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Comment by pjungwir | Hacker News Reader

Impertinent question: why not ask ChatGPT to talk with them? It doesn't have understanding either. I think this would be a great experiment in the meaning of consciousness. Can we train an LLM to communicate with whales, birds, etc.?

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In theory, we could train an LLM on whale "song" or bird chirps. We'd need to have lots and lots of it to feed it. But I don't think it would tell us what the animals are saying. The animals would theoretically recognize the output of the models and be able to interact with it but I don't think there is a clear path from that to our understanding.

The LLM accidentally declares war on all whales... :/

It’s being done right now:

https://blog.padi.com/talk-to-whales-with-ai/

One difficulty is that there isn’t nearly as much whale chatter available for training data as there’s human chatter.

And one important question is, why is this useful if we don’t know what the LLM says to them? But the post above touches on that too.

Won't they need some documents that combine whale speech noises with human words to bridge the gap? Otherwise they are making comments that are just word-like or sound-like fragments.

If you had enough recordings, you could (I think) build weights based _solely_ on whale speech. Humans wouldn't be able to understand the weights, and the word vectors in that model wouldn't match the word vectors in an English model, but I suppose there's a chance that vectors might be similar? I don't know. I think you'd have to be very good at both linguistics and also AI to know.

I don't think this is strictly needed. An English dictionary may seem pointless because it defines every word using only other English words. But the meaning is contained in the _relationship_ between the words.

I'm sure you've seen the example of word vectors that captures some of this meaning. king - man + woman = queen

In Spanish, rey - hombre + mujer = reina

The _relationship_ between "king" and "queen" in English may look close enough to the _relationship_ between "rey" and "reina" in Spanish, allowing you to bridge the gap between the two languages, even if they are entirely disconnected and you've never seen a direct translation between them.

>And one important question is, why is this useful if we don’t know what the LLM says to them?

There's no reason to be sure we couldn't know.

It's not like there are examples in the training set for every lang to lang combination modern models are capable of translating.

A llm can write a program to compute factorial or whatever, but that doesn't mean it has consciousness. Same for writing a poem about any topic. It is of course also not evidence of no consciousness. We just don't know but the likely-hood seems low.

For whales or even dogs or great apes, I think the chances are much higher, but we just don't know. We can't even agree on a definition for what consciousness is.

What does it matter if they’re conscious if they’re dumb?

Just because a consciousness exists staring out of a pair of eyes doesn’t change any ethics if that consciousness is exceptionally limited.

I thought about this for a few days. I eat meat, animal products like milk too. I feel some guilt about it, an animal died to get me this chicken sandwich. We'll face decisions about whether to continue ending the consciousness of animals to feed ourselves when we have alternatives. I'm far from the first person to think of this, but when we have some machine consciousness that compares to a chicken (I don't know how to measure consciousness but we'll face that one day), will there be a common understanding of what it means morally to be ending that consciousness?

I think one day we'll probably almost completely stop killing "intelligent" animals (in 100s of years after we develop safe and tasty alternatives). What about a software consciousness? I don't know. What about if we are able to "upload" our consciousness, will it have civil rights? Probably not at first.

It would, best case, just be able to talk about concepts that whales and birds talk about, right? “Ahh, a predator” “I found food” “weird trickster-monkey spotted, expect bizarre tests or treats or mysterious death.”

I’m not sure what a ML algorithm could do better than a tape recorder here.

We don't know what concepts whales talk about

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