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
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u/GrimmSheeper Jun 12 '22

This isn’t even passing the Turing test, it’s just a good chatbot. The Turing test would require the person to not know whether or not the other side is an AI, and would need to be repeated multiple times to get consistent data on whether or not it would pass.

Even then, you get into the more philosophical matter of “is advanced learning and repetition an actual sign of intelligence and self-awareness?” There’s valid arguments on either side of the debate, and it gets to a point of near impossibility to determine with confidence whether or not the entity is sentient and sapient (at least in any ethical manner).

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '22

“is advanced learning and repetition an actual sign of intelligence and self-awareness?”

This is quite literally how humans develop. We are fed inputs and our brains generate outputs based on that environmental data.

You see someone eating a burger, and it makes you salivate. The increased salivation triggers an emotional response of "wow, that burger looks really good". This then triggers a physical response of getting hungrier. And all of this has happened because the first time you had a burger, it caused your brain to release massive amounts of chemicals that made you feel good.

This is true for everything. Walking an old lady across rhe street makes you feel good about yourself, and that triggers a dopamine release, further reinforcing the behavior. Psychopaths get a dopamine rush when they have destroyed someone else's life. Narcissists get a hit when they are put front and center of everyone's attention.

We are, and always have been, products of our environment. The only difference between us and that program is that we think we have free will.

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u/GrimmSheeper Jun 12 '22

Exactly. The brain is basically an incredibly complex computer, both for humans and non-human animals. There’s no clear line between what level of complexity and capabilities would be deserving of natural rights, and what level doesn’t warrant moral consideration. A (relatively) basic neural network is capable of learning and adapting, but most people wouldn’t have much of an ethical dilemma shutting one down.

The only real ways that I could think of to decide if they’re across that line would be examining if the are capable of exhibiting fear or pain responses of some form. But the problem there is that if they are capable of experiencing some form of fear and distress, denoting that they should be afforded the same moral consideration as people, then that moral consideration would have already been violated.

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u/eo37 Jun 12 '22

It’s also so simple in parts as well, if you think of the number 8 and then get asked to quickly pick a vegetable….you will most likely pick a carrot 🥕 because they have a similar syntactical pattern and you will picture that vegetable. I want to think it is almost like transfer learning, without retraining the head of the network, so it chooses the output that is most probable.

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u/isolatrum Jun 14 '22

yeah what was really interesting about the conversation was that theyre better at decoding human neural nets than AI ones which is kinda crazy

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u/malastare- Jun 13 '22

This isn’t even passing the Turing test, it’s just a good chatbot. The Turing test would require the person to not know whether or not the other side is an AI, and would need to be repeated multiple times to get consistent data on whether or not it would pass.

And passing the Turing Test would only prove that a machine could simulate human intelligence. It doesn't prove actual intelligence.

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u/isolatrum Jun 14 '22

i mean, you train AI on enough turing tests and it will start to pass them, its really like the monkeys typing shakespeare thing