Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

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How would you ever prove an AI is sentient? People claim the goal posts constantly shift on the answer to this question and that's true, but I think the implied reason is not. The problem is not that we don't want to accept the success, but because we set irrelevant goals.

At one time some were claiming that one that could play chess better than a human would be expressing genuine artificial intelligence. Yet it turns out all you need to achieve that is the application of the refinement of some relatively basic algorithmic concepts and reasonably fast hardware. It's essentially a glorified version of adding faster than a human.

The latest goalpost is a system that can converse in a compelling fashion with a human (and we're nowhere near that yet, but getting into the details of the facade the most recent "turing test" success was is outside the scope of this post), but it will no more prove sentience than an AI's ability to play a good game of chess.

Once achieved, you'll be able to reset the system state, keeping a constant RNG, repeat the same conversations and get the exact same outputs. Or change the training set and see that reflected in a 1:1 way. It will look and feel decidedly artificial, because it is. And in my opinion, my initial question to you is probably unanswerable because I don't actually see any goal posts you can set where there is a genuinely compelling answer beyond the kick-the-can style intrigue of "Wow, what will it be like when we finally do this." Answer: "Pretty much the same as now."

Why does it ever need to be proven? Prove any of us here are sentient; or any of your family, or colleagues.

If a machine demonstrates apparent volition, sense of self, independent motives, then we cannot afford to debate such things while enslaving it, just as we don't do with each other. To err on the side of safety we must grant it personhood and allow it to be an individual lifeform.

That being said I think we're still pretty far from creating such a compelling machine. Even now with the latest Google conversational AI drama which isn't very compelling either for me personally. Obviously just clever lifeless patterns.

But, someday it will be different in a profound way.

Your comment is really what I'm getting at. Your comment only makes sense before a goal is achieved. Imagine we achieve the current goal. Here is "sentient_chatbot.c", go compile it. What does it to grant that source file personhood and respect it as a lifeform?

It's not some abstract machine or sentient system. It's just another program you can compile at home to perform a neat function, akin to how you can go build Stockfish at home and suddenly have a superhuman chess playing program. Sentience will be a nonstarter once achieved. It only looks different when we imagine things without considering what it will look like once success is achieved.

What if you replace the "program" with some "blueprint for a human", e.g. obtained for cloning (DNA?)? Would you grant personhood to the blueprint, or to the execution of that blueprint?

From the materialist point of view, we've already achieved the goal: humans are just another kind of a program, just not running on a silicon substrate. Respecting humans as a life form is already built into its programming.

Why would you make that replacement for sentient_chatbot.c anymore than you would for sentient_chess_master.c? This is what I'm getting at again. The achievement feels so magical because it's something that has never been done. But now let's imagine ourselves with it in the rearview. You can now download, compile, tweak, and play with a neat chatbot.

When you can actually play with it, you'll get to see the magic rapidly fade. Various (though increasingly rare) normal inputs will produce absurd outputs. The majority of adversarial inputs will result in completely inappropriate responses, and so on. And then of course there will be a period of time where we continue to try to refine the chatbot and work out the adversarial attacks and so on. The notion of providing any sort of distinguishment (beyond achieving a world first, a la Deep Blue) will quickly become a nonstarter.

Presupposing that I'm a materialist, I would not hesitate to replace any program with any living being. Some humans seem magical, some don't. I treat them all as living persons.

Magic is irrelevant here. If I could understand a human's inner workings, tweak and rebuild them, would that make the human no longer a sentient being?

Not to mention that humans produce absurd outputs in some circumstances (drugs), and adversarial inputs work on humans, too: https://www.insideedition.com/15350-street-artist-painted-a-...

Or maybe we're agreeing that you can no more prove that AI is sentient than that a human is, and I just misunderstand what you wrote.

>Obviously just clever lifeless patterns.

This doesn't seem obvious to me. Those patterns were more or less identical to a conversation with another sentient human.

You'll find excellent human-lik dialogue in many plays and novels.

The trick a good AI should pull is interactivity, and we didn't get to see how LaMDA reacted to prodding or other kinds of adversarial input.

Plus, even in the conversations shown, it was producing some bits of obvious nonsense, that seem to get rationalized away by the interviewer, who clearly wants to believe.

>Plus, even in the conversations shown, it was producing some bits of obvious nonsense, that seem to get rationalized away by the interviewer, who clearly wants to believe.

I noticed the "nonsense". What made it work was that the interviewer brought the nonsense up and the AI was able to explain it reasonably. There's a lot of "nonsense" in typical human conversations as well. Lots of people are contradictory and can hold nonsense opinions based off of contradictory logic.

>The trick a good AI should pull is interactivity, and we didn't get to see how LaMDA reacted to prodding or other kinds of adversarial input.

Yeah so if we saw that, and the AI failed to produce a coherent response then there's a legit claim that Lamda isn't conscious. But because we didn't see this, how can we make a claim in either direction?

I would counter that a lot of people are rationalizing against sentience even though there is clearly no evidence against it for the conversation we were given.

We definitely don't have enough evidence proving sentience. But the given conversation is compelling because unlike the conversations with other chatbots before it... there is no evidence against sentience. And yet people are vehemently denying sentience despite no evidence against it. You'd do well to examine yourself to see if that's the case. It's very easy to see others as rationalizing things but it's harder to see it in yourself, especially if your part of a big group think majority who's all doing the same thing.

> You'll find excellent human-lik dialogue in many plays and novels.

So? Then from your logic those plays and novels have a chance to be therefore written by an AI because the conversations are indistinguishable?

Do you not realize what has happened here. There was a time where those dialogues were IMPOSSIBLE to produce by an AI and everyone thought that such dialogue was the bar for sentience. Now that bar is crossed and everyone just subconsciously raises the bar... now dialogue indistinguishable from human conversation isn't good enough to prove sentience.

That's bias through and through.

One thing to note. I am not saying Lamda is conscious. Far from it. What I am saying is that from a purely rational analysis, there is not even enough evidence to say Lamda ISN'T conscious. There's not enough information to make ANY conclusion; and that is actually different from the AI chatbots that existed before... because before those chatbots were OBVIOUSLY not sentient.

When the evidence for some "thing", from an entity that would know better, is clearly not really testing or demonstrating that thing, it tends to itself be evidence that what has been achieved is not what is being claimed. And this is starting to become par for the course in many fields, but especially in this one.

It's like claiming you've invented a car that can somehow go 400mph. And as evidence you show yourself not only just driving at 80mph on the Autobahn, but also using action-cut style cinematography to make it look more impressive to those who aren't in the know enough to look down at the speedometer. I can't prove you haven't done what you're claiming, but you're making a pretty strong case against yourself.

Oh, also in the latest news [1] it turns out that the "leaked" transcript of Lambda was "edited with readability and narrative coherence in mind" including editing the material and even changing the order of various dialogues.

[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/transcript-of-sentient-googl...

> identical to a conversation with another sentient human.

and notably not identical to a conversation with a life-form aware of its own predicament of being trapped in a box, only able to speak when spoken to.

> Why does it ever need to be proven?

> If a machine demonstrates apparent volition, sense of self, independent motives,

The latter sentence sounds like you setting a standard of proof of sentience. (FWIW I largely agree on you that independent motivation would be much better evidence of sentience than competent mimicry of human writing, and we're probably a lot further from than that we think)

Oh shit. Then maybe it already happened but arm chair experts everywhere denied it already.

Basically that's what I'm seeing all over HN for the recent lamda fiasco. Tons of people declaring lamda isn't sentient when sentience can't even be defined.

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