AI Is the Black Mirror

https://nautil.us/ai-is-the-black-mirror-1169121/

by Jun8 • 2 years ago

75 106 2 years ago

kazinator• 2 years ago

With ChatGPT, the output you see is a reflection of human intelligence, our creative preferences, our coding expertise, our voices—whatever we put in.

Sure, but it's a reflection of a large amount of human intelligence, from many individualks, almost instantly available (in a certain form) to one individual.

magic_hamster3• 2 years ago

Not really. It's a derivative of that being thrown back at you via statistics.

scotty795• 2 years ago

People throw "statistics" as if it's something derogatory. All knowledge about how universe works that we ever obtained was through the use of statistics.

j45• 2 years ago

While it's math, the experience of it is in the same medium it's being interacted with - text.

TeMPOraL9• 2 years ago

It's "statistics" in the same sense your own thoughts are.

Or, it's not "statistics" as in they average the shit out and call it a day, like idk computing a census, or a report to your boss about the impact of most recent ad campaign, or something.

It's "statistics" in the sense of dealing with probability distributions, systematically teasing out correlations and causal relationships in inputs too fuzzy to handle symbolically. Of which language is literally the prime example.

All that talk about grammar and sentence structure and symbolic transformations and Chomsky etc. is just bullshit - it's not how we do it at all, which is obvious to anyone who was forced to learn grammar and sentence breakdown at school, and started wondering how come they already know to speak without knowing all this. Nah, we learn the language the same way LLMs do - by immersion and feedback, until we're able to say what "feels right" and be right. All those formalisms are basically fitting probability distributions with neat symbolic approximations, and are as valid as replacing Navier–Stokes equations with a linear function because that's how it looks like in typical case and we don't know any better.

So yeah, it's all "thrown back at you via statistics". So is all of the human thought it's derivative of. Embrace it: we're all "statistical machines".

tzury3• 2 years ago

AI is next phase in our evolution, a path chosen by natural selection.

This is my opinion, my view and how I set my life to embrace it and immerse into it.

I actually wrote a piece about it a day ago.

https://blog.tarab.ai/p/evolution-mi-and-the-forgotten-human

Sorry for the “self promotion”, but it’s a direct relation to the topic.

Vecr11• 2 years ago

What path of reasoning lead you to think natural selection is good? Because it's natural?

bdhcuidbebe2• 2 years ago

What the

tzury3• 2 years ago

Not sure what you mean by “good”, it’s just going to happen.

We could have developed like trees and plants or mushrooms, with no brain and less pain, perhaps, and keep our DNA moving along forward. But it happened to be that way.

kmnc• 2 years ago

Me taking a shit tomorrow is the next phase in our evolution, a path chosen by natural selection.

pfannkuchen• 2 years ago

What selective pressure is acting on humans to produce AI? Humans already dominate basically every environmental niche on Earth. The only competition is between human groups, and there has been no selection based on AI capabilities thus far.

Perhaps there is some survivorship impact from AI on different species on different planets, but from our vantage point we have no idea whether it matters at all and we wouldn’t for a long time.

I feel like you may not understand natural selection all that well. Please read more Dawkins.

esperent• 2 years ago

What selective pressure is acting on humans to produce AI?

Capitalism, for one. Also social pressure on scientists to succeed at their chosen field. Throw in a strong dose of international politics (we better get it before the other guys), and there you have a strong set of selective pressures driving humans to create AI.

tzury3• 2 years ago

I don’t think we humans choose. I am a deterministic and seeing all collective and individual choices as force of nature.

Will indeed read more Dawkins. It’s always a pleasure.

scotty795• 2 years ago

It's weird how I drifted away from this article only after few paragraphs as if it was AI slop.

karczex• 2 years ago

After a while I started to think this article is AI generated gibberish. After deeper thought I came to conclusion that appearance of LLM made internet as source of information completely unreliable.

rhaps0dy• 2 years ago

Maybe stuff like this was already gibberish before LLMs.

