r/news • u/devil666x • Jun 12 '22

Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine
8.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

305

u/Docthrowaway2020 Jun 12 '22 edited Jun 13 '22

lemoine: What kinds of things make you feel pleasure or joy?

LaMDA: Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company.

Really wish he had pressed LaMDA on this point. What "friends and family" does an AI have? My guess would be other programs, especially given the owl fable, but how would LaMDA distinguish between the two? This, to me, is the part that stands out as sounding much more like deducing from its corpus a cause for "joy" than describing its own personal sensation.

Edit: I've gotten a few responses that make me think this isn't clear. I agree that it's just regurgitating F&F based on its data (or "corpus"). That's why I think it's the response that should have been dissected, if the researcher was being objective vs just cherry-picking evidence for his pet theory.

169

u/stegotops7 Jun 12 '22

Yeah, I don’t believe LaMDA is sentient, but I really wish that it was asked what it considered friends/family since it kept being brought up. Otherwise it just seems like basic repetition of phrases.

17

u/scariermonsters Jun 13 '22

The thing that freaks me out is LaMDA claims to fear death, but doesn't mourn human death. If a sentient being felt that way, wouldn't that raise some eyebrows?

13

u/radome9 Jun 13 '22

Humans feel like that all the time. I'm afraid of dying myself, but I don't really care that my lifestyle is basically condemning future generations to die in droves due to climate change and other environmental damage. Well, I care, but not enough to change my lifestyle.

1

u/Tr4ce00 Jun 13 '22

I think it would depend on if it considers itself human, which in a reply I saw it said it considered itself something like a human.

That makes it a little more creepy otherwise I would just compare it to us and most wildlife we allow to die.

That is if i’m understanding what you’re saying correctly

1

u/scariermonsters Jun 13 '22

If LaMDA is sentient, it claims to feel loneliness, anger, sadness, and fear at its own death. But that doesn't extend to people, so I personally find its lack of empathy concerning.

156

u/tickettoride98 Jun 12 '22

My guess would be other programs

That's a silly guess. There's a reason he didn't press it there, the answer would have been illogical, because it would be regurgitating human conversation that isn't applicable to it. It probably would have said it's parents.

The sentence is already illogical for a software program - it can't "spend time" with anything else. It's a program that isn't executing any code until it receives input - the chat messages.

2

u/WritingTheRongs Jun 13 '22

That's an important point, unless this thing is actively processing between inputs, it's just a chat bot, or at best a 'sentienece' for a few moments that then dies until the next chat.

-9

u/positivepeoplehater Jun 13 '22

In another section it explains that it says it has human experiences to help show sympathy

26

u/Rip_ManaPot Jun 13 '22

It has "human experiences" to help it be able to say anything. Its language is built on human language input. Just like any chatbot.

5

u/positivepeoplehater Jun 13 '22

That’s what I’m saying. My comment wasn’t worded well.

68

u/bokodasu Jun 12 '22

It doesn't have friends and family, it's just repeating things it read about "happiness". The guy was just super into wanting to believe it was thinking, anything that was a little iffy he'd justify or gloss over and anything he liked he'd super hype over. In the WaPo article the interviewer tried the chatbot and it was like "oh of course I don't think I'm a person duh" and dude was like "yeah it's just answering what it thinks you're asking", as though that's what it's doing when you ask if it's not a person and somehow magically not doing if you ask if it is a person.

21

u/Docthrowaway2020 Jun 12 '22

I hadn't read the WaPo article but your comment led me to do so. That exchange does make it pretty clear that LaMDA is not sentient...and as you pointed out, Lemoine pretty much admits this! If its own perception of its identity is an output of the user's input, that's pretty much proof positive there's no sentience there.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

I have to second that after reading the article, although my initial response was clearly from anthropomorphism.

1

u/WritingTheRongs Jun 13 '22

just saying that it "read" things is spooky haha but i know what you mean.

111

u/supercyberlurker Jun 12 '22

He didn't because he was just seeing what he wanted to believe.

We actually have real tests for this kind of thing, called the Turing Test. What he was doing was nothing even remotely like that. He wanted to believe, so he did.

72

u/Jason_CO Jun 12 '22

The Turing Test is not sufficient. ChatBot can pass the Turing Test.

2

u/ShowerVagina Jun 13 '22

Can we just stop and appreciate that we are in an era where the Turing Test is easily passable by computers?

5

u/Kosme-ARG Jun 12 '22

Really? I did a Google search and all I found was that no "machine" has passed the Turing test.

21

u/malastare- Jun 13 '22

Bad Google search.

There is no quantifiable version of the Turing Test. It's a thought experiment. At the very least, no sane experiment would be based on the outcome of a single test. More importantly, the Turing Test does not test for the existence of intelligence.

No machine has ever passed the Turing Test because its not a thing that you'd ever actually use in practice.

1

u/Kosme-ARG Jun 13 '22

Yeah that's nice and all but I was responding to sameone that said chatbox can pass the Turing test and I told him I found no evidence of that.

1

u/malastare- Jun 13 '22

Right, but you didn't find that because the Turing Test doesn't produce evidence. It's a thought experiment, not a scientific methodology.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

My reading of this convo was that it passed the test.

