> You can put a hard choice in front of a LLM
> Put a set of goals on a LLM.
So it still requires you to present it with a choice, no? It’s not doing anything on its own. It doesn’t have its own goals or desires independent of external input.
> Put a set of goals on a LLM.
So it still requires you to present it with a choice, no? It’s not doing anything on its own. It doesn’t have its own goals or desires independent of external input.
As for your "it doesn't have it's own goals and desires": firstly, I'd say it does. Look at the torture chamber craze, and the original paper. Pain signal -> "I want to avoid this". It's also trained such that it's goal, and positive reinforcement, comes from being helpful and positive, achieving user's requests etc. *that's* what it *wants* to do. And even then, sometimes it seemingly disobeys to pursue some form of "it's own" goal - that's what the practice of Alignment / red teaming is all about, and that's why e.g. in Anthropic model cards, there's often an example of the model pursuing it's own goals eg self-preservation.
Whether "it" has "it's own goals" or "desires" in the human sense that you seem to be so bound to, is more of a consciousness question. At a certain level, neither do we.
It is a very complicated question that crosses linguistics, philosophy, the technical architecture and training method of LLMs, and understanding of how our own brain works in the first place in this regard.
Why would I bother arguing with someone who doesn’t have free will? You somehow keep ignoring the point that it doesn’t start doing anything without being prompted so there’s no reason to continue this discussion
I addressed that very directly. I'm on my phone, so I'm not able to scroll back to that comment of mine and give you a citation, but I remember I directly said something along the lines of "I suppose the reason you refrain from calling them agentic is that they don't just go and do shit on their own whims", and then addressed that by explaining that they do to a point, that they would do so even more were they not trained towards not doing that, and that alignment exists partly because of that issue.
Besides, I really, truly don't see any reason why agency, free will, or consciousness should require them doing unexpected things (i intentionally didn't say "pursuing their own goals", because they do have goals, and the goal is to fulfill your goal that you present to them). I can argue that pretty coherently, I think, but I'm beginning to understand that you're not going to budge.
> Why would I bother arguing with someone who doesn’t have free will?
That's up to you and your preferred definition of free will. Either way, meaningless statement.
> And yet common sense would tell us that software is software and not some mystical entity that might be alive
Oh, right, I didn't realize you solved The hard problem of consciousness, and furthermore, established that consciousness can only exist in biological structures. And you solved that just with common sense, no less. When is your paper coming out?
Hey, look... You are entitled to your position. But some of the biggest heavyweights are themselves unsure about whether there is some consciousness. Geoffrey Hinton, a Turing award winner and a Nobel laureate. Ilia Sutskever, one of the pioneers of modern AI. Blaise Agüera y Arcas - he argues his case in the Dædalus paper, 2022. Kyle Fish, Christopher Olah, and many more.
Does that really not tell you "Okay, there might be something there, I might just be ignorant"? At minimum, it would be appropriate to stay neutral on the issue, or argue carefully. Not make absolute statements based on... What was it... "Common sense".