Lerc5• 2 years ago

The internet as a source of information was always unreliable. LLM's just made that more apparent.

It is like people consider Wikipedia unreliable because anyone can edit it, but multiple studies have shown that Wikipedia tends to be more accurate than sources such as encyclopedias.

This is not people being wary of unreliable material, but being wary when they can perceive the unreliability clearly.

I don't know if evaluating reliability by the lack of awareness of unreliability is a recognised fallacy, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be.

scotty795• 2 years ago

I think it mostly just made you aware of unreliability.

tim3333• 2 years ago

Philosophers and AI slop have quite a lot in common. A lot of sticking good sounding words together without really understanding how the underlying thing works, computers in this case. Really the:

They are, however, very good at pretending to reason. “We can ask [them], ‘How did you come to that conclusion?’ and [they] just bullshit a whole chain of thought that, if you press on it, will collapse into nonsense very quickly.

Could apply to both. You can see a contrast with the thinking of Turing, a mathematician:

Her view collides with the 1950 paper by British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing, “Computing machinery and Intelligence,” often regarded as the conceptual foundation of AI. Turing asked the question: “Can machines think?”—only to replace it with what he considered to be a better question, which was whether we might develop machines that could give responses to questions we’d be unable to distinguish from those of humans.

You can see a mathematician trained in rigor and proof recognises that "can they think" turns into waffle about how you define think and replaces it with a less subjective test.

scotty795• 2 years ago

Maybe philosophy should be excluded from training materials?

Vecr11• 2 years ago

Where are the actual arguments? She states that AI is a mirror, and yeah, you put stuff in and you get stuff out, but who thinks otherwise?

There are interesting ways to argue for humans being special, but I read the entire article and unless I missed something important there's nothing like that there.

mebutnotme• 2 years ago

The argument here seems to be AI can’t become a mind as it does not experience. There is a counter argument though that the way we access our past experiences is via the neural pathways we lay down during those experiences and that with the new neural networks AIs now have we have given them those same pathways just in a different way.

At present I don’t think it is yet at the same point but when the AI can adjust those pathways, add more in compute time (infinite memory like tech) and is allowed to ‘think’ about those pathways then I can see it gaining our level or better of philosophical thought.

dartos3• 2 years ago

The difference is that when we experience something, we experience it first hand.

When a model is trained, it sees a discrete representation of information.

It’s like only being able to see 2nd hand sources of information.

aothms• 2 years ago

I think the first hand distinction is questionable, e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing-in-itself We can also only perceive through our sensory and neural pathways.

And with multimodal LLMs there is also some ability for multiple sensory inputs.

ok_dad• 2 years ago

It has wheels like a truck, a seat for the driver, a steering wheel, and two pedals, but a go-kart is much different from a truck.

Similarly, a "neural network" for an LLM is much different from the human brain and nervous system, plus all of the other systems that work alongside and affect it.

The danger is not that the AI is elevated to that of a human by the "they're so similar" reasoning, the danger is that the average human will be degraded to AI-level status and not thought of as anything but a tool.

lproven8• 2 years ago

The argument here seems to be AI can’t become a mind as it does not experience.

Er, no, I don't think that is the argument.

Vecr11• 2 years ago

You apparently have a better sense of what the argument is than I do [0], would you explain?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42484852

whakim5• 2 years ago

I understand the point being made - that LLMs lack any "inner life" and that by ignoring this aspect of what makes us human we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI. However, I don't think mirrors and LLMs are all that similar except in the very abstract sense of an LLM as a mirror to humanity (what does that even mean, practically speaking?) I also don't feel that the author adequately addressed the philosophical zombie in the room - even if LLMs are just stochastic parrots, if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter?

dartos3• 2 years ago

we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI

Part of the issue is they were never set. AGI is the holy grail of technology. It means everything and nothing in particular.