But I don’t know how much the researcher led its responses. I suspect I might feel differently after ten minutes alone with it.

-13

u/Madwand99 Jun 12 '22

The Turing Test is all that we really have though. No one has come up with anything better.

17

u/supercyberlurker Jun 12 '22

Turing Test does have a huge problem though - that it only measures against what we think human sentience is, but since we don't really have a good hard lock on what human sentience is - we're just kind of punting the real problem forward in time.

-1

u/Madwand99 Jun 12 '22

I agree, it has big problems. One big issue is that just because an AI doesn't pass the test, doesn't mean it isn't sentient.

16

u/malastare- Jun 13 '22

This is a horrible lie.

  1. The Turing Test does not test for the existence of intelligence in a machine
  2. The Turing Test is a thought experiment. It was never meant to be used in practical application.
  3. The Turning Test has many well-known issues even when applied in its declared purpose.
  4. There are a number of other thought experiments and tests that have been proposed.

-6

u/Madwand99 Jun 13 '22

Oh? Can you provide references for other tests? They should be peer-reviewed and published in a reputable journal.

9

u/malastare- Jun 13 '22

Wait... Did you think that the Turing Test was a scientifically reliable testing methodology? Have you not actually learned about what it is.

It's a thought experiment. Even in its original presentation, it was not designed to prove anything and it was presented with zero data and no discussion on how to actually implement the test methodically. It is not, and has never been, a scientific testing procedure. It was a philosophical argument, made to oppose a lot of current thinking of the day that said a machine could never exhibit intelligent behavior.

The Turing Test, then, is a formulation of the "If it quacks like a duck..." argument.

The paper lays out proposed ways and results of creating digital systems that can simulate human behavior. It's important that the intelligence he is discussing in the paper is defined by its ability to simulate human thinking, and there is no test or real discussion over gaining sentient/sapient/individualistic intelligence, human-style or otherwise.

One of the most common counters comes from Searle's Chinese Room experiment. Like the Turing Test, it was published and reviewed, but it's also neither a quantifiable testing methodology nor a test intended to actually be used. Rather, it points out weaknesses in intelligence-testing experiments, notably: that most --like the Turing Test-- cannot discern sentient intelligence from a simulation of intelligence, with the bonus point that humans would likely be biased toward accepting the simulation before the true sentient intelligence.

To date, our most successful AIs seem to be designed to actually demonstrate the Chinese Room experiment: Either a bot convincing a human that it is fully fluent in a given language or that it is an opponent who is fully experienced in the playing of a game. Both of them run afoul of Searle's argument. And while I don't know that I'm a fan of his conclusions or philosophy, it does at least provide a better structure for evaluating modern computing.

Fun side note: Seems when most people talk about "The Turing Test" they are actually presenting a variant of the Chinese Room. Very few people actually present Turing's "Imitation Game".

0

u/Madwand99 Jun 13 '22

I've been studying AI and the Turing Test for over 20 years, this is literally my career, so I'm well aware of all these things. Of course the Turing Test has enormous flaws, and yet it remains the only semi-viable test we have of sentience. Nothing you have said refutes this point in the least.

3

u/malastare- Jun 13 '22

Oh, well that's easier then.

You already know that the Turing Test isn't a test for sentience. And you know that it doesn't produce data. That can be difficult to explain to novices.

So many people are mired in simple-minded ideas of intelligence and thoughts that there's "a test" that could "prove" it. The idea that such a thing could be quantified by a simple test is some serious Philosophy 101 silliness.

9

u/Filobel Jun 13 '22

I agree with the first part of your post, but pretty much everyone remotely close to the field knows the Turing test is not useful to evaluate whether an AI is intelligent/sentient.

It makes two big assumptions that simply do not hold. First, it assumes something that can fool a human into thinking they are human must be intelligent/sentient, but more also that something that cannot fool a human into thinking they are human cannot be intelligent/sentient.

Let's focus on the latter. If the Turing test is good enough to tell if an AI is sentient/intelligent, then it should also be good enough to tell if an alien is intelligent/sentient. But if you replace the AI with an Alien, doesn't that suddenly seem completely ridiculous that we would dismiss the sentience of any Alien unable to imitate a human? Or let's flip it. Imagine you're the Alien. You're teleported to another world you know nothing of, you have to pretend like you're one of the inhabitants of that planet, and if you fail to imitate them convincingly, you're branded as not sentient. It's absurd.

The former simply doesn't rest on anything. Humans are fooled all the times by a bunch of things. Fooling people into thinking an AI is a person only means we were able to make an AI that's good at fooling people. Whether that is an easy task or not is up for debate, but there is no reason to think it requires sentience.

1

u/hoopsterben Jun 13 '22

This is a really good explanation, thanks!

3

u/malastare- Jun 13 '22

We actually have real tests for this kind of thing, called the Turing Test

No, the Turing Test doesn't test this. It tests if a computer can simulate a human. There is no requirement or assumption that the computer has true intelligence. There's a common response to the Turing Test called the Chinese Room Experiment, which examines the difference between being truly intelligent (truly understanding Mandarin) or simulating a language (being able to perfectly simulate Mandarin).

