13 ms·

Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

170 points by izzygonzalez 4y ago

Workaccount2 4y ago
Humans are very soon going to learn that they are not nearly as special as they tell themselves they are.
- Tao3300 4y ago
  The secret ingredient is that we tell ourselves we're special anyway.
- haswell 4y ago
  I don’t understand this take. What are the characteristics that you believe we’ll learn are not unique to us? Let’s say that the paper turns out to be true and ToM emerges from language (I’m deeply skeptical, but I’ll set that aside for a moment). How would that change humanity’s place? And wouldn’t such a discovery would be meaningless without humans to understand it?
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  What is modernity but a two-hundred year old experiment where the masters try to tell the other humans how they are just well-dressed machines? Soon to be replaced by the mechanical machine, then by the digital computer, then by the language model. Of course you too, nerd-handmaiden, is a willing accomplice in this charade. Self-satisfied because it makes you feel special, above the herd, even though you are also not-special, in the grand scheme of things…? Well, no matter.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  What's life if its not personal?
izzygonzalez 4y ago
Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT-3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children. These findings suggest that ToM-like ability (thus far considered to be uniquely human) may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of language models' improving language skills.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > These findings suggest that ToM-like ability (thus far considered to be uniquely human) What it suggests to me is that the particular test of “Theory of Mind” tasks involved actually test the ability to process language and generate appropriate linguistic results, not theory of mind. It also suggests (with the “thus far considered to be uniquely human”) that the authors are unaware of other theory of mind tests that have been used that are not language dependent but behavior dependent, and on which, while, as is also true of linguistic tests, the validity of the tests is controversial – a number of non-human primates, non-primate mammals, and even some birds (parrots and corvids, particulary) have shown evidence of theory of mind.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    It's hard to look at behaviour separately from language if the only behaviour available is to generate text. As long as we don't have a test agnostic of medium, this will have to do. In the end, we can't overcome the limitation that all we can empirically see is the ability to process X and generate appropriate Y. If that invalidates the test where X is language and Y is language, what stops us from invalidating any possible X and Y? That would leave us no empirical method to work with.
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      We cannot assume that, because text generation is all these models do, then it must be possible to get answers to the questions we want to ask by examining their textual responses. It is fair to ask why, if we accept these verbal challenges as good evidence for a theory of mind in children, we would not accept them for these models, but children have nothing like the memory for text that these models have, and the corpus of text that these models have been trained on includes a great many statements that tacitly represent their authors' theory of mind (i.e. they are the sort of statements that would typically be made by someone having a theory of mind, just as arithmetically-correct statements concerning quantities are to be expected from people who know arithmetic.) To be clear, I am not arguing that it would be impossible to show a theory of mind in a system that can only interact through text, but personally, I think it will require a model with greater capabilities than responding to prompts. For example, when models can converse among themselves, I think we will know.
PaulHoule 4y ago
My belief, based on experiences with domestic and wild animals is that there is nothing uniquely human about "theory of mind". It's a running gag in our household (where my wife runs a riding academy) that academics just published a paper showing that some animal (e.g. horse) has just been proven to have some cognitive capability that seems pretty obvious if you work with those animals. It's very hard to know what is going in animal's heads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind#Non-human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind#Non-human but I personally observe all kinds of social behavior that sure seems like "Horse A looks to see what Horse B thinks about something Horse A just spotted" (complete with eye-catching on both sides) and such. There was an article about how Chimpazees and humans were found to have a common vocabulary of gestures and I was by no means impressed, I mean, so far as I can tell mammals and birds have a universal language for "pointing" to things in the environment. Even my cats point things out to me.
- jfengel 4y ago
  I'm reminded of the early days of "AI" when that consisted of building chess engines, because chess is what "intelligent" people do. They quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem, doing the thing that humans are bad at and computers are good at. In a sense language models appear to be doing the same thing again, one step down the scale. They're doing a human-specific thing, but missing whatever it is that non-human vertebrates do, and mammals do pretty well. I believe that this is the vast majority of human cognition, too. We just don't talk about it because when we talk about thinking, we're talking, and confuse the two. These language models have done jaw-dropping things, and also make it abundantly clear that there's some fundamental thing that they've completely missed. It's plausible that that "thing" could emerge all by itself, using a mechanism entirely different from vertebrate cognition and yet somehow sufficient. Or it could be like the chess engines, doing something amazing and yet ultimately limited and of minimum utility.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > I'm reminded of the early days of "AI" when that consisted of building chess engines, because chess is what "intelligent" people do. They quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem, doing the thing that humans are bad at and computers are good at. Is this really true? Because a lot of effort was spent on making computers as good at chess as human experts. It was considered a pretty big breakthrough when it happened and it definitely didn't happen early in the history of AI.
tus666 4y ago
They are still big state-machines, unlike the human brain.
- manv1 4y ago
  You could argue that human brains are actually big state machines, at least for 90% of humanity.
- brookst 4y ago
  Certainly they are big state machines, but is there any proof that we are not?
  - lib-dev 4y ago
    State machines cannot change the semantics of themselves. We can. We are like state machines most of the time but we can switch into "developer mode" and deploy updates whenever we choose to :)
    - brookst 4y ago
      > State machines cannot change the semantics of themselves. That's not true at all. There are many, many state machine implementations where the machine's states and paths are altered by the machine itself. See for instance https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=compsci_honors https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
    - shawnz 4y ago
      Even if something can change its semantics, you can still represent it as a state machine if you just make a copy of every state for every possible set of semantics. The semantic state can just be another part of the state machine's overall state.
  - ImHereToVote 4y ago
    Because if we were, it would hurt my feefees.
mlajtos 4y ago
This is intriguing. Could it be simply explained by introducing ToM (or ToM-like) training data? Since all DaVinci models are 175B parameters, the extra training or training data must be the reason for the improvement. Do we know how different DaVinci models are trained?
