Are stochastic parrots alive?

Doesn't this boil down to "If artificial intelligence wasn't artificial, wouldn't we just call it intelligence?" which feels like a tautology dressed up as a thought experiment.

"What if we encountered an extraterrestrial life form which had independently developed anthropomorphic tendencies" is a totally different question from "What should we think when we encounter a heavily engineered system designed by humans to be anthropomorphic?"

If a human-looking alien came out of a UFO, it would shake my worldview even if I realized it was made of tissue closer to plastic than human tissue. I don't feel the same way when I encounter a doll in the toy store.

Whether LLMs are conscious is probably more interesting than whether they are "alive", and there's some criteria that consensus says they don't meet yet: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708

Alive is really a poor choice of word here, because our criteria for living is so biologically focused. LLMs don't have homeostasis, reproduce, or otherwise demonstrate all the "usual" markers of living, precisely because they're ephemeral brains conjured into existence on a silicon substrate. As such, trying to ascribe any intuition about "life" to these virtual entities is only going to lead us astray in key areas like ethics and policy.

It's better to think of them as powerful calculation machines and leave it at that.

It's just data processing. If it wasn't trained to speak like a human you would have no problems in seeing it's a machine. Try to ask it to create a joke about some topics and you can easily see it's just a robot. The lesson to take is not that we are not prepared to assume other type of intelligence is "real". The lesson here is that we humans fool ourselves when we are exposed to some kinds of data. Remember, you can simulate an AI with pen an paper, and the speed at which you simulate it doens't make a difference, it's provably deterministic (a part from randomness that doesn't change a thing for the point). Good look in proving that humans are deterministic.

A truly thoughtless "thought experiment."

Is this asking if they're a living being? Because they're clearly not. If this is trying to ask if they have a consciousness, then again the answer is not.

Shuffle the pages of a dictionary according to some rules and you got yourself, according to the author, a living being.

Absolutely not. Having "sensory" and "feelings" that lead to "continuous life flow" instead of "discrete life flow" are things that make a difference between something that is a "living" thing and something that "pretends to be a living thing". That's why there is a debate around "vegetables" too: Do they have feelings and sensory? Some believe they do, some don't. An LLM? It has nothing to sense. You just feed it "representation" of what another thing has described to you. An ADC sensor that outputs binary integers on a special bus, can't turn an LLM into a living thing: It has gone through many human-made human-pleasing translations to then be turned into "text sequence" then turned into tokens then... While no "living thing" that human has ever seen works like that. So no.

If an alien came to my backyard in an advanced spaceship then spoke English like GPT-2, I'd declare that we have met a new advanced form of alien intelligence too.

To be alive they need autonomy to self-replicate.

When we create an AI that controls it's own manufacturing and can self-replicate then we can talk about inorganic life.

No, they're pining for the fjords.

This just pushes the main argument back one step. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the answer is yes, a stochastic parrot is a living creature.

The next question is: does it matter? And for many people, the answer to that question depends on the extent to which the stochastic parrot is conscious. Which is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Can they prove it?

No.

stochastic zombie

"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it."

Nope.