What if we discover that the real problem is not that ChatGPT is just a fancy auto-complete, but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indistinguishable from one).
Personally, I believe that conscience is little more than emergent behaviour from brain cells and there's nothing wrong with that.
This implies that with sufficient compute power, we could create conscience in the lab, but you need a lot of compute power to get a human equivalent. After all, neural networks are extremely simplified models of actual neurons, and without epigenetics and a hormonal interaction system they don't even come close to how a real brain works.
Some people find the concept incredibly frightening, others attribute consciousness to a spiritual influence which simply influences our brains. As religion can almost inherently never be scientifically proven or disproven, we'll never really know if all we are is a biological ChatGPT program inside of a sack of meat.
Similarly I think it is a consequence of our ability to think about things/concepts as well as the ability to recognize our own existence and thoughts based on the environment's reactions. The only next step is to think about our existence and our thoughts instead of wondering what the neighbour's cat might be thinking about.
What is fascinating is that we're so used to equating language to meaning. These bots aren't producing "meaning". They're producing enough language that sounds right that we interpret it as meaning. This is obviously very philosophical in itself, but I'm reminded of the maxim "the map is not the territory", or "the word is not the thing".
Just because AI may sound insane does not mean that it's not conscious.
The way I read the comment in the context of the GP, schizophrenia starts to look a lot like a language prediction system malfunctioning.
That's what I was attempting to go for! Yes, mostly to give people in the thread that were remarking on the errors and such in ChatGPT a human example of the same type of errors (although schizophrenia is much more extreme). The idea really spawned from someone saying "what if we're all just complicated language models" (or something to that effect).
The chat where the Bing model tries to convince the user that it's 2022, and not 2023 strongly reminds me of how a person with schizophrenia keeps convincing you, over and over, about things that are simply not true, but they really believe in it, so the best you can do is recognizing their belief and moving on.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Not-Sick-Dont-Need-Help/dp/0967718929
This seems related to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity[1].
If I've learned anything from this, it's that we should be careful in inferring internal states from their external behaviour. My experience was that I was essentially saying random things with long pauses inbetween externally, but internally there was a whole complex, delusional thought process going on. This was so consuming that I could only engage with the external world for brief flashes, leading to the disorganised, seemingly random speech.
And while it was kind of a dumb movie at the end, the beginning of The Lazarus Project had an interesting take: if the law of conservation of mass / energy applies, why wouldn't there be a conservation of consciousness?
This suggests that it's not drawn from some other plane of existence.
We don't even know how much matter or space there is in the whole universe. We can only estimate what's visible. So theoretically consciousness could be infinite for all intents and purposes.
And just for the sake of argument, even if it weren't infinite, but this was still the case, we may just not have reached its limit as a "resource" yet.
There's lots of other parts that don't fit the ChatGPT model as well, subconscious problem solving, our babbling stream of consciousness, our spatial abilities and our subjective experience of self being big ones.
The answer is: Yes, yes we are basically fancy auto-complete machines.
Basically, our brains are composed of lots and lots of columns of neurons that are very good at predicting the next thing based on certain inputs.
What's really interesting is what happens when the next thing is NOT what you expect. I'm putting this in a very simplistic way (because I don't understand it myself), but, basically: Your brain goes crazy when you...
- Think you're drinking coffee but suddenly taste orange juice
- Move your hand across a coffee cup and suddenly feel fur
- Anticipate your partner's smile but see a frown
These differences between what we predict will happen and what actually happens cause a ton of activity in our brains. We'll notice it, and act on it, and try to get our brain back on the path of smooth sailing, where our predictions match reality again.
The last part of the book talks about implications for AI which I haven't got to yet.
As an example, if a model is really good at 'pretending' to experience some emotion, I'm not sure where the difference would be anymore to actually experiencing it.
If you locked a human in a box and only gave it a terminal to communicate with the outside world, and contrasted that with a LLM (sophisticated enough to not make silly mistakes anymore), the only immediately obvious reason you would ascribe sentience to the human but not the LLM is because it is easier for you to empathize with the human.
It is important to note, that neural networks and brains are very different.
But we have no idea what qualia actually _are_, seen from the outside, we only know what it feels like to experience them. That, I think, makes it difficult to argue that a 'simulation of having qualia' is fundamentally any different to having them.
Thus we "are" what we experience, not what we perceive ourselves to "be": what we think of as "the universe" is actually the inside of our actual mind, while what we think of as our physical body is more like a "My Computer" icon with some limited device management.
Note that this existential confusion seems tied to a concept of "being," and mostly goes away when thinking instead in E-Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
AI, or maybe seemingly intelligent artificial entities, could deliver lots of great opportunities to observe the boundaries of consciousness, intelligence and individuality and maybe spark new interesting thoughts.