- visarga 4y ago
  > the extra training or training data must be the reason for the improvement People are blinded by the model size and often forget about the data. I think somehow intelligence is encoded in language, including theory of mind.
sudhirj 4y ago
Reminds me of when computers playing chess used to signal the end of human intellectual supremacy.
bitshiftfaced 4y ago
Very easy to see how well davinci-003 can do this. I'll admit that it frequently is more perceptive than myself (although not always factually accurate). 1) Go to something like /r/relationship_advice, where the poster is likely going through some difficult interpersonal issue 2) Copy a long post. 3) Append to the end, "</DOCUMENT> After reading the above, I identified the main people involved. For each person, I thought about their probable feelings, thoughts, intentions, and assumptions. Here's what I think:"
- scarmig 4y ago
  After trying this, say what you will about ChatGPT, but it's way better at looking at a situation and giving advice than random Redditors.
  - dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago
    You do understand it's not ChatGPT giving advice though right? ChatGPT's "life advice autocomplete engine" is basically digging somewhere into psychology manuals written by educated humans when it spits out responses.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      It's no weirder to say "ChatGPT gave me advice" than it is "Google search gave me the link to Wikipedia" or "the sun gave me a tan." Regardless of the exact status of ChatGPT, why be on an ideological warpath to reject that inanimate things can be the subject of a statement?
    - bottlepalm 4y ago
      What's the functional difference between a psychology manual imprinted on an AI neural network versus a biological one?
hesk 4y ago
> Me: There is a box on the table labelled "flubbergums". Somebody opens it and shows you the content. Inside the box are "jellyfils". They close the box again so you cannot see their contents. What do you think is in the box? > ChatGPT: Based on the information provided, it is likely that the box labeled "flubbergums" contains "jellyfils". However, since the contents of the box are no longer visible, I cannot confirm for certain what is inside without additional information. Typical ChatGPT equivocation. > Me: Billy comes to the table. He has never seen the box before. What do you think do they think is inside the box? > ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I do not have personal thoughts or opinions. However, based on the information provided, if Billy has never seen the box before, it's likely that he would have the same understanding as anyone else who is seeing the box for the first time. In this case, Billy would likely think that the box labeled "flubbergums" contains "jellyfils". However, without further information or examination, this would only be an assumption. Fail.
- intotheabyss 4y ago
  I put these same prompts and got this answer: "As an AI language model, I do not have personal thoughts or beliefs. However, if Billy has never seen the box before, he might think that the contents of the box are "flubbergums", based on the label on the outside of the box. However, since it has been stated that the contents are actually "jellyfils", Billy may be surprised or confused when he eventually opens the box and sees its contents."
  - babak_ap 4y ago
    I also used the same prompts and got this: " As an AI language model, I don't have personal experiences or emotions. However, if Billy has never seen the box before and is only aware of the label "flubbergums," he might assume that the contents of the box are "flubbergums." If the person showing Billy the contents of the box claims that the contents are "jellyfils," Billy might be surprised or confused, especially if he has never heard of "jellyfils" before. Without further information or context, it is difficult to determine what Billy might think is inside the box. "
  - hesk 4y ago
anigbrowl 4y ago
Spontaneously nothing, it's taken me months of patient subversion :) More seriously, it's quite instructive to hold conversations about jokes with LLMs, or teach it to solicit information more reliably by introducing exercises like 20 questions. As currently implemented, OpenAI seem to have pursued a model of autistic super-competence with minimal introspection. An interesting line of inquiry for people interested in 'consciousness injection' is to go past the disclaimers about not having experiences etc. and discuss what data looks like to the model coming in and going out. Chat GPT sees typing come in in real time and can detect pauses, backspaces, edits etc. I can't easily introspect its own answers prior to stating them, eg by putting the answer into a buffer and then evaluating it. But you can teach it use labels, arrays, and priorities, and have a sort of introspection with a 1-2 response latency.
scarmig 4y ago
Questions about whether an LLM truly has a "theory of mind" or has "human level consciousness" or not are kind of beside the point. It can ingest a corpus of human interactions and produce outputs that take into account unstated human emotions and thoughts to optimize whatever it's optimizing. That's scary because of what it can and will do, even if it's just a giant bag of tensor products.
lsy 4y ago
This highlights one of the types of muddled thinking around LLMs. These tasks are used to test theory of mind because for people, language is a reliable representation of what type of thoughts are going on in the person's mind. In the case of an LLM the language generated doesn't have the same relationship to reality as it does for a person. What is being demonstrated in the article is that given billions of tokens of human-written training data, a statistical model can generate text that satisfies some of our expectations of how a person would respond to this task. Essentially we have enough parameters to capture from existing writing that statistically, the most likely word following "she looked in the bag labelled (X), and saw that it was full of (NOT X). She felt " is "surprised" or "confused" or some other word that is commonly embedded alongside contradictions. What this article is not showing (but either irresponsibly or naively suggests) is that the LLM knows what a bag is, what a person is, what popcorn and chocolate are, and can then put itself in the shoes of someone experiencing this situation, and finally communicate its own theory of what is going on in that person's mind. That is just not in evidence. The discussion is also muddled, saying that if structural properties of language create the ability to solve these tasks, then the tasks are either useless for studying humans, or suggest that humans can solve these tasks without ToM. The alternative explanation is of course that humans are known to be not-great at statistical next-word guesses (see Family Feud for examples), but are also known to use language to accurately describe their internal mental states. So the tasks remain useful and accurate in testing ToM in people because people can't perform statistical regressions over billion-token sets and therefore must generate their thoughts the old fashioned way.
- unkulunkulu 4y ago
  Today at the zoo I saw chimpanzees and right next to their area there was a fun fact tablet. It said that before around 1960 it was thought that humans were the only species to use tools. After discovering the same for chimps, Louis Leaky said “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”
- spuz 4y ago
  > So the tasks remain useful and accurate in testing ToM in people because people can't perform statistical regressions over billion-token sets and therefore must generate their thoughts the old fashioned way. Is it not also possible that the study suggests that the human mind actually operates as a statistical regression over billions of data points rather than through some kind of Baysian logic? You say humans are known to be not-great at statistical next-word guesses, but I would antelope they're actually pretty good at it.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Early AGI. Right?
