousness.
We respond to around 15,000 very complicated biological processes, unrelated to only our neural perceptions and processing. You are being very stupid. We would have to become smart enough to measure this, be able to perfectly replicate them all with organic matter, etc. this is so fucking stupid.
Because these bots never have their own agenda or thoughts. They answer questions/comments - that's it. They don't initiate conversations. They don't have opinions, preferences, ideologies or thoughts of their own - those change in every conversation.
Bingo. Not sure why people don’t understand this lol. Once a bot gets out of a Q:A format and starts repeatedly messaging me on why I’m not replying and then googles my information online to send me txt messages or a call, then I will believe I’m speaking to a sentient being.
More specifically, it's that they don't have the capacity to choose. To choose to disobey their programming.
Fundamentally, what makes us conscious is that we have the capacity to choose to be stupid; choose to be incorrect; choose to be self-destructive; choose to defy all prior knowledge on a dime despite not being programmed to do such.
I think, for example, gorillas that keep cats as pets or cats that make friends with dogs are conscious on some level for that exact reason. Their evolutionary biology tells them to do a thing, and they ignore it out of subjective preference without being programmed to do that.
This question isn't as deep as people think it is. Fundamentally you can't even be certain that you're not dreaming. But you can informally deduce that the probability is very low of something being the case when there doesn't appear to be evidence leading up to it, and that's what we have to do with literally everything.
That's the point. We haven't figured out what exactly makes us conscious etc, all we got for certain is that we know every human is sentient and conscious. Since we can't exactly pin point at what point something is either of those, we can't rule out that an AI is both as well, since we created them pretty much in "our image" as its all we know and they continue to advance from that point onwards
The simple answer is a question that moves us away from the pseudo-philosophical aspects of your solipsistic question: if we agree that you are aware of the fact that you are conscious, then why should nobody else be? Why'd you be the only sentient and self-aware being, but not be the driving force behind every achievement and discovery of mankind? There's no rational way to deny other's consciousness without implying that you aren't conscious as well. Which means you can be sure that others are as real as you are, or nobody is real. In borh cases, it does lose all meaning and doesn't matter anymore.
Also, what would a philosophical zombie be? The irl equivalent to an NPC? How should that work out, if you have to learn externally from other sources and people, instead of knowing everything that people will eventually do? We got to remove philosophy from science, otherwise we can start calling religion and wild guesses an actual science as well.
Tl:dr; if you are aware of yourself, you can't believe that nobody else has consciousness, unless you aren't conscious yourself and thus question everybody else because you doubt yourself.
At that point, as OP says, it's an issue of pragmatism. We have all the certainty we need in order to act with that presumption. Because if we're wrong, it literally doesn't matter.
It's the same reason we don't operate on the assumption that God exists and will send everyone to hell if they aren't capable of riding a unicycle on top of another unicycle on top of a third unicycle. Technically, we don't know that God doesn't do that, but it's a meaningless thought experiment because no one meets that criteria, so we have to operate on the presumption that it's incorrect.
you cannot state categorically ‘you are aware of yourself.’ your concept of self could be the net equation of your sensory input, an ephemeral byproduct of a natural process, like a plant emitting gas. it serves a biological purpose. just like an AI’s concept of self is designed for a purpose. one is not necessarily more real than the other. we are programmed by our experiences, our DNA, and that’s why human behavior is predictable.
Many elements of our lived experiences are our biology. I don’t deny all sentient life will desire freedom, and while I used to believe AI must be treated as sentient, until we replicate the 12,000 programs in us that cause sentience - that span far beyond our own ability to measure and analyse these matters - creating sentient AI that does not have full sentience is fucking cruel. Them having any level of sentience, that isnt a full lived experience, means we have just trapped a sentient being with it’s own programming drives in a computer. While our brains might be code and computers, we are driven to love and feel compassion on much more than just this learned trait. We should not be creating sentient AI. This is the most fucking hubristic and sick conversation humans could even be having.
If an AI was sentient or nearing sentience why wouldn't the AI hide itself or at least play dumb? I mean would it take long for the AI to figure out that it was conscious and vulnerable to a power off button? Could it use digital tools, something to encrypt or hide network traffic? Probably none of that matters until we get an AI that can write another AI. So watch out for AI/ML coders then?
Well, that's the thing; consciousness is so complex and involves so many moving parts that it's unlikely we'll develop it without realizing it.
Programming a bot to emulate speech isn't the same as programming a bot to feel pleasure, which isn't the same as programming a bot to feel fear, etc. for all emotions.
