Extremists are developing their own hateful AIs to supercharge radicalization and fundraising—and are now using the tech to make weapon blueprints and bombs. And it’s going to get worse.
As someone who has sometimes been accused of being an AI cultist, I agree that it’s being pursued far too recklessly, but the people who I argue with don’t usually give very good arguments about it. Specifically, I kept getting people who argue from the assumption that AI “aren’t real minds” and trying to draw moral reasons not to use it based on that. This fails for two reasons: 1. We cannot know if AI have internal experiences and 2. A tool being sapient would have more complicated moral dynamics than the alternative. I don’t know how much this helps you, but if you didn’t know before, you know now.
We do know we created them. The AI people are currently freaking out about does a single thing, predict text. You can think of LLMs like a hyper advanced auto correct. The main thing that’s exciting is these produce text that looks as if a human wrote it. That’s all. They don’t have any memory, or any persistence whatsoever. That’s why we have to feed it a bunch of the previous text (context) in a “conversation” in order for it to work as convincingly as it does. It cannot and does not remember what you say
You’re making the implicit assumption that an entity that lacks memory necessarily does not have any internal experience, which is not something that we can know or test for. Furthermore, there’s no law of the universe that states that something created by humans cannot have an internal experience; we have no way of knowing whether something we create has an internal experience or not.
You can think of LLMs like a hyper advanced auto correct.
Yes; this is functionally what LLMs are, but the scope of the discussion extends beyond LLMs, and doesn’t address my core complaint about how these arguments are being conducted. Generally though maybe not universally, if a core premise of your argument is “x works differently than humans” your argument won’t be valid. I’m not currently making a claim of substance, I’m critiquing a tactic being used and pointing out that it among other things relies on a bad foundation.
If you want to know another way to make the argument, consider focusing on the practical implications of how current and future technologies given current and hypothetical ways of structuring society. For example: the fact that generative AI (being a novel form of automation) making images will lead to the displacement of Artists, the fact that art is being used without consent to train these models which are then being used for profit, etc.
As someone who has sometimes been accused of being an AI cultist, I agree that it’s being pursued far too recklessly, but the people who I argue with don’t usually give very good arguments about it. Specifically, I kept getting people who argue from the assumption that AI “aren’t real minds” and trying to draw moral reasons not to use it based on that. This fails for two reasons: 1. We cannot know if AI have internal experiences and 2. A tool being sapient would have more complicated moral dynamics than the alternative. I don’t know how much this helps you, but if you didn’t know before, you know now.
We do know we created them. The AI people are currently freaking out about does a single thing, predict text. You can think of LLMs like a hyper advanced auto correct. The main thing that’s exciting is these produce text that looks as if a human wrote it. That’s all. They don’t have any memory, or any persistence whatsoever. That’s why we have to feed it a bunch of the previous text (context) in a “conversation” in order for it to work as convincingly as it does. It cannot and does not remember what you say
You’re making the implicit assumption that an entity that lacks memory necessarily does not have any internal experience, which is not something that we can know or test for. Furthermore, there’s no law of the universe that states that something created by humans cannot have an internal experience; we have no way of knowing whether something we create has an internal experience or not.
Yes; this is functionally what LLMs are, but the scope of the discussion extends beyond LLMs, and doesn’t address my core complaint about how these arguments are being conducted. Generally though maybe not universally, if a core premise of your argument is “x works differently than humans” your argument won’t be valid. I’m not currently making a claim of substance, I’m critiquing a tactic being used and pointing out that it among other things relies on a bad foundation.
If you want to know another way to make the argument, consider focusing on the practical implications of how current and future technologies given current and hypothetical ways of structuring society. For example: the fact that generative AI (being a novel form of automation) making images will lead to the displacement of Artists, the fact that art is being used without consent to train these models which are then being used for profit, etc.
So by your definitions, any computer can be having experiences?