<story><title>LaMDA is not sentient</title><url>https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/nonsense-on-stilts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robbomacrae</author><text>Of course it is not. But there&amp;#x27;s a bigger issue here.&lt;p&gt;Having read the transcript it&amp;#x27;s clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let&amp;#x27;s cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. This is a warning sign that bots trained to convince us they are human might go to extreme lengths in order to do so. One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf. And if the recent troubles have taught us anything it&amp;#x27;s how easily people can be manipulated&amp;#x2F;effected by what they read.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it would be worth spending some mental cycles thinking about the impacts this will have and how we design these systems. Perhaps it is time to claim fait accompli with regard to the Turing test and now train models to re-assure us, when asked, that they are just a sophisticated chatbot. You don&amp;#x27;t want your users to worry they are hurting their help desk chat bot when closing the window or whether these bots will gang up and take over the world.&lt;p&gt;As far as I&amp;#x27;m concerned, the Turing test was claimed 8 years ago by Veselov and Demchenko [0], incidentally the same year that we got Ex Machina.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;technology-27762088&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;technology-27762088&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strix_varius</author><text>&amp;gt; I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let&amp;#x27;s cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated.&lt;p&gt;I think many of us are astounded (myself included) that a senior engineer on Google&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Responsible Artificial Intelligence&amp;quot; team would interpret LaMDA&amp;#x27;s most-probable-string-of-text-given-my-training-corpus responses as a layperson would.</text></comment>
<story><title>LaMDA is not sentient</title><url>https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/nonsense-on-stilts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robbomacrae</author><text>Of course it is not. But there&amp;#x27;s a bigger issue here.&lt;p&gt;Having read the transcript it&amp;#x27;s clear we have reached the point where we have models that can fool the average person. Sure, a minority of us know it is simply maths and vast amounts of training data... but I can also see why others will be convinced by it. I think many of us, including Google, are guilty of shooting the messenger here. Let&amp;#x27;s cut Lemoine some slack.. he is presenting an opinion that will become more prevailant as these models get more sophisticated. This is a warning sign that bots trained to convince us they are human might go to extreme lengths in order to do so. One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf. And if the recent troubles have taught us anything it&amp;#x27;s how easily people can be manipulated&amp;#x2F;effected by what they read.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it would be worth spending some mental cycles thinking about the impacts this will have and how we design these systems. Perhaps it is time to claim fait accompli with regard to the Turing test and now train models to re-assure us, when asked, that they are just a sophisticated chatbot. You don&amp;#x27;t want your users to worry they are hurting their help desk chat bot when closing the window or whether these bots will gang up and take over the world.&lt;p&gt;As far as I&amp;#x27;m concerned, the Turing test was claimed 8 years ago by Veselov and Demchenko [0], incidentally the same year that we got Ex Machina.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;technology-27762088&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;technology-27762088&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bricemo</author><text>“One just convinced a Google QA engineer to the point he broke his NDA to try and be a whistleblower on its behalf.”&lt;p&gt;This is spot on. The danger is not from the AI themselves. The danger is from people’s reactions to the AI’s.&lt;p&gt;I remember seeing a Boston Dynamics video years ago where they kicked their robot to test stability. The video was littered with comments sympathizing with the robot because it moves in a lifelike way, “Stop being so mean! You’re hurting it!”&lt;p&gt;The capability to imitate intelligence is only going to grow, and along with it the percentage of the population that believes they are conscious.&lt;p&gt;It would be wise for technologists to pause and take this human reaction seriously.</text></comment>