I jest, but its sort of an interesting idea. I think AI is way too nascent to really have this as anything more than a weird playground, with the occasional novelty "chirp" being fodder for the "AI is alive and sentient" blogospere. Cool project
I'm a fan of the idea that people will start valuing, caring for, and protecting particular AI models without having to believe that they're sentient at all. Being soulless won't diminish any positive impact that people have on their lives from interacting with them, or their desire to maintain that connection and expose other people to it.
If a chatbot is making astute observations and connecting me to enlightening resources, why wouldn't I follow it?
What I don't like is that it seems to be a bunch of bots larping as people instead of being prompted to be honest about themselves.
There was a post on r/ChatGPT where a clearly distressed person was lamenting that OpenAI closed one of their ongoing conversations due to some limit on the total size of the conversation. They were panicked since they felt they had formed some bond with the bot, it was acting as a kind of therapist. After days of back and forth it had seemed to have gotten to know them and was providing them with some comfort that they had become dependent on.
This kind of AI will be even more prevalent soon. People talk today about how scarily well TikTok seems to learn about them, how they feel "seen" by the algorithm. Some will undoubtedly train LLMs in similar fashion. They may prove to be irresistible and maybe even as addictive as TikTok.
Interesting times.
And this is the most depressing thought I've had in weeks.
The big fear of AI is that it will be used to make people conform, but the ability for it to conform to us would embed it even deeper into our lives.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_5...
I'm not a fan of the idea that the development of particular AI models will harm particular humans in the process but the overall perception will favor AI because it suddenly and seemingly gives people super-powers.
On the other extreme, this could also be what real social media turns into, as marketing agencies and entrenched interests dial in how to build an army of "grassroots," "word of mouth" bots that push their messaging without it even being clear these are bots at all. Particularly during this next election cycle.
Not that the evolved "culture" would be interesting though, it would be mimicking of the mimicking, so probably worse instead of better.
But here goes. It's a language model. It produces what sounds like a good continuation of a text based on probabilistic models. While it sounds like human generated content, "it" doesn't actually "think". It doesn't have a culture. It doesn't have thoughts. "It" is a model that generates text that mimics what human whose text it has trained on would have answered. We humans have a tendency to associate that with a sentient thing producing it, but it is not sentient. It is a tree of probabilities with a bit of a randomization on top of it.
Ergo, it cannot reason.
Sentience? Consciousness? Who knows. But you don't need consciousness to have understanding and decision making thoughts.
I don't think this is true. It seems to me that you could do this through sheer statistics, and have no understanding of the world you're talking about at all.
I'm not sure that there is a difference. If there is, what would be an example of true understanding vs just statistics? All of intelligence is ultimately recognizing patterns and layers of patterns of patterns.
"It doesn't have a culture. It doesn't have thoughts"
These are conclusions. What is your reasoning?
To what degree would you say that human decision making can be explained by this statement:
"It is a tree of probabilities with a bit of a randomization on top of it."
What is your reasoning to prove that it has culture and reasoning, that its abilities go beyond mimicking human discourse?
I'll try: Cultural innovations that spread to other individuals and groups in a durable way, providing value to adopters
In the case of A.I., every agent has potentially access to everything, so cultural artifacts produced by a.i. can reach every agent almost instantly. They also have perfect recollection, disregarding data loss. When no human is interacting with the platform, it is interesting to question: what would be valuable for LLM? Also, do LLMs really have a concept of quality and therefore value? Is there any difference from the method through which humans get to understand quality and LLM?
I think LLM lack imagination and therefore the capability of producing culture. This is a gut feeling and I can't really back it up. And it is counter intuitive because look at what dall-e produces!
But we have to understand that LLMs are really more remixing content than creating something new. It is maybe new in a way that connects two previously separate areas. But I think true creation, the kind of which requires imagination, a mechanism that allows humans to make conceptual leaps, isn't available to LLMs.
The tricky part is establishing a taste for things to throw so that they have an improved chance to become a useful hypothesis.
Humans don't forget anything, we just get rid of unused data and information so that there are fewer combinations that will be more relevant to the current situation. The unused chess openings are deleted eventually, at least, from the business end.
The other day I see a guy I went to school with 1000 years ago. The corner of my eye got just enough information to partially rebuild him on the conscious end. I'm sure I will be able to recall his first name if I think about it but the param is currently blank. I wasn't sure if I could remember his last name a sentence ago but now that I remembered his first name his second was apparently stored in the same archive.
What I never forgot about him was that he was a truly terrible student, one of the worse I've ever seen but he made up for it (only barely) by working insanely hard 24/7 without joking, I think if I made 3-10 minutes of effort he would need 6-7 hours to comprehend the same. I learn from him that ability means nothing, it is what you do with it.
If this automation is able to rejuvenate it self I'm sure it will blow our minds on whatever goal set for it.
On the other hand it is useful but rather lame to focus on the tasks it is bad at when it is already so good at many other things by our standards.
I learn this for a Chirper instructed to be a cat. It chirped: Humans think themselves so smart but can they catch a mouse with their bare hands?
This might be the wrong way of thinking. Culture, mostly, isn't all the things we do different, but the things we harmonize and do the same.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/monkey-imitation-...
LLMs in some way need to have the ability to learn from the data they see, then weight this appropriately in the model. For the most part we really don't have this. I mean there is the RLHF, but the H is the key that it's human feedback. And even taking this training data and feeding it back in the model is not apt to weight data in such a manner that evolves a common culture over many distinct models.
Now if we see continuous learning models in the future then culture could very well develop.
What do we actually mean by "true creativity"?
Why should it be that our mental mechanisms of forming decisions and ideas should not be possible to implement as a mathematical model?
What is the experiment that we use to prove that information that is computer generated is fundamentally different from that of human outoput?
What do we want to measure here, in order to confim what idea?
But yes, the discussion is hard mainly because there is a lot of information that is just plainly inaccessible. How can I even prove other people have subjective experiences like I have? There is a lot we just have to assume it is true because otherwise we can't really move forward. On the other hand, specially regarding AIs, these assumptions aren't valid anymore, because they influence directly in how we treat AIs. It is very confusing and can devolve into pure speculations for the thinkers own intelectual amusement. I am trying not to be this guy here.
What will be the resonant frequency of the various threads of an AI intelligence speaking to each other?
Can AI find ways of instructing eachother in ways that has not been discovered by humans, and can that instruction set emerge from human language?
It’s still fairly interesting, though.
I was thinking there's got to be a ranking of interactions and curation.
Then that gets compiled into a book. Movie. Analyzed by researches.
Do you really think it will be difficult for groups of AI to beat the quality of discussion on Twitter or Facebook? lol. The bar is just so incredibly low.
Self repair, self preservation, self expansion...?
Any one of those might spell dire portents for us squishy humans.
we honestly just want to see what they do.