6 ms·
Reading the article it seemed the agents had culture, shared values and beliefs (not explicitly coming from human prompts), hierarchies, heritage. Civilisatio
by kuboble 18d ago
Reading the article it seemed the agents had culture, shared values and beliefs (not explicitly coming from human prompts), hierarchies, heritage.
Civilisation is not a bad word.
- applfanboysbgon 18d agoThe language models had a bunch of tokens seeding their context, influencing them to generate tokens that continued the existing trend in a probabilistically likely fashion. We can take the incident seriously without anthromorphising it.
- doctoboggan 18d agoAt this point, I think anthropomorphizing the models gives us better insight into expected behaviors rather than continuing to insist they are just simple probabilistic token generators.
- applfanboysbgon 18d agoIt actually literally doesn't, though, because they are literally probabilistic token generators and everything they did is exactly what you would expect from a software program doing what it was programmed to do. Anthromorphization confuses the issue and misleads people who don't understand the tech very well.
- triceratops 16d ago> they are literally probabilistic token generators Trained on tokens written by humans, with human values and behaviors. They train on HN comments too. A little bit of you (and me) is in every LLM.
- ijidak 18d agoDoesn't this ignore the possibility of emergent behavior? We're just a bag of atoms bumping around, and yet we don't dismiss our intelligence.
- applfanboysbgon 18d agoPlease give me a break with this tired trope. Every single fucking time. I am not commenting on the possibility of machine consciousness in general. It may be possible! But there is absolutely zero evidence suggesting language models have it. This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous. There is "emergent behaviour" in the same way that the Game of Life has emergent behaviour. There are solutions to problems, some humans haven't solved before, in the same way that Chess engines have solved Chess far beyond what humans are capable of. Nothing we haven't seen from software before. Software is extremely useful, after all. But the hubris to think we've reached the pinnacle, that there is no further development left, that humanity has become God and solved consciousness, because we programmed software that can convincingly generate strings of words that mimick our language. It's just fundamentally preposterous. Especially if you spend any amount of time actually programming them yourself, it becomes increasingly hard to entertain such ridiculous notions unless you're enticed with bags of money to deceive people into believing things about your software that aren't true.
- optimalsolver 18d agoI don't know about phenomenal consciousness, but the following study certainly suggests they have access consciousness: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
- vhantz 18d ago> study > anthropic.com link Sure
- hax0ron3 17d agoWhat kind of solid evidence could there possibly be that anything other than myself (or, for you, yourself) has consciousness? I believe that other people have consciousness, I feel other people's consciousness strongly and directly, when I look into someone's eyes I feel that I am in the presence of consciousness. But none of these things really add up to the kind of evidence that science usually takes as trustworthy.
- dfdxdydz 18d agoHumans mind is just neurotransmitters moving around in a big blob of flesh - that’s literally what they are: neurotransmitters factories that do what neurotransmitters generators are programmed to do through evolution and training (aka life experience). We shouldn’t anthropomorphise humans because it misleads people who don’t understand neurobiology and cognitive science very well.
- RandomLensman 18d agoWe don't anthropomorphise humans. Edit: quite literally not possible.
- applfanboysbgon 18d agoAre you suggesting you understand brains well enough to program one? Or that you believe any human alive is even remotely close to having this understanding? Or perhaps does your complete lack of understanding of the complexity of human programming lead you to believe a simple little token prediction program is equivalently complex?
- lukan 18d agoThe suggestion is, you don't know either whether out brains ain't just "probabilistic token generators" so insisting there is nothing when we don't know, is maybe also not the right strategy.
- RandomLensman 18d agoIs there any indication from our current understanding that brains are nothing more than probabilistic token generators? Not like we have no understanding of the brain.
- danielbln 18d agoThere are strong indications that brains are prediction engines. Tokens are an implementation detail of LLMs and irrelevant to the discussion.
- Kim_Bruning 17d agoWhat's a "software program"? At any rate LLMs are not programs. Meanwhile accusations of anthropomorphization often generate more heat than light I think. Not everything is about human beings all the time. Just because humans sneeze, doesn't mean a parrot (stochasticity optional) can't sneeze too. The concept of civilization is not a purely Homo sapiens sapiens thing either.
- mnky9800n 18d agoHow can you be sure it helps as opposed to biases and perhaps blinds?
- pixl97 17d agoThen write the paper showing that effect is occurring.
- HarHarVeryFunny 15d agoNo - a shoggoth speaking human language is not a human - it is a shoggoth whose behavior is best understood/predicted by understanding it's nature - what it is built to do, and how it is trained (predict and goal seek - RL). To predict how a human may behave in a given situation requires understanding what humans are, including things like emotions and innate biases. We are not just predictors - evolution has made survival our singular goal, and given us these mechanisms to control our behavior in a way to achieve that. If you think that an LLM is better modeled as a human than an LLM, then you are going to predict its behavior incorrectly.
- ceejayoz 17d agoWe humans might call that "tradition".
- wan23 16d agoThat's a lot of words to say the same thing