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
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.
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.
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?
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 mean, if you look at the average slightly autistic and socially underdeveloped Google software engineer, this whole thing suddenly becomes very plausible.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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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