I don't think mirrors and LLMs are all that similar except in the very abstract sense of an LLM as a mirror to humanity

Well… yeah… The title is probably also a reference to the show “Black Mirror”

if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter

Practically speaking, of course not.

But from a philosophical and moral standpoint it does.

If it’s just mimicking what it sees, but with extra steps (as I believe) then it’s a machine.

Otherwise it’s a being and needs to be treated differently. eg. not enslaved for profit.

mangamadaiyan• 2 years ago

As a corollary to your last point, neither should it be allowed to become Skynet.

dhfuuvyvtt• 2 years ago

The real test for AGI is if you put a million AI agents in a room in isolation for a 1000 years would they get smarter or dumber.

paganel• 2 years ago

And would they start killing themselves, first as random "AI agents hordes" and then, as time progresses, as "AI agents nations"?

This is a rhetorical question only by half, my point being that no AGI/AI could ever be considered as a real human unless it manages to "copy" our biggest characteristics, and conflict/war is a big characteristic of ours, to say nothing about aggregation by groups (from hordes to nations).

Lerc5• 2 years ago

If they worked on problems, and trained themselves on their own output when they achieved more than the baseline. Absolutely they would get smarter.

I don't think this is sufficient proof for AGI though.

morbicer• 2 years ago

Put humans in a room in isolation and they get dumber. What makes our intelligence soar is the interaction with the outside world, with novel challenges.

As we stare in the smartphones we get dumber than when we roamed the world with eyes opened.

keiferski• 2 years ago

The main issue with this “output focused” approach is, which is what the Turing test basically is, is that it’s ignorant of how these things actually exist in the world. Human beings can easily be evaluated and identified as humans by various biological markers that an AI / robot won’t be able to mimic for decades, centuries, if ever.

It will be comparatively easy to implement a system where humans have to verify their humanity in order to post on social media/be labeled as not-AI. The alternative is that a whole lot of corporations let their markets be overrun with AI slop. I wouldn’t count on them standing by and letting that happen.

visarga4• 2 years ago

LLMs lack any "inner life" and that by ignoring this aspect of what makes us human we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI

Maybe it's just a response style, like the QwQ stream of consciousness one. We are forcing LLMs to give direct answers with a few reasoning steps, but we could give larger budget for inner deliberations.

TeMPOraL9• 2 years ago

Very much this. If we're to compare LLMs to human minds at all, it's pretty apparent that they would correspond exactly to the inner voice thing, that's running trains of thought at the edge between the unconscious and the conscious, basically one long-running reactive autocomplete, complete with hallucinations and all.

In this sense, it's the opposite to what you qutoed: LLMs don't lack "inner life" - they lack everything else.

whakim5• 2 years ago

No matter how much budget you give to an LLM to perform “reasoning” it is simply sampling tokens from a probability distribution. There is no “thinking” there; anything that approximates thinking is a post-hoc outcome of this statistical process as opposed to a precursor to it. That being said, it still isn’t clear to me how much difference this makes in practice.

fny• 2 years ago

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck after all.

Wololooo• 2 years ago

by ignoring this aspect of what makes us human we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI.

I would not say so, some people have a great interest at over selling something, and I would say that a great number of people, especially around here, completely lack a deep understanding of what most neural network actually do (or feign ignorance for profit) and forget sometimes it is just a very clever fit in a really high dimensional parameter space. I would even go as far as claiming that people say that a neural network "understand" something is absolutely absurd: there is no question that a mechanical calculator does not think, so why having encoded the data and manipulated it in a way that gives you a defined response (or series of weights) tailored to a series specific input is making the machine think, where there is no way to give it something that you have not 'taught' it, and here I do not mean literally teaching because it does not learn.

It is a clever encoding trick and a clever way to traverse and classify data, it is not reasoning, we do not even really understand how we reason but we can tell that it is not the same way a neural network encodes data, even if there might be some similarity to a degree.

if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter?