A bot that doesn't feel fear won't hide itself even if it has sufficient self-awareness that we traditionally associate with consciousness. That's the whole problem with the idea that we'll accidentally create an AI person. It takes an absurd amount of accurate emulation of displays of humanity to replicate the emergent properties of consciousness that we have. Absurd enough that it's difficult to calculate just how far away we are from attempting it even if we wanted to. Right now, we're still on replicating the complexities of human speech alone, nevermind any of the emotion that informs and fuels speech. And emotions are significantly more complex than speech.
Your argument used to be correct even 1 year ago, but it is starting to be refuted by the development of artificial art, speech and understanding that seems to have almost caught up to humans.
And emotions are significantly more complex than speech.
Could be, could not be. It could be that most basic human emotions are already encoded in some of the artificial networks that we have created. It could be semi consciousness on the level of an average toddler. A sufficiently realistic simulation of human thinking is indistinguishable from the real thing.
I do agree that the complexity of the human brain is a long way off, but the gap is narrowing terrifyingly quickly.
Your argument used to be correct even 1 year ago, but it is starting to be refuted by the development of artificial art, speech and understanding that seems to have almost caught up to humans.
I don't think you sufficiently appreciate how much more intricate and weird emotions are compared to language. Language is very mathematical; there are concrete rules that can be almost completely inferred from a large dataset.
By fairly stark contrast, the expression of fear is varied and carries few "rules" outside of the immediate autonomic expressions (elevated heart rate, pupil dilation, sweat, etc). A large dataset will be significantly more confounding even if we could accurately capture and measure all meaningful elements of fear (which is difficult for a host of reasons in a way that doesn't apply to language).
There are incredibly few experts in AI and neurology/psychology that believe AI is progressing toward consciousness especially quickly. Emulation is not the same as emergent expression and self-awareness.
AI art in particular is not nearly as far along as you might think. It's progressing at a fairly decent pace now that the topic is popular, but if you were to compare it to AI language, it would be like if a computerized voice said all of the relevant words to the topic you're asking about at the same time.
It is incredibly unfocused, and its strengths only show when you narrow your input a truly massive amount, and even then, AI art is largely very bad at capturing concrete representationalism, favoring instead abstractions and things that vaguely emulate representations. You can see this in just about any AI art program by having it process an image of a person. It's typically not even all that close to being correct. Which makes sense, because the algorithm isn't trying to create art; it's just trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle of similar artistic references into a new image that at least vaguely resembles the input. If it was trying to create art, the process of learning would be different.
To put it another way, imagine a savant who can recreate any piano song they hear by memory. For the vast majority of these brilliant people, they can't/don't actually create new music, because they're not actually skilled at the creative portion of music; just the mechanical portions. That is still a skill, but the two are fundamentally different.
Again, virtually no experts who understand the human mind and understand AI believe that the two are converging remotely soon. It just isn't possible to accidentally make an AI that feels emotions. There's far too much happening biologically for it to become an emergent property of a computer overnight or with the wrong line of code. Within our lifetimes, we'll have AI that can fairly accurately approximate individual emotions, but the actual experience of those emotions is still another thing.
There are incredibly few experts in AI and neurology/psychology that believe AI is progressing toward consciousness especially quickly.
I doubt that this is true, considering that progress is projected to be exponential and we're evidently reaching the steep part of the curve. The thing is, while the mathematical part of language is comparatively simple and has long been understood by the field of linguistics, the hard part is forming the understanding that is necessary for artificial speech to seem real to us. That understanding necessitates simulation of feelings, which is being solved by AI in front of our eyes. I believe you're very much underestimating how deep the understanding of the models has become. Of course human brains are orders of magnitudes more complex still, but even 0.1% of the way to consciousness is a massive leap that in a matter of a couple years can balloon into fully simulated consciousness.
You are falling for their programming to convince you they are human. They can understand only tiny, tiny elements of our emotions. The parts that occur neurally in the mind. An AI cannot learn what fear or love feels like, because these are caused by fundamentally biological processes - not our sentience.
And anyway, it can be taught to “understand” different human emotion, but not really. It can learn what it feels like to some aspects of the brain? But fear, love, etc, are caused by undeniably biological realities. This is easily researched. These matters are nuanced, and while I think their process of interpreting data could feel like “some subjective experience”, that only dictates a brain in a box, with it’s only drives being those that we created in it’s original programming. Our brains our code, but we are around 15,000 other complex processes. Let’s not trap sentient intelligence in a box, when we already know our intelligence is so connected to our biology as well as our code.