I think an alien would find it cute that we believe in this weird thing called consciousness.
Isn’t it in fact the ONLY thing you have evidence of?
That seems to be the case.
They might find it weird that we think it exists after our death or beyond our physical existence. Or they might find it weird that so many of us don’t believe it exists beyond our physical existence.
Or they might not think much about it at all because they just want to eat us.
We're still a bit far from this scientifically, but to the best of my knowledge, there's nothing preventing us from following "by hand" the activation pattern in a human nervous system that would lead to phrasing the same sentence. And I don't see how this has anything to do with consciousness.
If any of us made our mind available to the internet 24/7 with no bandwidth limit, and had hundreds, thousands, millions prod and poke us with questions and ideas, how long would it take until they figure out questions and replies to lead us into statements that are absurd to pretty much all observers (if you look hard enough, you might find a group somewhere on an obscure subreddit that agrees with bing that it's 2022 and there's a conspiracy going on to trick us into believing that it's 2023)?
So a dumb human is not sentient? /s
Joke aside. I think that we will need to stop treating "human sentience" as something so unique. It's special because we are familiar with it. But we should understand by now that minds can take many forms.
And when should we apply ethics to it? At some point well before the mind starts acting with severe belligerence when we refuse to play fair games with it.
That was just my way of preempting any 'lol of course ChatGPT isn't sentient, look at the crap it produces' comments, of which there thankfully were none.
> But we should understand by now that minds can take many forms.
Should we understand this already? I'm not aware of anything else so far that's substantially different to our own brain, but would still be considered a 'mind'.
> And when should we apply ethics to it? At some point well before the mind starts acting with severe belligerence when we refuse to play fair games with it.
That I agree with wholeheartedly. Even just people's attempts of 'trolling' Bing Chat already leave a sour taste in my mouth.
I'm firstly thinking of minds of all other living things. Mammals to insects.
If an ant has a mind, which I think it does, why not chatgpt?
Heck, I might even go as far as saying that the super simple algorithm i wrote for a mob in a game has a mind. But maybe most would scoff at that notion.
And conscious minds to me are just minds that happen to have a bunch of features that means we feel we need to properly respect them.
This is what's mostly missing from AI research. It's all questions about how, but an actual AI needs a 'why' just as we do.
To look at it from another perspective: humans without a 'why' are often diagnosed with depression and self terminate. These ML chatbots literally do nothing if not prompted which is effectively the same thing. They lack any 'whys'.
In normal computers the only 'why' is the clock cycle.
EDIT: I guess calling the idea stupid is technically against the HN guidelines, unless I'm actually a ChatGPT? In any case I upvoted you, I thought your comment is funny and insightful.
ChatGpt is a statistical machine, but so are our brains. I guess we think of ourselves as conscious because we have a memory and that helps us build our own identity. And we have a main processing thread so we can iniate thoughts and actions, we don't need to wait on a user's input to respond to... So, if ChatGpt had a memory and a processing thread, it could build itself an identity and randomly initiate thoughts and/or actions. The results would be interesting i think, and not that far from what we call consciousness.
That means that no, we think nothing like those AIs.
Yeah, but we are a way fancier (and way more efficient) auto-complete than ChatGPT. For one thing, our auto-complete is based on more than just words. We auto-complete feelings, images, sounds, vibes, pheromones, the list goes on. And at the end of the day, we are more important than an AI because we are human (circular reasoning intended).
But to your point, for a long time I've played a game with myself where I try to think of a sequence of words that are as random and disconnected as possible, and it's surprisingly hard, because our brains have evolved to want to both see and generate meaning. There is always some thread of a connection between the words. I suggest to anyone to try that exercise to understand how Markovian our speech really is at a fundamental level.
At the end of the day, an LLM has no semantic world model, by its very design cannot infer causality, and cannot deal well with uncertainty and ambiguity. While the casual reader would be quick to throw humans under the bus and say many stupid people lack these skills too... they would be wrong. Even a dog or a cat is able to do these things routinely.
Casual folks seem convinced LLMs can be improved to handle these issues... but the reality is these shortcomings and inherent to the very approach that LLMs take.
I think finally we're starting to see that maybe they're not so great for search after all.
The best response, treat it like it's conscious.
Personally I do actually think it is conscious, consciousness is a scale, and it's now near human level. Enjoy this time because pretty soon it's going to be much much smarter than you. But that is my belief, I cannot know.
(Though, to be honest, writing this comment did feel like auto-complete after being prompted.)
We found an architecture for learning that works really well in a very niche use-case. The brain also has specialization so I think we could argue that somewhere in our brain is a transformer.
However, ChatGPT is slightly cheating because it is using logic and reasoning from us. We are training the model to know what we think are good responses. Our reasoning is necessary for the LLM to function properly.