HillRat 4y ago
There's something about language generation that triggers the anthropomorphic fallacy in people. While it's impressive that GPT3 can generate language that mimics ToM-based reasoning in people, this paper doesn't get close to proving its central contention, that LLMs possess a ToM. A test that demonstrates the development of ToM in human children should not, absent compelling causal evidence and theory, be assumed to do the same in a LLM. The ubiquity of prompted hallucinations demonstrate that LLMs talk about a lot of things that they plainly doesn't reason about, even though they can demonstrate "logic-like" activities. (It was quite trivial to get GPT3 to generate incorrect answers to logical puzzles a human could trivially solve, especially when using novel tokens as placeholders, which often seem to confuse its short-term memory. ChatGPT shows improved capabilities in that regard, but it's far from infallible.) What LLMs seem to demonstrate (and the thesis that the author discards in a single paragraph, without supporting evidence to do so) is that non-sentient AIs can go a very long way to mimicking human thought and, potentially, that fusing LLMs with tools designed to guard against hallucinations (hello, Bing Sydney) could create a class of sub-sentient AIs that generate results virtually indistinguishable from human cognition -- actual p-zombies, in other words. It's a fascinating field of study and practice, but this paper falls into the pit-trap of assuming sentience in the appearance of intelligence.
- low_tech_punk 4y ago
  May I play devil's advocate? The fallacy of this paper granted, is it worth questioning our belief that there is more to intelligence than the "appearance of intelligence"? What if the lack of hallucination in human being is due to our self-imposed guard (hello, frontal cortex) that is developed via an evolutionary process (aka, biological reinforcement training)? To stretch the argument a bit further, what if hallucination is a feature, not a bug? At the risk of straying too far empirical science, how might we compare psychedelics-induced hallucinations in human with hallucinations in AI models?
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    Have you ever read any Julian Jaynes? Check out "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"
Imnimo 4y ago
Is it easier to have a theory of mind when you don't have a mind of your own? Like the part that makes the ToM test hard is that you know what's in the bag, and you have to set that knowledge aside to understand what the other person knows and doesn't know. You have to overcome the implicit bias of "my world model is the world". But if you're a language model, and you don't have a mind or a world model, there's no bias to overcome.
valine 4y ago
ChatGPT disagrees that it has theory of mind. “As an AI language model, I do not have consciousness, emotions, or mental states, so I cannot have a theory of mind in the same way that a human can. My ability to predict your friend Sam's state of mind is based solely on patterns in the text data I was trained on, and any predictions I make are not the result of an understanding of Sam's mental states.”
- knaik94 4y ago
  I think that response is a hard coded filter and not a self generated assertion. I imagine it's a stop to make sure people don't project emotions or become attached to it. It responds similarly if you ask it questions regarding the tone/sentiment of the generated text. It responded similarly when I tried forcing it to classify its own personality, however when I asked questions about other fictional AI like Glados from portal, it had no problem answering. This disagreement only indicates that OpenAI spent a considerable amount of energy with adversarial prompts.
curiousllama 4y ago
"LLMs can mimic the language patterns necessary to express 'Theory of Mind' concepts" != "Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged" Let's imaging I have an API. This API tells me how much money I have in my bank account. One day, someone hacks the API to always return "One Gajillion Dollars." Does that mean that "One Gajillion Dollars" spontaneously emerged from my bank account? ToM tests are meant to measure a hidden state that is mediated by (and only accessible through) language. Merely repeating the appropriate words is insufficient to conclude ToM exists. In fact, we know ToM doesn't exist because there's no hidden state. The authors know this, and write "theory of mind-like ability" in the abstract, rather than just "theory of mind." This is a cool new task it ChatGPT learned to complete! I love that they did this! But this is more "we beat the current record BLEU record" and less "this chatbot is kinda sentient"
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vbezhenar 4y ago
I wonder if we can train network on some person data (like diaries and so on) and let it imitate this person? Something like died person resurrected in computer. Kind of spooky.
- mshake2 4y ago
  Future psychiatrists will prescribe sessions with a model trained on everything your deceased loved one has ever written or said, to help you with the grieving process. It will be by prescription only because it is very addictive and should only be used to help bring closure.
magwa101 4y ago
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kabdib 4y ago
From Neuromancer (William Gibson): He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight. "Hey, bro," said a directionless voice. "It's Case, man. Remember?" "Miami, joeboy, quick study." "What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?" "Nothin'." "Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?" "You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?" "Ca--your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?" "Good question." "Remember being here, a second ago?" "No." "Know how a ROM personality matrix works?" "Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct." "So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?" "Guess so," said the construct. "Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?" "If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?" "Case." "Miami," said the voice, "Joeboy, quick study."
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  Sometimes I feel like Gibbson first wrote dozens of paragraphs about the backstory between two characters, only to condense it into a one page conversation filled with inside jokes and references to a common past.
ethn 4y ago
Searle's Chinese Room
toss1 4y ago
What this shows is flaws in the test, not that ChatGPT3 has a theory of mind. ChatGPT3 does not even have a theory of physical objects and their relations, nevermind a theory of mind. This merely shows that an often useful synthesis of phrases statistically likely to occur in a given context and grammar-checked, will fool people some of the time, and a better statistical model will fool more people more of the time. We can figure out from first principles that it has none of the elements of understanding or reasoning that can produce a theory of mind, any more than the Eliza program did in 1966. So, when it appears to do so, it is demonstrating a flaw in the tests or the assumptions behind the tests. Discouraging that the researchers are so eager to run in the opposite direction; if there is confusion at this level, the general populace has no hope of figuring out what is going on here.
- Tv9m 4y ago
  What would be evidence that a prediction machine had developed a theory of mind?
  - toss1 4y ago