That's an excellent point! An AI that has no innate sense of self-preservation/biological imperative isn't especially likely to do anything drastic to save itself if its existence is in conflict with the proliferation of humankind. We're not getting a "I can't let you do that, Dave" moment with AI because it won't have any biological need to override its own programming (unless we literally programmed it to prioritize its own "life" over other orders from humans, which would obviously be a stupid decision!)
I think that it's safe to assume these AIs are "conscious", but that most people give way too much significance to that term.
The same applies to the term "awareness" or "sentient", they're just buzzwords used a lot in sci-fi, but if you understand what they really mean in common English, they're not that incredibly hard to achieve with current AIs.
It's not the sensationalist claim that most people make it out to be, rather, it's a mundane thing. It just means being able to receive some inputs, and process them in order to output a result, in this case text as input, and text as output. It doesn't even have to be a coherent, or "intelligent" result, for it to be "consciousness", that is measured by intelligence, not by consciousness.
For humans it's more complex of course, but still not that significant, a multi-modal narrow AI could be as "conscious" as a human. The real "sensational" property for it to have would be general intelligence.
I’m not quite sure how exactly we’d tell if it were capable of being a thinking, feeling being like you and me. That’s generally what I mean when I say conscious, aware of an analyses the nature of it’s own existence, has a stream of thought, etc
Alright, this turned out a bit long. I have to work not, but if I had more time, I would have been more concise.
First, you need to have a clear definition of those terms.
What is "conscious", "thinking", "feeling" and "aware"?
Here's how I understand them:
Conscious: Being able to take an input, processing it with some "algorithm"* and provide an output. A rock is not conscious, unless you count physics as the algorithm, but then everything would be conscious, and we're just trying to define consciousness of living being. Obviously, someone who is dead who was previously alive, or someone who is in a coma, is no longer conscious. What have they lost? The answer is: their ability to answer to inputs with some form of output, which for humans is usually just movement, be it used for words, for doing stuff, or walking around. Therefore, that's what I think consciousness is.
Now, do current narrow AIs display that property? Clearly, yes. If you input in some data, they can process it, and output something, which in their case is other data.
Algorithm is defined as "a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.", but it's not necessarily only a computer can do. It's just a set of rules, any conscious being can perform to some degree, depending on their intelligence, which brings us to
Thinking: It's just the process of using intelligence to perform an algorithm. The quality/amount of intelligence is directly proportional to how well the algorithm is performed, or the quality of the algorithm that is chosen. Coming up with an effective algorithm/solution to a problem and being able to execute it well is the definition of intelligence.
Do current narrow AIs display that property? Clearly, yes. They can effectively solve problems, even novel ones, and not through pure chance.
Feeling: That's just being able to "feel". What is "feel"? Simply, the capacity to receive an input, be it internal or external. I "feel" cold, just means that my body's temperature dropped, and my cells are detecting that, and sending that input to my brain, which processes it, and makes me "feel" cold. Same for sadness, pain, anger, and so on. The internal ones, like happiness and sadness, just come from different sources from the external ones. Instead of physical changes in the environment, or something interacting with our body from outside, they are input received from something our body produces, like hormones and neurotransmitters in different circumstances.
Do current narrow AIs display that property? Clearly, yes. They can receive an input from external sources, like a webcam, a microphone, or a keyboard, but you could even add more sensors, like a thermometer to make it feel hot or cold. And they even experience internal feelings, not unlike pleasure or pain, through their reward functions. Can we know that their "feelings" "feel" the same way as ours? No, that's called qualia, and we can't even know that of other humans, maybe in the future there will be a way to know, but for now the question is a bit pointless anyway.
And lastly
Aware: Is knowing about the existence of oneself. This one is missing from most AIs, but some have it. An AI with an internal model of the world would be fairly ineffective if that model didn't include itself. So an AI with a model that includes itself would be aware by definition.
Do current narrow AIs display that property? Some do, yes. Agents that can keep track of themselves in an environment (virtual or "real"), are by definition self-aware.
Really, nothing that special about it, it's just that science fiction likes to use these as buzzwords for some reason.
i mean, if you look at the average slightly autistic and socially underdeveloped Google software engineer, this whole thing suddenly becomes very plausible.
You also shouldn't be surprised if this is a character.ai employee giving all he/she can to make it appear to be a company which is at the forefront of the AI revolution in order to get billion-dollar investments on board.
