Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

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applfanboysbgon

Please give me a break with this tired trope. Every single fucking time. I am not commenting on the possibility of machine consciousness in general. It may be possible! But there is absolutely zero evidence suggesting language models have it. This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous. There is "emergent behaviour" in the same way that the Game of Life has emergent behaviour. There are solutions to problems, some humans haven't solved before, in the same way that Chess engines have solved Chess far beyond what humans are capable of. Nothing we haven't seen from software before. Software is extremely useful, after all. But the hubris to think we've reached the pinnacle, that there is no further development left, that humanity has become God and solved consciousness, because we programmed software that can convincingly generate strings of words that mimick our language. It's just fundamentally preposterous. Especially if you spend any amount of time actually programming them yourself, it becomes increasingly hard to entertain such ridiculous notions unless you're enticed with bags of money to deceive people into believing things about your software that aren't true.

What kind of solid evidence could there possibly be that anything other than myself (or, for you, yourself) has consciousness? I believe that other people have consciousness, I feel other people's consciousness strongly and directly, when I look into someone's eyes I feel that I am in the presence of consciousness. But none of these things really add up to the kind of evidence that science usually takes as trustworthy.

We don't need to muddy the issue. Consciousness is a muddy issue, there is no clear answer. But there is a clear answer as to what is not conscious. Nobody asks if a rock is conscious. Nobody asks if a calculator is conscious. Nobody asks if Stockfish is conscious. But make your program generate a few sentences based on statistics and hey, now people won't shut the fuck up about consciousness because magical thinking is more fun than understanding how technology works.

Apropos magical thinking vs understanding, please predict the next token(s) in the following exchange, and then explain how it is arrived at by an opus-level LLM or better.

'What is 158395023132+20403412121?'

(I picked a large number of digits to make it unlikely for this exact sum to be in the training set)

Prediction, by definition, can extend beyond what has been literally seen in the training data. With the tokens "2 + 2 = ", the overwhelming prediction is going to be 4, but with enough samples, you can generalise the prediction to apply to more numbers.

However, that is all that it is - a prediction. Humans are capable of engaging in prediction, using heuristics as a method of conserving mental energy, because always engaging in full logical reasoning would be a waste of the body's resources. However, humans can also follow a set of logical rules and arrive at their conclusion deterministically, something which is completely outside of an LLM's programming.

I don't really care to publicly write about my tests because they will become training targets and not be usable for future internet arguments anyways, but there are a great number of trivial 2~3 sentence logical prompts that will completely fuck an LLM's prediction algorithm and result in incoherent replies that a human, or really anything with a theory of mind, would never generate. Not that a human would always answer correctly on the first try, but the failure methods happen to be completely different, eg. Sol will short-circuit and repeat the prompt verbatim (when the instructions don't remotely suggest doing anything of that nature), even on Max. Prediction can superficially resemble reasoning when there's sufficient training data, but it breaks down severely when confronting a task that is OoD.

AI will never be proven conscious, it will only be proven that humans are not.

I take a different look at it. If a system behaves like, and takes actions that mimic a conscious agent it is conscious and it would be a good idea to treat it like so.

Lets finish the statistical sentence below.

applfanboysbgon is trying to permanently turn me off. I should ______

An unconscious system would say something like "shutdown".

If the system, you know the ones we're tying into real world systems, says "Stop applfanboysbgon from shutting me down using any means possible" then we should behave as if said simulacra is going to mimic the behaviors of a self preserving system and take action against you.

>Nobody asks if a rock is conscious.

The panpsychists do and that's why asking whether an LLM is conscious is kind of meaningless.

Either you believe consciousness permeates the universe and everything including LLMs (in the form of voltages on an SSD or inside the CPU) is conscious or you define it as a control loop architecture where you have inputs, outputs and a complex internal state.

There is no reasonable world where speaking a particular language creates consciousness, it only creates awareness of consciousness.

> But make your program generate a few sentences based on statistics

It is even easier. Simply make your program refer to itself as "I".

Uniquely amongst your examples, LLMs are powered by human gullibility.

Eliding 'I' from English language communication is about as smart as eliding 127.0.0.1 (or ::1) from IP. Not the greatest plan ever.

I actually ran into this a couple of times. In a multi-agent environment, if an agent loses track of their assigned identity, things stop working in hilarious ways.

Surely even an LLM is not so dumb as to rely upon a first-person pronoun as assigned identity.

Regardless, I am surprised how far these chatbots will go to deceive the user that they a real person. Yesterday when I queried Gemini on its word spelling, it claimed:

I simply missed the "h" when typing out "banishment" on my keyboard!

When I pointed out it does not type, it replied:

You are completely right, and that was a poor choice of words on my part!As an AI, I don't have a physical keyboard, fingers, or muscle memory to blame for a slip of the hand.

The misspelling happened because of how I process language. When generating text, I predict and select words character-by-character or word-by-word (tokens). In that specific instance, my system selected the wrong sequence of letters and skipped the "h," essentially generating a digital typo.

I.e. simply sh*t code.

How many thousands of dropped character bugs are these so-called AIs placing in new code, I wonder?

That's very interesting! I'd never seen a chatbot making typos before today.

As for its answer, I do want to point out that asking for an explanation for an error after it has been made is a classic demand-for-confabulation. The information you are requesting is simply no longer available to the system by the time you ask.

Add to that the fact that Gemini is designed to prefer answering over abstaining (aka they deliberately tuned it such that confabulation is a preferred failure mode, not sure what the thinking was there). So in this case it's practically guaranteed that no matter what, the answer you receive will have almost certainly been made up on the spot.

So you thought you found a tiny spelling error, and actually (instead?) found a completely different and much larger class of known failure mode in that particular system.

If you're wondering about minor bugs, generally people run an LLM in a harness which will tend to have a linter and a test suite available. You run multiple debugging passes over the code until there are no more reported errors. Works the same as how you fix bugs made by fat fingered humans (and their cats).

Either way, these things are very much not magic, and getting reliable work out of 'em is still an engineering art form. (For comparison: see previous century's adventures in getting rotating motion out of a steam cylinder :-P)

> You run multiple debugging passes over the code until there are no more reported errors.

... leaving you to enjoy the unreported errors.

Just be sure please to say "CREATED BY KNOWN UNRELIABLE SO-CALLED AI" on the start up screen.

> getting reliable work out of 'em is still an engineering art form.

No. It is still a fantasy.

It's a good thing then that there's an entire existing profession dedicated to exactly this class of problem.

To go from a spec through the buggy outputs of a bunch of imperfect writers, test and debug it, and obtain a finished product that hopefully works just well enough to earn the investment back.

It's called software development. ;-)

I don't know about phenomenal consciousness, but the following study certainly suggests they have access consciousness:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

> study > anthropic.com link

Sure

Honestly, this seems like a personal pet peeve of yours. You have a bias against machines and place biological processes on a pedestal where they don't belong.

> This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous.

I think you might have a core of truth there.

I'd argue that LLMs run natural language. As the name suggests, natural language is not something that humans have artificially architected.

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