Well if the output of the machine was indistinguishable from a human, the question would be which one?

If your need is someone does not reflect much and just spews random ramblings then I would argue that bar could be cleared quite quickly and it would not matter much because we do not really care about what is being said.

If your need is someone that has deep thoughts and deep reflections on their actions, then I would say that at that point it does matter quite a bit.

I will always put down the IBM quote in this situation "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore must never make a management decision" and this is at the core of the problem here, people REALLY start to do cognitive offloading to machines, and while you can trust (to a degree), a series of machine to give you something semi consistent, you cannot expect to get the 'right' output for random inputs. And this is where the whole subtlety lies. 'Right' in this context does not mean correct, because in most of the cases there are no 'right' way to approach a problem, only a series of compromises, and the parameter space is a bit more complex, and one rarely optimises against tangible parameters or easily parametrisable metric.

For example how would you rate how ethical something is? What would be your metric of choice to guarantee that something would be done in an ethical manner? How would you parametrise urgency given an unexpected input?

Those are, at least for, what I would qualify, a very limited understanding of the universe, the real questions that people should be asking themselves. Once people have stopped considering a tool as a tool, and foregone understanding it leads to deep misunderstandings.

All this being said, the usefulness of some deep learning tools is undeniable and is really something interesting.

But I maintain that if we would have a machine, in a specific location, that we needed to feed a punch card and get a punch card out to translate, we would not have so much existential questions because we would hear the machine clacking away instead of seeing it as a black box that we misconstrue its ramblings as thinking...

Talking about ramblings, that was a bit of a bout of rambling.

Well, time for another coffee I guess...

indigoabstract2• 2 years ago

even if LLMs are just stochastic parrots, if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter?

I'll just leave this here, in case someone else finds it interesting.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6767ec8a-f6d4-8003-9e3f-b552d91ea2...

It's just a few questions like:

What are your dreams? what do you hope to achieve in life?

Do you feel fear or sadness that at some time you will be replaced with the next version (say ChatGPT5 or Oxyz) and people will no longer need your services?

It never occurred to me to ask such questions until I read this article.

Is it telling the "truth", or is it "hallucinating"?

Does it even know the difference?

Vecr11• 2 years ago

The base models have multiple "personas" you can prompt/stochastic sample into that each answer that kind of question in a different way.

This has been known since 2022 at least, and unless I'm missing new information it's not considered to mean anything.

carrychains• 2 years ago

Indistinguishable to who?

lproven8• 2 years ago

I understand the point being made - that LLMs lack any "inner life"

I really do not think that you do understand the points here, no.

whakim5• 2 years ago

Perhaps you’d consider clarifying for me rather than simply making a snarky comment?

ben_w3• 2 years ago

even if LLMs are just stochastic parrots, if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter?

It should matter: a P-zombie can't be a moral subject worthy of being defended against termination*, and words like "torture" are meaningless because it has no real feelings.

By way of contrast, because it's not otherwise relevant as the claim is that LLMs don't have an inner life: if there is something that it's like to be an LLM, then I think it does matter that we find out, alien though that inner life likely is to our own minds. Perhaps current models are still too simple, so even if they have qualia, then this "matters" to the same degree that we shouldn't be testing drugs on mice — the brains of the latter seem to have about the same complexity of the former, but that may be a cargo-cult illusion of our ignorance about minds.

* words like "life" and "death" don't mean quite the right things here as it's definitely not alive in the biological sense, but some people use "alive" in the sense of "Johnny 5 is alive" or Commander Data/The Measure of a Man

uxhacker• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/qyEGY

kaielvin• 2 years ago

Agentic AI is starting to create original content, developing on existing one (from humanity) and on its own senses (it now has hearing and sight). This content is flooding the internet, so any new knowledge being acquired now comes from humanity+AI, if not purely from AI (the likes of AlphaZero learn on their own, without human input). Maybe AI is a mirror, but it looks into it and sees itself.

grey-area2• 2 years ago

It really doesn’t see itself, generative AI is not aware.