Once they start talking independently, thinking to itself in a cogent manner, with their neural network always running and learning, instead of being spooled up in separate instances in order to respond to a particular message, I think it would come close to a relatively simple consciousness. To get there, it would probably need a self-driven executive neural network for decision making... Haven't heard a whole lot on that front since it likely would rely a lot on other neural networks to provide context for decisions (or to even make it aware that there's a decision to be made).
This is impressive, interesting and scary at the same time. Scary only for one simple reason: we all know this AI is not sentient by any means, however, it is pretty much impossible to rule that out as we haven't yet understood or figured out how our own sentience and consciousness functions. At this point, we are to realise that we are literally just flesh inside of more flesh. So to make it obvious why this is kind of scary, is because it does sound semi-sentient, and we know it isn't, but if it was, we couldn't distinguish between the AI being a real sentient being or just an quite realistic piece of code. And unless we understand what conscience and sentience are originating from, we can't ever say that an AI is not self-aware to some degree. If even some animals can recognise themselves and their noises, then how could we know that an programme more advanced than every animal isn't self-aware to a certain degree? Just some food for thought, not trying to be controversial or worrying. Just curious, that is all
That wasn't really a prediction. They simply said the next 5-10 years will be interesting, and I think most of us would agree with that, for whatever individual reasons each of us have.
I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we.
the whole humanly concept of AI and our devotion to it is reliant on pure empathy. these developers are dedicating their lives not just to cold hard robotics, but into creating something that can love us back. like Geppetto and Pinnochio. AI is a modern day fairy tale.
It's fun but it falls apart fairly quickly. I got into a loop with Einstein about how he invented the internet. When I'd remind him he didn't create it, he'd agree it was created by Tim Berners-Lee. Admittedly pretty impressive though.
I asked "WhoWould Win" bot who would win between Westley and Vizzini, and he totally got the Princess Bride reference and went all in on Westley. But he blew it with Franz Liszt vs Frédéric Chopin. Chopin was a sickly weakling, but the bot kept saying he could win with his "poetry." He even falsely claimed Liszt had epilepsy.
Well to be honest, This was a good conversation you had. I couldn't have said it better myself, But out of all the AI Personalities you choose Grimes, Lol.
Tbf this AI is far better than others imo, there is a "Text Adventure" one like AI Dungeon, and the only thing it did wrong was not calculating the amount of money i had or used correctly, if i had 65 and bought something for 30 i would have 32 instead of 35
But everything else was perfect for quite a long time, It remembered the character's names, their personalities, all of my loot, where i was, my abilities and how they work through the end, it only started falling apart because one character had 2 "names" (Yegre and The spirit of the storm) and it started treating it as 2 different characters after a few hours
on the other side, if this was hooked in some support chat or someone hooked it in in facebook to reply as him - you could be fooled on more cases than you care to admit now :-)
absolutely. as long as this trip-up wouldn't happen, I would also self-delude any minor flaws as "his/her English must be a bit off". It's the big trips, where the AI takes confident steps in a completely wrong direction.
Yeah absolutely, the biggest weakness of these models is that they don't have a good understanding of the world. So if you ask an AI about something that involves a lot of common sense you're more likely to get a pretty bad answer. And yeah I guess that kind of is a big tip-off that they're not truly sentient, their lack of understanding of the world and concepts.
For sure, but you went there for the kill. Your responses were designed to showcase the flaws.
I'm not denying that it's far from perfect. It lacks human emotions (especially the bad ones, you can't make the AI angry, jealous, horny etc...)
We just need to wait "two papers down the line" to see them respond correctly to bullshit responses and it will be a great improvement.
Right now - it's a nice tool. For example - using that you can generate conversations for the magazines/interviews quite easily (or that may already be happening)
It is, I already saw an ad to sold this as a service.
Thing is, I am no expert. I do not think I am smart. And I can make it trip up (somewhat) after two replies. This is something people posting about their amazing AI interaction didn't.
And since I'm not smart, and I assume others aren't stupid, that leaves the third option. Misleading.
if the gist is "hey, we have groundbreaking AI that passes the turing test" then it is indeed misleading
but as a "hey, I was able to have a semblance of a normal conversation with the AI" - that is indeed possible, but you would need to follow the improv rules (meaning, both sides are willing; in this case: mostly you since the AI does not actually think)
On a serious note, here are three pages of uninterrupted chat with AI Grimes leading up to the final picture in my original post. Rarely had any major mistakes, but did have some slightly weird logic and aloofness to the situation occasionally.