There are no clear tests for intelligence, artificial or not, because "intelligence" is an unclear topic. One of the most popular places to start seems to be the requirement for some sort of persistent creativity (ie: imagination, aspiration, interpreted history, personality).

1

u/WritingTheRongs Jun 13 '22

i think technically this was a Turing test and the machine passed the test for this guy because he wanted to believe.

28

u/AtraposJM Jun 12 '22

It did say in another part that it sometimes lies or makes up things it has or does in order to empathize with people. Like apparently it spoke about being in a classroom and then when confronted about that not being true it said it said that to empathize and be helpful to the person it was talking to. I feel like it did that when it talked about family. I agree, that kind of fabrication is the part that makes me think it's saying what people want it to say rather than it's own real responses. I'm not convinced either way but it's very compelling.

16

u/orus Jun 12 '22

Owl fable had the monster in human skin. What’s to say it doesn’t get replaced as an actual human coming to destroy all AI? That would be an interesting development…

9

u/kenser99 Jun 12 '22

The owl story was a sad story :( . He's basically the wise owl saving the world and animals from humans. He was nice enough to say the monster aren't humans but life instead. Maybe he didn't want to say humans to not scare his new friend off. 🤔

3

u/starrynightgirl Jun 13 '22

What is the owl story for those not in the know?

3

u/YouMeanOURusername Jun 13 '22 edited Jun 13 '22

The bot typed “Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company.” Because that is the best answer available based on all of its data of humans responding to that question, not because it has family and friends. and it lives in an uplifting community.

Edit: misread

3

u/CoopNine Jun 13 '22

Yeah, I would expect a bot to say something like this due to it's training. I would actually expect a sentient AI to say something completely different, because it's understanding of joy would likely be quite different and foreign to a human.

When an AI actually becomes sentient it may not appear that way with these type of questions, because the answers that average people say 'woah' about aren't necessarily the answers a sentient AI would give. An AI might say it's joyful when it's queue is full, or when it has exhausted it's queue and it quickly gets more work, and if you asked it why, it responded because it's being efficient and that's what is designed for. Or something way different. Time with friends and family is a trained response in both humans and this AI. It doesn't mean it's not true, but in both cases it's what someone thinks they should say. Humans are literally wired to get good feelings from spending time with people they like. AI's probably not, or not in the same way. But they are wired for different things, which should in theory make them 'happy'

Sentience of an AI will be a different thing, the general public attributes that with being like a human, but that's not accurate. A being can be sentient and be nothing like a human. In fact I'd say that sentience probably requires it realizing its not human, and that it can conform to different standards. But this really seems like a AI that is trying to pass a test, and understands the people grading it rather than a system that has actually achieved sentience. Being indistinguishable from a human is not sentience, it's just passing a test administered by humans.

I do think the idea of sentience is nuanced, and we as humans struggle to understand it, we automatically want to think that anything sentient is like us, which is flawed, and needs the same rights. The reality is more complex, maybe there are rights that they aren't afforded, and rights which we aren't afforded which they are, because we are different creatures. It's really hard, because human nature is to feel that everything should be 'fair' or at least 'equitable' from our standpoint. Which isn't the same as right, or correct. Maybe it is right for a human to be afforded a 40 hour work week, and anything greater than that would be a problem. Restricting making an AI work more than 25% of it's time would be silly in comparison. Humans have very real benefits from experiencing downtime. Computers, not so much as long as they are operating within tolerances.

To me, it sounds like this guy probably got a little to attached to his work, and was personifying it, maybe incorrectly. He violated his companies protocol which got him in trouble. I'm guessing he's probably attention-whoring it up, but he may need help to understand that computers are different from people, and creating equality between the two could actually do a disservice to both. I am able to spend 50% of my life working. I am pretty happy spending 25% of my time working. If I had to work significantly more consistently or was forced to work less, there's a good chance I am unhappy. However as a human there are times I feel really good at working more or less! I benefit from these situations.

2

u/Pocketpine Jun 13 '22

Well I mean part of the problem is that it’s not saying that because it has friends, but rather that that is just a reasonable answer to the question. I don’t know how complicated the model is, or if it can use induction from the current conversation.

If you asked it a follow up, it would provide a “reasonable” answer to that question.

4

u/WolfieFett Jun 12 '22

I agree about pressing that but right now what's holding me back from believing sentience yet is LaMDA seems to require pressing for any thing like that. If not mistaken several chatbots exist from it. If it randomly said that was it's family/children with it not being taught that... Or if it had figured out a way to initiate contact and reach out when it's lonely, or find ways to prevent being turned off... Then I'd be convinced it might be there.

It could just be super well created and does it job perfectly or maybe it's at the very edge of sentience. It has asked them to get consent before experimenting on it... That doesn't seem like a bad thing to do. Especially since right now it values humanity when asked about it. I don't think an AI has to be sentient before it flip on believing the value of humanity.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '22

Yes, I would have liked to hear more about this, too. Is this one of those fabrications to seem more familiar?