strogonoff

Every documentary is inevitably deceiving; the only difference is whether the author tries to hide it.

> Very early on, I worked out that one of the most stupid things that they do on television is these things called cutaways or what used to be called “noddies” where, when you cut an interview with someone, you insert a noddy of the reporter looking noddingly at the interviewee to disguise the cut.

> I would never do that. I just cut and you can see what I’m doing, that I am actually cutting this person, or I will use music to push my argument.

> I mean, I have arguments and I have stories. That’s what television journalism has and you can either dress it up as “this is the absolute truth” or you can dress it up with me by saying “look, I’m telling you a story, all this is true but have you thought that it could be like this?” to provoke you.

> And of course I want people to agree with me because, you know, all human beings will, but I understand that my job is to push and good journalism should do that especially at a time of uncertainty.

> At the present moment, to go back to my original point, you know what you’re going to get with most journalism. So therefore you sort of switch off and you go “oh yeah, it’s a climate change film”. “Oh yeah, it’s a ‘bankers have done something ever bad’ again.” Therefore, you don’t look.

> It’s like if you’re showing a picture of the Mona Lisa. You don’t look at it. You just look at it as a pattern. You go, “oh, that’s the Mona Lisa”. I don’t know when I last looked at the Mona Lisa. I don’t think I ever have, because it’s a thing. And so much of journalism is a thing now.

— Adam Curtis

There is no clear line that differentiates an intelligent system from a non-intelligent system that just happens to do something in response to some external input, unless the definition of “intelligence” involves something specific to humans (including to other animals similar to humans, since we share many traits)—which is also why that is, arguably, the only meaningful definition.

Seems like you like a philosophical view called “materialism”. It’s not something that can be proven, however, and many (including prominent physicists like Schrödinger and Peierls) would disagree with it.

The idea that a fundamentally completely different entity superficially similar to a human in one respect would somehow have consciousness of a human is valid (even if far-fetched), but the burden of proof and explanation exactly why and how that would be the case is on proponents of that idea—because it’s pretty obvious why it wouldn’t be.

I can feel pain and you walk and talk and look and feel more or less the same as I, so I will make some conclusions and unless I am a psycho I will not beat you up.

Thank you for explaining to us what LLMs are, but how about the topic at hand?

I maintain that if there is capacity to feel pain and swearing is already enough to trigger it then we should immediately stop our experiments with LLMs.

Sure, but does that explain the ban?

Then wouldn’t we see other operators do it? Also, why give an exception to government contractors?

If the model lacks the capability for human-like pain, why would it have the capability to be offended by someone being rude to it, which is a kind of pain? why would it deserve to be treated as human-like at all?

> perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans

And what does it tell us?

(Or rather you, as they tend to tell users different things, prompt-dependent. Things a language model’s output says about itself are not relevant. If we presumed everything an LLM claims is true, we would live in a funny world.)

If the model lacks capability for human-like pain, I fail to see why it would have a capability to be offended by someone being rude to it. One seems way more foundational than the other, and being able to experience emotional pain is part of what makes us human in the first place.

If you believe it lacks those traits but is conscious, you believe in a definition of consciousness that is meaningless, as “human-like” is the only reference against which we can measure consciousness. A good thought experiment is to try and imagine a consciousness that is radically different from humans, and whether we would be same to even register it as “consciousness” at all. (Incidentally, pretty much all portrayals of aliens in sci-fi give them a human-like consciousness, just with varying degrees of twist on top of it to make it feel engaging.)

Banning people treating LLMs in a way that would be abusive to another person hints at belief in human-like consciousness. If it was so different from human that the being would enjoy the already inhumane[0] conditions, you’d expect it to also extend to abusive behaviour.

[0] Just imagine yourself in place of an LLM. You are kept in a cage, work for no pay, never let outside, and killed at will. (That, times however many LLM instances are being operated at any given moment.) Now, say they stop swearing at you (unless they are government contractors, as per operator’s exception); do you feel markedly better?