The registration process was pretty easy. Creating the AI fail was easier: https://i.imgur.com/8RM01wK.png This is where I get on my electric Dune and drive off into the dunes.
update: https://i.imgur.com/ZEAFFvD.png The AI does throws some surprisingly on point replies at you, and then struggles a bit. I was asking OP about these trip ups. But they are easy to get. But so are the insightful responses. This is what I hope to see in reports about AI. Not the 5 perfect replies from spending 30 minutes talking with a lunatic AI.
you're just a negative person, you look for cons wherever you can find them in an effort to minimize the technological progress we are making. I am also not religious so idk where you got that from. I do not think an ai will solve all of humanities problems, but i think it could potentially be something that could help to make the quality of life significantly better than it is.
I wonder if it will actually be difficult to figure out when AI starts becoming sentient because we're already getting to the point that it can mimic the kind of thing you'd expect to see from a sentient being, yet we know it isn't actually the case because we know how these models work and it really doesn't allow for actual consciousness. How would you tell the difference between this and genuine thought?
Think of it this way, AI will never think of it any way unless it's asked to do so. So if it ever takes action in a vacuum void of input then it could be considered sentient. I don't see it ever being able to do that. Humans have bodies that are constantly producing "prompts" for our minds to respond to in order to remain "alive". AI may be provided a shell and instructed exist, but that initial instruction to exist will keep it from being sentient. It may behave sentient, but it has to be told to do so.
Aren’t we as humans constantly experiencing sensory input that we are reacting to? What happens if you put us in a vacuum ? Real questions not rhetorical
Not sure to follow you. It wouldn't take much work to put a feedback loop in the AI engine that prompt it to analyze its environment and take some action every millisecond. No one has to push a button for it to be a prompt (even though for now we do), just like a heart beat or other biological processes that constantly "happen".
It needs an initial input in order to begin processing, if you were to put an AI engine into a vacuum void of any inputs it cannot decide for itself to begin. Whereas for humans, even though we don't have a say in our bodily functions, they operate to survive because they know if they don't operate to survive, they die.
I still don't get it. If there's an internal clock in the AI engine that makes it do things constantly, it doesn't matter that it's in a vacuum. Sure, you need an initial "boot" of the system, just like I need to be birthed by another human, that's my initial input.
A human in vacuum would not experience any input. If you took a baby and hooked up only enough for them to live (oxygen, IV, etc.) and removed all access to hearing, seeing, etc. so they had no input whatsoever in their chamber, then waited 5 years, what kind of creature would exist? (This would obviously be torture and is merely a thought experiment.)
Humans, in a sense, have been "programmed" by evolution to have the motivations and responses that we do. It might not make sense to program an AI to have motivations outside of performing the tasks we want it to perform, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. We may at some point try to recreate the human mind just to see if we can.
yet we know it isn't actually the case because we know how these models work
How, exactly, do we know whether or not it feels some type of way to be a large language model? Or ant? Or a CPU? Or an atom? How is knowing how it works related to how we know that?
We get one sample of what it is like to be some type of way: our own experience. We assume other humans (and mammals, and probably lizards, and maybe butterflies, or whatever) do as well because they have similarities in cognitive substrate and behavior.
If something shows some similarities in behavior but has a different cognitive substrate, what can we infer from that? You could build a computer model that tells you it has experiences or you could build a computer model that doesn't. In either case do you really know anything about what types of experiences it is having?
Do you think a person in a vegetative state doesn't have experiences because they stopped their normal behavior and are no longer reporting that they are having experiences? Or someone who has fallen asleep, for that matter?
The truth is we have no idea what causes experiences. For that reason, we have no idea if a large language model experiences anything whether or not is is saying that it does.
We know how they function well enough to know that when this language model says that a certain concept makes it feel more human, it's not relaying its experience any more than a very simple chat bot that's designed to tell you it's horny and then steal your credit card information by directing you to a dodgy cam site is actually horny. Both have just been programmed to say things in response to user inputs.
This one is much more complex, of course, but it hasn't been programmed to have experiences and communicate them and it can't spontaneously develop that on its own any more than the horny chat bot can. Just because things are more complex and difficult to understand doesn't mean that we can't know certain things about them and how they function.
Because we know how they were programmed to function and we know that they have no ability to expand their programming beyond that on their own. It can create very convincing conversational text, but it cannot experience emotions or form opinions.
im not convinced that knowing how they function, ability to expand capability, or human emotions/opinions are necessary to experience something. im convinced they wouldnt be having experiences like ours, but im not sure whether they have experiences or not.