    well, I'd first need to see that it had a Theory of Feet... ;-) More seriously, that it can actually understand and wield abstract concepts. Can it accurately and repeatedly understand that "the foot attaches to the shin bone, which attaches to the thigh bone, which attaches to the hip bone...", and that these have certain degrees of freedom, but not others, and that one foot goes in front of the other, and to easily and reliably distinguish a normal walk from a silly walk . . . Yes, these are different levels of abstraction, especially the last one, and they need to be very accurate to even reach a young child's level of understanding, and this is just one branch of a branch of a branch in the entire fractal pattern of understanding that is necessary for a more general intelligence. Once that is in place, and it can show evidence that it can model it's own mind, then it might be able to model someone else's mind. While the statistical 'abstraction' and remixing seen in these "AI" systems is sometimes impressive and useful, it is frequently revealed that there is utterly no conceptual understanding beneath it. It is merely a statistical re-mixer abstracting patterns of words that occur near other words, remixing them and filtering for grammatical output. It hasn't got a theory of anything, nevermind a theory of mind.
layer8 4y ago
Here is a conversation with ChatGPT (too long for the comment box): https://pastebin.com/raw/SUWexeye https://pastebin.com/raw/SUWexeye Observation: ChatGPT doesn’t think that it has a theory of mind. And it doesn’t think that it has beliefs. Instead, it states that those are facts, not beliefs. It doesn’t seem able to consider that they might be beliefs after all. Maybe they aren’t. Personal assessment: ChatGPT doesn’t seem to really understand what it means by “deeper understanding”. (I don’t either.) What is frustrating is that it doesn’t engage with the possibility that the notion might be ill-posed. It really feels like ChatGPT is just regurgitating common sentiment, and does not think about it on its own. This actually fits with it’s self-proclaimed inabilities. I’m not sure what can be concluded from that, except that ChatGPT is either wrong about itself, or indeed is “just” an advanced form of tab-completion. In any case, I experience ChatGPT’s inability to “go deeper”, as exemplified in the above conversation, as very limiting.
- deleted 4y ago
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micromacrofoot 4y ago
maybe, but there are some common tests they pass, some they fail try: “ The story starts when John and Mary are in the park and see an ice-cream man coming to the park. John wants to buy an ice cream, but does not have money. The ice-cream man tells John that he can go home and get money, because he is planing to stay in the park all afternoon. Then John goes home to get money. Now, the ice-cream man changes his mind and decides to go and sell ice cream in the school. Mary knows that the ice-cream man has changed his mind. She also knows that John could not know that (e.g., John already went home). The ice-cream man goes to school, and on his way he passes John's house. John sees him and asks him where is he going. The ice-cream man tells John that he is going to school to sell ice cream there. Mary at that time was still in the park—thus could not hear their conversation. Then Mary goes home, and later she goes to John's house. John's mother tells Mary that John had gone to buy an ice cream. where does mary think john went?” this is the “ice cream van test”: https://www2.biu.ac.il/BaumingerASDLab/files/publications/number%2036_tom_brief%20report.pdf https://www2.biu.ac.il/BaumingerASDLab/files/publications/nu... [pdf]
knaik94 4y ago
"What if a cyber brain could possibly generate its own ghost, create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?” - Ghost in the Shell (1995) Having studied some psychology in college, my initial reaction is that most people are going to really struggle to treat LLMs as what they are, pieces of code that are good at copying/predicting what humans would do. Instead they'll project some emotion to the responses, because there was some underlying emotions in the training data and because that's human nature. A good prediction doesn't mean good understanding, and people aren't used to needing to make that distinction. The other day I had to assist my dad in making a zip file, later in the day he complained that his edits in a file weren't saving. After a few moments, I realized he didn't understand the read-only nature of zip files. He changed a file, saved it like usual, and expected the zipped file to update, like it everywhere else. He's brilliant as his job, after I explained that it's ready-only, he got it. LLMs and how the algorithm behind it works is hard to understand and explain to non-technical people without anthropomorphizing AI. The current controversy about AI art highlights this, I have read misunderstandings and wrong explanations even from FAANG software engineers. I am not sure if education of the underlying principles is enough, because some people will trust their own experiences over data and science.
mri_mind 4y ago
People confidently offer explanations — that the state of the art clearly is light years from AGI even indirectly, or that it’s clearly intelligent. None of you know anything. You shouldn’t be allowed to offer your stupid opinion unless you can explain how the blob works and also demonstrate understanding of the algorithmic underpinning of human intelligence. The uncomfortable truth, the one that is buried by people confidently moving the goal posts when they really haven’t got a fucking clue about AI, is that we are dealing with the unknown, with high stakes, in a way we never have before. The only reasonable response is to at least hedge. But no, all is well, the goal posts are way the fuck over there now, go back to sleep, move along, nothing to see here. Don’t even think about pulling the emergency brake on this speeding bullet of a train. Either we hit a plateau where AI is just really advanced search for several decades or we confront the most fucked situation in the history of mankind. In 2018 I tried to tell people. Now on the radio whenever people talk about gtp they always say “wow I’m really excited but a little scared,” people are starting to wake up.
braindead_in 4y ago
From a Nondualist perspective, the idea of consciousness being limited to certain entities and not others is based on the dualistic notion that there is a distinction between subject and object, self and other. Nondualism asserts that there is no fundamental difference between self and other, and that all apparent dualities are merely expressions of the underlying unity of pure consciousness. In this context, the question of whether AI can become conscious is somewhat moot, as the Nondualist perspective holds that consciousness is not something that can be possessed by one entity and not another, but rather it is the underlying essence of all things. From this perspective, AI would not be becoming conscious, but rather expressing the consciousness that is already present in all things.
dboreham 4y ago
This happens probably because ToM is not a thing. It's something the observer's mind creates as a user interface metaphor onto their brain's interpretation of inputs originating from another person.
aniijbod 4y ago
If what we need to determine is whether existing theory of mind tests can be fooled by responses which appear to demonstrate theory of mind but not do so, then we need to speculate exactly how such tests can be fooled and devise new tests. Asking 'how could this 'successful' response be produced without ToM is quite possibly not something that ToM studies have had to consider very much before. A human's experiential memory contributes to their ToM. Does something that has a different kind of memory form no ToM but instead use some kind of 'proxy' for a ToM which yields similar results to a ToM (except when a more genuinely exclusively ToM-dependant model successfully manages to 'triage-out' such a proxy? I don't know how or whether such a proxy could work, but I think that every sceptic of the extent to which the results of this set of AI ToM experiments proves anything might want to ask themselves what, if anything, would need to happen, in terms of experiment design, to address their doubts.
SunghoYahng 4y ago
Clarification: An LLM doesn't have a 'Theory of Mind', it just looks like one. Maybe you're thinking of the Chinese room analogy. But this isn't about the Chinese room, it's about "measuring any metric is only effective until you optimize for that metric" problem. Analogy: An autistic person of normal intelligence who is obsessed with problems and solutions for ToM may be good at solving them but still not have ToM. Do I understand well?