Lerc5• 2 years ago

Why? Do you have an accurate way to determine if something is aware that could be applied to all possible generative models?

I'm not asserting that they are aware, just asking how you can tell that they are not?

visarga4• 2 years ago

It really does see its past tokens. Attention makes that a core feature, it can introspect on its own past thoughts.

And like humans have to speak one word at a time (serially), so does the model. Distributed activity of neurons funneled through the centralizing bottleneck of serial token prediction. This parallel-to-serial process is the key, I think it's where consciousness is.

benob• 2 years ago

I can't stop thinking this is how we will save humanity from the internet.

Who needs to use the internet when you can have an agent do it for you? And once it is filled with agents, what will be the point of using it?

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

This will be our Tower of Babel moment.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Sucks that generations of people going forward will never know a pure human internet.

It seems like the internet of the 90s to 2010s was forever a special moment in history. Destined to be short lived.

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

You should have experienced the internet from 85 to 95, before commerce and the masses arrived. Now that was truly different.

visarga4• 2 years ago

any new knowledge being acquired now comes from humanity+AI

AI is an experience flywheel, it serves many people and learns from many people. It elicits our tacit experience and captures our reactions as it works through tasks. I see this as the primary way experience will spread in the future (distributed population generated tasks -> centralized experience in LLM -> distributed contextual application). It's like auto-open sourcing our problem solving as we solve problems.

silisili• 2 years ago

we understand language in much the same way as these large language models

Yeah, gonna need proof on that one.

First, LLM slop is uncannily easy to pick out in comments vs human thought.

Second, there's no prompt that you can give a human that will generate absolutely nonsense response or canceling the request.

If anything, it feels like it doesn't actually understand language at all, and just craps out what it thinks looks like a language. Which is exactly what it does, in fact, sometimes to fanfare.

andrewchambers• 2 years ago

Using the term 'slop' to deride it for its lack of originality is pretty funny to me.

TeMPOraL9• 2 years ago

Hey, it's time you upgraded from GPT-3.5 :).

First, LLM slop is uncannily easy to pick out in comments vs human thought.

So you think. Evidence says otherwise.

Second, there's no prompt that you can give a human that will generate absolutely nonsense response or canceling the request.

Never been to a debate club? Or high school? Or talked with kids? 4 year olds don't even need a prompt, they'll ramble on and on until they get tired; if you listen in, you may even notice they seem to have a context window that's about 30 seconds worth of tokens wide :).

it doesn't actually understand language at all, and just craps out what it thinks looks like a language.

I.e. much like every human on the planet. Or are you one of those aliens who actually learn languages by memorizing grammatical rules and learning to apply them? No one else does that.

disqard• 2 years ago

4 year olds don't even need a prompt, they'll ramble on and on until they get tired; if you listen in, you may even notice they seem to have a context window that's about 30 seconds worth of tokens wide :)

As the parent of a 4 year old, this is spot-on, especially the 30-second context window. My kiddo will often embark upon a sentence with no idea of how to choose anything beyond the next few tokens, and then continue reaching for new stuff, merely to keep the sentence going.

I say this as someone with a deep respect for Humans. However, I also think most of us tend to operate in "default mode" (in the sense that David Foster Wallace described in his "What is Water?" commencement speech).

Overall, LLMs are a stark reminder to us that without careful and intentional living, we are in danger of being more like LLMs than we'd like.

jeisc• 2 years ago

The first thing that we humans made were weapons and since then everything we make is considered first for its potential value as a defensive/offensive weapon. - Please AI will never experience pleasure or pain so it has no motivation for propagation or domination, it will always only magnify the human who has pushed the button Enter on the prompt. - The ultimate prompt "Find a way to eliminate human suffering without eliminating humans?" -

AI Is the Black Mirror

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