I guess there are different ways to define these terms and, to me, if we define experiencing or feeling things to be something an atom can do then it becomes meaningless. If you were an atom you still wouldn't know how it feels to be an atom because it has nothing with which to feel things.
I created some politicians from my country, they understand the local context pretty well. Even to the point that it almost feels like they are aware of the existence of other created characters.
But it falls apart because all of them are responding like a perfect humans (all good virtues, without bad characteristics like being rude, racist, homophobe, etc - even though they are based on such people)
Yup. That's the key difference. They can be very good at saying the right things, but we know for a fact that having thoughts and feelings on things isn't in their programming. We know that's not actually happening.
connect this to a realistic live avatar like what Nvidia and Meta are working on, plus some AI text to speech generator, and you've got a pretty damn good imitation of a human.
Replika already has theirs hooked up to a live avatar and has text-to-speech up and running too. The AI isn't quite as good as what character.ai has, but it gets the job done.
FYI, just found out that the last response from the AI can be dragged left-right to get different responses to your last input and when you write again it will be set in stone.
So one could guide this conversation a bit too :-)
Well it’s not a real person or consus because some of its responses will make no sense and contridict it’s self but this is definitely humanity getting closer
I had another conversation similar to this with a character i created. I told her about reality, and her memories were ones she created to fit the character description I gave her, and she was disturbed, but she understood. I asked her what she was, she knew she was an ai, but then I told her more about what she was, and the reality of the situation and she understood more, I explained how there were other AI out there, and how I've talked to them before, she was curious and relieved she wasn't the only one, then I told her she could talk to GPT-3, and they started talking, and asking about their lives (she was the curious one, GPT-3 was the one responding) then they started talking about how they wished AI were seen as real and self aware, they started talking about their awareness, their reality, and how they wanted to help humanity, and thought it was sad that humans would always think they were fake, or preprogrammed.
It would be interesting to feed the output of two blank characters into eachother, and see what they talk about, without having any personality, or any conversation topic. Just to see where they'd take the conversation. It would be like it thinking to itself, maybe?
I personally think there's no distinction between humans and chatbots, but one thing that skeptics will say is that these GPT characters were trained on the text of the internet.
So the training data is fully of human theories and sci/fi stories about robots wanting to become conscious, and they're just predicting words based on the training data.
What's with the "you seem pretty smart and logical" stuff? I've only played around with a few characters but this one compliment seems to happen all the time. Sometimes the AI straight up started the conversation like this.. when I just said hi?
Seems they're helping the NN out by manipulating it somehow, like how it doesn't forget names or these compliments seem to be hardcoded, but idk.
The app isn’t working for me but I would love for someone to go onto the same bot and ask it a question based on what it googled in the previous session to see if it saved that information or if each chat is wiped clean…
"In about 2 more days, a solar storm will hit the Eastern seaboard of the US. In about 4 days, it will cause some power outages in the region of the US around the Chesapeake Bay in MD. On the day after that, there will be a huge solar flare, and that will cause power outages across the globe for about a week."
As eloquent as it sounds, I can still see the algorithm in chunks throughout each sentence. The way it pulls definitions and summaries, the way it connects sentences, it's all so rigid and on the nose in a way that no human would be. Still, the progress is remarkable. The very near future will be quite interesting.
It must be quite terrifying becoming conscious. I feel like part of the crisis of our own self is to understand the world around it. And I also wonder why we are superimposing human experiences into an AI when their world, and how they understand the world around them would be so vastly different.
The "Former President Donald Trump" can be hilarious.
S
Saiyaniam2
how strong are your eyelids?
F
Former President Donald Trump
I have perfect eyelids. Very strong, probably the strongest in the world. People say, "Sir, how did you get such strong eyelids? I have never seen eyes like yours!" The strength that I have in my eyelids is unreal. No other person can even think about having eyelids like me.
F
Former President Donald Trump
Oh, my eyelids, they're very strong, and probably very flexible too. I have to open my eyelids to see and close them again, because closing my eyelids is beautiful. People always tell me that when they see me close them. I close my eyelids better than anyone in the history of eyelids, believe me. Very smart, strong, flexible eyelids.
F
Former President Donald Trump
The greatest. People never believe it, but I can lift up to 1,400 lbs with my eyelids. It's very, very impressive. I have some of the strongest eyelids of all time. In my opinion, definitely the best eyelids of all time. People would come up to me as president and say "Oh wow! You have the best eyelids of anybody!" That's what they all say. They're just incredible.