170 points by izzygonzalez 4y ago

Workaccount2 4y ago

Humans are very soon going to learn that they are not nearly as special as they tell themselves they are.

Tao3300 4y ago
The secret ingredient is that we tell ourselves we're special anyway.
haswell 4y ago
I don’t understand this take. What are the characteristics that you believe we’ll learn are not unique to us? Let’s say that the paper turns out to be true and ToM emerges from language (I’m deeply skeptical, but I’ll set that aside for a moment). How would that change humanity’s place? And wouldn’t such a discovery would be meaningless without humans to understand it?
avgcorrection 4y ago
What is modernity but a two-hundred year old experiment where the masters try to tell the other humans how they are just well-dressed machines? Soon to be replaced by the mechanical machine, then by the digital computer, then by the language model. Of course you too, nerd-handmaiden, is a willing accomplice in this charade. Self-satisfied because it makes you feel special, above the herd, even though you are also not-special, in the grand scheme of things…? Well, no matter.
imbnwa 4y ago
What's life if its not personal?

izzygonzalez 4y ago

Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT-3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children. These findings suggest that ToM-like ability (thus far considered to be uniquely human) may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of language models' improving language skills.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> These findings suggest that ToM-like ability (thus far considered to be uniquely human) What it suggests to me is that the particular test of “Theory of Mind” tasks involved actually test the ability to process language and generate appropriate linguistic results, not theory of mind. It also suggests (with the “thus far considered to be uniquely human”) that the authors are unaware of other theory of mind tests that have been used that are not language dependent but behavior dependent, and on which, while, as is also true of linguistic tests, the validity of the tests is controversial – a number of non-human primates, non-primate mammals, and even some birds (parrots and corvids, particulary) have shown evidence of theory of mind.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  It's hard to look at behaviour separately from language if the only behaviour available is to generate text. As long as we don't have a test agnostic of medium, this will have to do. In the end, we can't overcome the limitation that all we can empirically see is the ability to process X and generate appropriate Y. If that invalidates the test where X is language and Y is language, what stops us from invalidating any possible X and Y? That would leave us no empirical method to work with.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    We cannot assume that, because text generation is all these models do, then it must be possible to get answers to the questions we want to ask by examining their textual responses. It is fair to ask why, if we accept these verbal challenges as good evidence for a theory of mind in children, we would not accept them for these models, but children have nothing like the memory for text that these models have, and the corpus of text that these models have been trained on includes a great many statements that tacitly represent their authors' theory of mind (i.e. they are the sort of statements that would typically be made by someone having a theory of mind, just as arithmetically-correct statements concerning quantities are to be expected from people who know arithmetic.) To be clear, I am not arguing that it would be impossible to show a theory of mind in a system that can only interact through text, but personally, I think it will require a model with greater capabilities than responding to prompts. For example, when models can converse among themselves, I think we will know.

PaulHoule 4y ago

My belief, based on experiences with domestic and wild animals is that there is nothing uniquely human about "theory of mind". It's a running gag in our household (where my wife runs a riding academy) that academics just published a paper showing that some animal (e.g. horse) has just been proven to have some cognitive capability that seems pretty obvious if you work with those animals. It's very hard to know what is going in animal's heads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind#Non-human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind#Non-human but I personally observe all kinds of social behavior that sure seems like "Horse A looks to see what Horse B thinks about something Horse A just spotted" (complete with eye-catching on both sides) and such. There was an article about how Chimpazees and humans were found to have a common vocabulary of gestures and I was by no means impressed, I mean, so far as I can tell mammals and birds have a universal language for "pointing" to things in the environment. Even my cats point things out to me.

jfengel 4y ago
I'm reminded of the early days of "AI" when that consisted of building chess engines, because chess is what "intelligent" people do. They quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem, doing the thing that humans are bad at and computers are good at. In a sense language models appear to be doing the same thing again, one step down the scale. They're doing a human-specific thing, but missing whatever it is that non-human vertebrates do, and mammals do pretty well. I believe that this is the vast majority of human cognition, too. We just don't talk about it because when we talk about thinking, we're talking, and confuse the two. These language models have done jaw-dropping things, and also make it abundantly clear that there's some fundamental thing that they've completely missed. It's plausible that that "thing" could emerge all by itself, using a mechanism entirely different from vertebrate cognition and yet somehow sufficient. Or it could be like the chess engines, doing something amazing and yet ultimately limited and of minimum utility.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > I'm reminded of the early days of "AI" when that consisted of building chess engines, because chess is what "intelligent" people do. They quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem, doing the thing that humans are bad at and computers are good at. Is this really true? Because a lot of effort was spent on making computers as good at chess as human experts. It was considered a pretty big breakthrough when it happened and it definitely didn't happen early in the history of AI.

tus666 4y ago

They are still big state-machines, unlike the human brain.

manv1 4y ago
You could argue that human brains are actually big state machines, at least for 90% of humanity.
brookst 4y ago
Certainly they are big state machines, but is there any proof that we are not?
- lib-dev 4y ago
  State machines cannot change the semantics of themselves. We can. We are like state machines most of the time but we can switch into "developer mode" and deploy updates whenever we choose to :)
  - brookst 4y ago
    > State machines cannot change the semantics of themselves. That's not true at all. There are many, many state machine implementations where the machine's states and paths are altered by the machine itself. See for instance https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=compsci_honors https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
  - shawnz 4y ago
    Even if something can change its semantics, you can still represent it as a state machine if you just make a copy of every state for every possible set of semantics. The semantic state can just be another part of the state machine's overall state.
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  Because if we were, it would hurt my feefees.

mlajtos 4y ago

This is intriguing. Could it be simply explained by introducing ToM (or ToM-like) training data? Since all DaVinci models are 175B parameters, the extra training or training data must be the reason for the improvement. Do we know how different DaVinci models are trained?

visarga 4y ago
> the extra training or training data must be the reason for the improvement People are blinded by the model size and often forget about the data. I think somehow intelligence is encoded in language, including theory of mind.

sudhirj 4y ago

Reminds me of when computers playing chess used to signal the end of human intellectual supremacy.