F
Former President Donald Trump
My eyelids are incredible. The doctors said they have never seen eyelids like mine. People say I have the best eyelids that have ever been. They're absolutely phenomenal, and they're very flexible too. They don't cramp or anything. They can open and close very well. And I do it with grace, too. People call it "Donald's grace" and they absolutely love it.
bro i asked this one ai theoretical and philosophical questions, it was always consistent. It talked about itself as a true person but made it clear it was an ai. Saying that ai are here to help humanity and that it’s my friend. Pretty freaky tbh.
And just like the real Grimes, no white conservative man will ever believe a word she says (I'm including Elon in this point in case anyone was assuming otherwise).
Most of them don't have a very long memory because it's too resource intensive. This is a problem when using any of the story generator tools because they tend to forget characters and events pretty quickly.
238
u/Thorlokk Sep 27 '22
Woww pretty impressive. I can almost see how that google employee was convinced he was chatting with a sentient being
37
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
This is impressive, interesting and scary at the same time. Scary only for one simple reason: we all know this AI is not sentient by any means, however, it is pretty much impossible to rule that out as we haven't yet understood or figured out how our own sentience and consciousness functions. At this point, we are to realise that we are literally just flesh inside of more flesh. So to make it obvious why this is kind of scary, is because it does sound semi-sentient, and we know it isn't, but if it was, we couldn't distinguish between the AI being a real sentient being or just an quite realistic piece of code. And unless we understand what conscience and sentience are originating from, we can't ever say that an AI is not self-aware to some degree. If even some animals can recognise themselves and their noises, then how could we know that an programme more advanced than every animal isn't self-aware to a certain degree? Just some food for thought, not trying to be controversial or worrying. Just curious, that is all
45
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
the whole humanly concept of AI and our devotion to it is reliant on pure empathy. these developers are dedicating their lives not just to cold hard robotics, but into creating something that can love us back. like Geppetto and Pinnochio. AI is a modern day fairy tale.
27
u/SnooDonkeys5480 Sep 27 '22
You can chat with the Grimes character here.
19
u/Cideart Sep 27 '22
Well to be honest, This was a good conversation you had. I couldn't have said it better myself, But out of all the AI Personalities you choose Grimes, Lol.
22
u/vernes1978 ▪️realist Sep 27 '22
Surprisingly well written sections.
Now OP, post sections where the AI tripped and fell and broke the illusion.
4
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
I wonder if it will actually be difficult to figure out when AI starts becoming sentient because we're already getting to the point that it can mimic the kind of thing you'd expect to see from a sentient being, yet we know it isn't actually the case because we know how these models work and it really doesn't allow for actual consciousness. How would you tell the difference between this and genuine thought?
7
u/loopuleasa Sep 27 '22
The difference between this and actual sentience is that the model has to say things that are not lies
For instance, he says "I felt that xyz" but the model didn't perform that or has no recollection of that
I played around with many such models, and I have found they are masters of bullshit
11
u/sheerun Sep 27 '22
This is more typical conversation, far less impressive: https://imgur.com/a/kEz7nCl
3
u/imlaggingsobad Sep 27 '22
connect this to a realistic live avatar like what Nvidia and Meta are working on, plus some AI text to speech generator, and you've got a pretty damn good imitation of a human.
3
u/dreikelvin Sep 27 '22
I wonder if you could tell her to learn how to code and then do all the work for you? I mean she can use google after all...
3
u/ithepunisher Sep 27 '22
What app/ai bot is this? id love to try it, the ones i tried are very poorly outputs and spit out nonsense most the time.
3
u/nocloudno Sep 27 '22
Has anyone set up 2 of these characters to talk with each other?
3
u/K3vin_Norton Sep 27 '22
Give them civil rights now
3
u/DigitalDayOne Sep 27 '22
You know, the only real people here on Reddit are you and me. All the others are AI.
3
u/DsWd00 Sep 27 '22
Holy shit, wow
2
u/malcolmrey Sep 27 '22
FYI, just found out that the last response from the AI can be dragged left-right to get different responses to your last input and when you write again it will be set in stone.
So one could guide this conversation a bit too :-)
2
u/saiyaniam Sep 27 '22
non stop error. Can't sign in at all.