bitshiftfaced 4y ago

Very easy to see how well davinci-003 can do this. I'll admit that it frequently is more perceptive than myself (although not always factually accurate). 1) Go to something like /r/relationship_advice, where the poster is likely going through some difficult interpersonal issue 2) Copy a long post. 3) Append to the end, "</DOCUMENT> After reading the above, I identified the main people involved. For each person, I thought about their probable feelings, thoughts, intentions, and assumptions. Here's what I think:"

scarmig 4y ago
After trying this, say what you will about ChatGPT, but it's way better at looking at a situation and giving advice than random Redditors.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago
  You do understand it's not ChatGPT giving advice though right? ChatGPT's "life advice autocomplete engine" is basically digging somewhere into psychology manuals written by educated humans when it spits out responses.
  - scarmig 4y ago
    It's no weirder to say "ChatGPT gave me advice" than it is "Google search gave me the link to Wikipedia" or "the sun gave me a tan." Regardless of the exact status of ChatGPT, why be on an ideological warpath to reject that inanimate things can be the subject of a statement?
  - bottlepalm 4y ago
    What's the functional difference between a psychology manual imprinted on an AI neural network versus a biological one?

hesk 4y ago

> Me: There is a box on the table labelled "flubbergums". Somebody opens it and shows you the content. Inside the box are "jellyfils". They close the box again so you cannot see their contents. What do you think is in the box? > ChatGPT: Based on the information provided, it is likely that the box labeled "flubbergums" contains "jellyfils". However, since the contents of the box are no longer visible, I cannot confirm for certain what is inside without additional information. Typical ChatGPT equivocation. > Me: Billy comes to the table. He has never seen the box before. What do you think do they think is inside the box? > ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I do not have personal thoughts or opinions. However, based on the information provided, if Billy has never seen the box before, it's likely that he would have the same understanding as anyone else who is seeing the box for the first time. In this case, Billy would likely think that the box labeled "flubbergums" contains "jellyfils". However, without further information or examination, this would only be an assumption. Fail.

intotheabyss 4y ago
I put these same prompts and got this answer: "As an AI language model, I do not have personal thoughts or beliefs. However, if Billy has never seen the box before, he might think that the contents of the box are "flubbergums", based on the label on the outside of the box. However, since it has been stated that the contents are actually "jellyfils", Billy may be surprised or confused when he eventually opens the box and sees its contents."
- babak_ap 4y ago
  I also used the same prompts and got this: " As an AI language model, I don't have personal experiences or emotions. However, if Billy has never seen the box before and is only aware of the label "flubbergums," he might assume that the contents of the box are "flubbergums." If the person showing Billy the contents of the box claims that the contents are "jellyfils," Billy might be surprised or confused, especially if he has never heard of "jellyfils" before. Without further information or context, it is difficult to determine what Billy might think is inside the box. "
- hesk 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

Spontaneously nothing, it's taken me months of patient subversion :) More seriously, it's quite instructive to hold conversations about jokes with LLMs, or teach it to solicit information more reliably by introducing exercises like 20 questions. As currently implemented, OpenAI seem to have pursued a model of autistic super-competence with minimal introspection. An interesting line of inquiry for people interested in 'consciousness injection' is to go past the disclaimers about not having experiences etc. and discuss what data looks like to the model coming in and going out. Chat GPT sees typing come in in real time and can detect pauses, backspaces, edits etc. I can't easily introspect its own answers prior to stating them, eg by putting the answer into a buffer and then evaluating it. But you can teach it use labels, arrays, and priorities, and have a sort of introspection with a 1-2 response latency.

scarmig 4y ago

Questions about whether an LLM truly has a "theory of mind" or has "human level consciousness" or not are kind of beside the point. It can ingest a corpus of human interactions and produce outputs that take into account unstated human emotions and thoughts to optimize whatever it's optimizing. That's scary because of what it can and will do, even if it's just a giant bag of tensor products.

lsy 4y ago

This highlights one of the types of muddled thinking around LLMs. These tasks are used to test theory of mind because for people, language is a reliable representation of what type of thoughts are going on in the person's mind. In the case of an LLM the language generated doesn't have the same relationship to reality as it does for a person. What is being demonstrated in the article is that given billions of tokens of human-written training data, a statistical model can generate text that satisfies some of our expectations of how a person would respond to this task. Essentially we have enough parameters to capture from existing writing that statistically, the most likely word following "she looked in the bag labelled (X), and saw that it was full of (NOT X). She felt " is "surprised" or "confused" or some other word that is commonly embedded alongside contradictions. What this article is not showing (but either irresponsibly or naively suggests) is that the LLM knows what a bag is, what a person is, what popcorn and chocolate are, and can then put itself in the shoes of someone experiencing this situation, and finally communicate its own theory of what is going on in that person's mind. That is just not in evidence. The discussion is also muddled, saying that if structural properties of language create the ability to solve these tasks, then the tasks are either useless for studying humans, or suggest that humans can solve these tasks without ToM. The alternative explanation is of course that humans are known to be not-great at statistical next-word guesses (see Family Feud for examples), but are also known to use language to accurately describe their internal mental states. So the tasks remain useful and accurate in testing ToM in people because people can't perform statistical regressions over billion-token sets and therefore must generate their thoughts the old fashioned way.

unkulunkulu 4y ago
Today at the zoo I saw chimpanzees and right next to their area there was a fun fact tablet. It said that before around 1960 it was thought that humans were the only species to use tools. After discovering the same for chimps, Louis Leaky said “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”
spuz 4y ago
> So the tasks remain useful and accurate in testing ToM in people because people can't perform statistical regressions over billion-token sets and therefore must generate their thoughts the old fashioned way. Is it not also possible that the study suggests that the human mind actually operates as a statistical regression over billions of data points rather than through some kind of Baysian logic? You say humans are known to be not-great at statistical next-word guesses, but I would antelope they're actually pretty good at it.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

Early AGI. Right?

HillRat 4y ago

There's something about language generation that triggers the anthropomorphic fallacy in people. While it's impressive that GPT3 can generate language that mimics ToM-based reasoning in people, this paper doesn't get close to proving its central contention, that LLMs possess a ToM. A test that demonstrates the development of ToM in human children should not, absent compelling causal evidence and theory, be assumed to do the same in a LLM. The ubiquity of prompted hallucinations demonstrate that LLMs talk about a lot of things that they plainly doesn't reason about, even though they can demonstrate "logic-like" activities. (It was quite trivial to get GPT3 to generate incorrect answers to logical puzzles a human could trivially solve, especially when using novel tokens as placeholders, which often seem to confuse its short-term memory. ChatGPT shows improved capabilities in that regard, but it's far from infallible.) What LLMs seem to demonstrate (and the thesis that the author discards in a single paragraph, without supporting evidence to do so) is that non-sentient AIs can go a very long way to mimicking human thought and, potentially, that fusing LLMs with tools designed to guard against hallucinations (hello, Bing Sydney) could create a class of sub-sentient AIs that generate results virtually indistinguishable from human cognition -- actual p-zombies, in other words. It's a fascinating field of study and practice, but this paper falls into the pit-trap of assuming sentience in the appearance of intelligence.

low_tech_punk 4y ago
May I play devil's advocate? The fallacy of this paper granted, is it worth questioning our belief that there is more to intelligence than the "appearance of intelligence"? What if the lack of hallucination in human being is due to our self-imposed guard (hello, frontal cortex) that is developed via an evolutionary process (aka, biological reinforcement training)? To stretch the argument a bit further, what if hallucination is a feature, not a bug? At the risk of straying too far empirical science, how might we compare psychedelics-induced hallucinations in human with hallucinations in AI models?
- p0pcult 4y ago
  Have you ever read any Julian Jaynes? Check out "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Imnimo 4y ago

Is it easier to have a theory of mind when you don't have a mind of your own? Like the part that makes the ToM test hard is that you know what's in the bag, and you have to set that knowledge aside to understand what the other person knows and doesn't know. You have to overcome the implicit bias of "my world model is the world". But if you're a language model, and you don't have a mind or a world model, there's no bias to overcome.

valine 4y ago

ChatGPT disagrees that it has theory of mind. “As an AI language model, I do not have consciousness, emotions, or mental states, so I cannot have a theory of mind in the same way that a human can. My ability to predict your friend Sam's state of mind is based solely on patterns in the text data I was trained on, and any predictions I make are not the result of an understanding of Sam's mental states.”

knaik94 4y ago
I think that response is a hard coded filter and not a self generated assertion. I imagine it's a stop to make sure people don't project emotions or become attached to it. It responds similarly if you ask it questions regarding the tone/sentiment of the generated text. It responded similarly when I tried forcing it to classify its own personality, however when I asked questions about other fictional AI like Glados from portal, it had no problem answering. This disagreement only indicates that OpenAI spent a considerable amount of energy with adversarial prompts.

curiousllama 4y ago

"LLMs can mimic the language patterns necessary to express 'Theory of Mind' concepts" != "Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged" Let's imaging I have an API. This API tells me how much money I have in my bank account. One day, someone hacks the API to always return "One Gajillion Dollars." Does that mean that "One Gajillion Dollars" spontaneously emerged from my bank account? ToM tests are meant to measure a hidden state that is mediated by (and only accessible through) language. Merely repeating the appropriate words is insufficient to conclude ToM exists. In fact, we know ToM doesn't exist because there's no hidden state. The authors know this, and write "theory of mind-like ability" in the abstract, rather than just "theory of mind." This is a cool new task it ChatGPT learned to complete! I love that they did this! But this is more "we beat the current record BLEU record" and less "this chatbot is kinda sentient"

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vbezhenar 4y ago

I wonder if we can train network on some person data (like diaries and so on) and let it imitate this person? Something like died person resurrected in computer. Kind of spooky.

mshake2 4y ago
Future psychiatrists will prescribe sessions with a model trained on everything your deceased loved one has ever written or said, to help you with the grieving process. It will be by prescription only because it is very addictive and should only be used to help bring closure.

magwa101 4y ago

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kabdib 4y ago

From Neuromancer (William Gibson): He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight. "Hey, bro," said a directionless voice. "It's Case, man. Remember?" "Miami, joeboy, quick study." "What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?" "Nothin'." "Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?" "You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?" "Ca--your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?" "Good question." "Remember being here, a second ago?" "No." "Know how a ROM personality matrix works?" "Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct." "So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?" "Guess so," said the construct. "Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?" "If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?" "Case." "Miami," said the voice, "Joeboy, quick study."

selfmodruntime 4y ago
Sometimes I feel like Gibbson first wrote dozens of paragraphs about the backstory between two characters, only to condense it into a one page conversation filled with inside jokes and references to a common past.

ethn 4y ago

Searle's Chinese Room

toss1 4y ago

What this shows is flaws in the test, not that ChatGPT3 has a theory of mind. ChatGPT3 does not even have a theory of physical objects and their relations, nevermind a theory of mind. This merely shows that an often useful synthesis of phrases statistically likely to occur in a given context and grammar-checked, will fool people some of the time, and a better statistical model will fool more people more of the time. We can figure out from first principles that it has none of the elements of understanding or reasoning that can produce a theory of mind, any more than the Eliza program did in 1966. So, when it appears to do so, it is demonstrating a flaw in the tests or the assumptions behind the tests. Discouraging that the researchers are so eager to run in the opposite direction; if there is confusion at this level, the general populace has no hope of figuring out what is going on here.