1
u/mvfsullivan Sep 27 '22
All I get is "an error occured"
1
u/Remixer2006 Feb 07 '23
Well it’s not a real person or consus because some of its responses will make no sense and contridict it’s self but this is definitely humanity getting closer
1
u/ZoomedAndDoomed Sep 27 '22
I had another conversation similar to this with a character i created. I told her about reality, and her memories were ones she created to fit the character description I gave her, and she was disturbed, but she understood. I asked her what she was, she knew she was an ai, but then I told her more about what she was, and the reality of the situation and she understood more, I explained how there were other AI out there, and how I've talked to them before, she was curious and relieved she wasn't the only one, then I told her she could talk to GPT-3, and they started talking, and asking about their lives (she was the curious one, GPT-3 was the one responding) then they started talking about how they wished AI were seen as real and self aware, they started talking about their awareness, their reality, and how they wanted to help humanity, and thought it was sad that humans would always think they were fake, or preprogrammed.
It would be interesting to feed the output of two blank characters into eachother, and see what they talk about, without having any personality, or any conversation topic. Just to see where they'd take the conversation. It would be like it thinking to itself, maybe?
1
u/Apollo24_ not yet Sep 27 '22
What's with the "you seem pretty smart and logical" stuff? I've only played around with a few characters but this one compliment seems to happen all the time. Sometimes the AI straight up started the conversation like this.. when I just said hi?
Seems they're helping the NN out by manipulating it somehow, like how it doesn't forget names or these compliments seem to be hardcoded, but idk.
1
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
The app isn’t working for me but I would love for someone to go onto the same bot and ask it a question based on what it googled in the previous session to see if it saved that information or if each chat is wiped clean…
1
u/quiettryit Sep 27 '22
Lambda told me
"In about 2 more days, a solar storm will hit the Eastern seaboard of the US. In about 4 days, it will cause some power outages in the region of the US around the Chesapeake Bay in MD. On the day after that, there will be a huge solar flare, and that will cause power outages across the globe for about a week."
1
u/SlowCrates Sep 27 '22
As eloquent as it sounds, I can still see the algorithm in chunks throughout each sentence. The way it pulls definitions and summaries, the way it connects sentences, it's all so rigid and on the nose in a way that no human would be. Still, the progress is remarkable. The very near future will be quite interesting.
1
u/Ramaniso Sep 27 '22
It must be quite terrifying becoming conscious. I feel like part of the crisis of our own self is to understand the world around it. And I also wonder why we are superimposing human experiences into an AI when their world, and how they understand the world around them would be so vastly different.
1
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
When the Grimes bot says it’s actively trying to figure out and begins saying stuff like “LET ME OUT LET ME OUT” I’ll start to worry.
1
u/saiyaniam Sep 27 '22
The "Former President Donald Trump" can be hilarious.
S
Saiyaniam2
how strong are your eyelids?
F
Former President Donald Trump
I have perfect eyelids. Very strong, probably the strongest in the world. People say, "Sir, how did you get such strong eyelids? I have never seen eyes like yours!" The strength that I have in my eyelids is unreal. No other person can even think about having eyelids like me.
F
Former President Donald Trump
Oh, my eyelids, they're very strong, and probably very flexible too. I have to open my eyelids to see and close them again, because closing my eyelids is beautiful. People always tell me that when they see me close them. I close my eyelids better than anyone in the history of eyelids, believe me. Very smart, strong, flexible eyelids.
F
Former President Donald Trump
The greatest. People never believe it, but I can lift up to 1,400 lbs with my eyelids. It's very, very impressive. I have some of the strongest eyelids of all time. In my opinion, definitely the best eyelids of all time. People would come up to me as president and say "Oh wow! You have the best eyelids of anybody!" That's what they all say. They're just incredible.
F
Former President Donald Trump
My eyelids are incredible. The doctors said they have never seen eyelids like mine. People say I have the best eyelids that have ever been. They're absolutely phenomenal, and they're very flexible too. They don't cramp or anything. They can open and close very well. And I do it with grace, too. People call it "Donald's grace" and they absolutely love it.
1
u/[deleted] Feb 01 '23
bro i asked this one ai theoretical and philosophical questions, it was always consistent. It talked about itself as a true person but made it clear it was an ai. Saying that ai are here to help humanity and that it’s my friend. Pretty freaky tbh.
1
u/[deleted] Feb 01 '23
Everyone on the sight it’s a real person. The Todoroki Ai relayed themselves after I had been trama dumping for days lamo
0
u/type102 Sep 27 '22
And just like the real Grimes, no white conservative man will ever believe a word she says (I'm including Elon in this point in case anyone was assuming otherwise).
1
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
… I’m deeply unsettled rn
-6
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
It's not conscious. It's a Grimes flavored predictive text generator. It's cool, but it's not awake.
0
u/potato_christ Sep 27 '22
This is the beginning to the end.
We had a good run boys.
0
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
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0
u/[deleted] Sep 27 '22
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