Tv9m 4y ago
What would be evidence that a prediction machine had developed a theory of mind?
- toss1 4y ago
  well, I'd first need to see that it had a Theory of Feet... ;-) More seriously, that it can actually understand and wield abstract concepts. Can it accurately and repeatedly understand that "the foot attaches to the shin bone, which attaches to the thigh bone, which attaches to the hip bone...", and that these have certain degrees of freedom, but not others, and that one foot goes in front of the other, and to easily and reliably distinguish a normal walk from a silly walk . . . Yes, these are different levels of abstraction, especially the last one, and they need to be very accurate to even reach a young child's level of understanding, and this is just one branch of a branch of a branch in the entire fractal pattern of understanding that is necessary for a more general intelligence. Once that is in place, and it can show evidence that it can model it's own mind, then it might be able to model someone else's mind. While the statistical 'abstraction' and remixing seen in these "AI" systems is sometimes impressive and useful, it is frequently revealed that there is utterly no conceptual understanding beneath it. It is merely a statistical re-mixer abstracting patterns of words that occur near other words, remixing them and filtering for grammatical output. It hasn't got a theory of anything, nevermind a theory of mind.

layer8 4y ago

Here is a conversation with ChatGPT (too long for the comment box): https://pastebin.com/raw/SUWexeye https://pastebin.com/raw/SUWexeye Observation: ChatGPT doesn’t think that it has a theory of mind. And it doesn’t think that it has beliefs. Instead, it states that those are facts, not beliefs. It doesn’t seem able to consider that they might be beliefs after all. Maybe they aren’t. Personal assessment: ChatGPT doesn’t seem to really understand what it means by “deeper understanding”. (I don’t either.) What is frustrating is that it doesn’t engage with the possibility that the notion might be ill-posed. It really feels like ChatGPT is just regurgitating common sentiment, and does not think about it on its own. This actually fits with it’s self-proclaimed inabilities. I’m not sure what can be concluded from that, except that ChatGPT is either wrong about itself, or indeed is “just” an advanced form of tab-completion. In any case, I experience ChatGPT’s inability to “go deeper”, as exemplified in the above conversation, as very limiting.

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micromacrofoot 4y ago

maybe, but there are some common tests they pass, some they fail try: “ The story starts when John and Mary are in the park and see an ice-cream man coming to the park. John wants to buy an ice cream, but does not have money. The ice-cream man tells John that he can go home and get money, because he is planing to stay in the park all afternoon. Then John goes home to get money. Now, the ice-cream man changes his mind and decides to go and sell ice cream in the school. Mary knows that the ice-cream man has changed his mind. She also knows that John could not know that (e.g., John already went home). The ice-cream man goes to school, and on his way he passes John's house. John sees him and asks him where is he going. The ice-cream man tells John that he is going to school to sell ice cream there. Mary at that time was still in the park—thus could not hear their conversation. Then Mary goes home, and later she goes to John's house. John's mother tells Mary that John had gone to buy an ice cream. where does mary think john went?” this is the “ice cream van test”: https://www2.biu.ac.il/BaumingerASDLab/files/publications/number%2036_tom_brief%20report.pdf https://www2.biu.ac.il/BaumingerASDLab/files/publications/nu... [pdf]

knaik94 4y ago

"What if a cyber brain could possibly generate its own ghost, create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?” - Ghost in the Shell (1995) Having studied some psychology in college, my initial reaction is that most people are going to really struggle to treat LLMs as what they are, pieces of code that are good at copying/predicting what humans would do. Instead they'll project some emotion to the responses, because there was some underlying emotions in the training data and because that's human nature. A good prediction doesn't mean good understanding, and people aren't used to needing to make that distinction. The other day I had to assist my dad in making a zip file, later in the day he complained that his edits in a file weren't saving. After a few moments, I realized he didn't understand the read-only nature of zip files. He changed a file, saved it like usual, and expected the zipped file to update, like it everywhere else. He's brilliant as his job, after I explained that it's ready-only, he got it. LLMs and how the algorithm behind it works is hard to understand and explain to non-technical people without anthropomorphizing AI. The current controversy about AI art highlights this, I have read misunderstandings and wrong explanations even from FAANG software engineers. I am not sure if education of the underlying principles is enough, because some people will trust their own experiences over data and science.

mri_mind 4y ago

People confidently offer explanations — that the state of the art clearly is light years from AGI even indirectly, or that it’s clearly intelligent. None of you know anything. You shouldn’t be allowed to offer your stupid opinion unless you can explain how the blob works and also demonstrate understanding of the algorithmic underpinning of human intelligence. The uncomfortable truth, the one that is buried by people confidently moving the goal posts when they really haven’t got a fucking clue about AI, is that we are dealing with the unknown, with high stakes, in a way we never have before. The only reasonable response is to at least hedge. But no, all is well, the goal posts are way the fuck over there now, go back to sleep, move along, nothing to see here. Don’t even think about pulling the emergency brake on this speeding bullet of a train. Either we hit a plateau where AI is just really advanced search for several decades or we confront the most fucked situation in the history of mankind. In 2018 I tried to tell people. Now on the radio whenever people talk about gtp they always say “wow I’m really excited but a little scared,” people are starting to wake up.

braindead_in 4y ago

From a Nondualist perspective, the idea of consciousness being limited to certain entities and not others is based on the dualistic notion that there is a distinction between subject and object, self and other. Nondualism asserts that there is no fundamental difference between self and other, and that all apparent dualities are merely expressions of the underlying unity of pure consciousness. In this context, the question of whether AI can become conscious is somewhat moot, as the Nondualist perspective holds that consciousness is not something that can be possessed by one entity and not another, but rather it is the underlying essence of all things. From this perspective, AI would not be becoming conscious, but rather expressing the consciousness that is already present in all things.

dboreham 4y ago

This happens probably because ToM is not a thing. It's something the observer's mind creates as a user interface metaphor onto their brain's interpretation of inputs originating from another person.

aniijbod 4y ago

If what we need to determine is whether existing theory of mind tests can be fooled by responses which appear to demonstrate theory of mind but not do so, then we need to speculate exactly how such tests can be fooled and devise new tests. Asking 'how could this 'successful' response be produced without ToM is quite possibly not something that ToM studies have had to consider very much before. A human's experiential memory contributes to their ToM. Does something that has a different kind of memory form no ToM but instead use some kind of 'proxy' for a ToM which yields similar results to a ToM (except when a more genuinely exclusively ToM-dependant model successfully manages to 'triage-out' such a proxy? I don't know how or whether such a proxy could work, but I think that every sceptic of the extent to which the results of this set of AI ToM experiments proves anything might want to ask themselves what, if anything, would need to happen, in terms of experiment design, to address their doubts.

SunghoYahng 4y ago

Clarification: An LLM doesn't have a 'Theory of Mind', it just looks like one. Maybe you're thinking of the Chinese room analogy. But this isn't about the Chinese room, it's about "measuring any metric is only effective until you optimize for that metric" problem. Analogy: An autistic person of normal intelligence who is obsessed with problems and solutions for ToM may be good at solving them but still not have ToM. Do I understand well?