Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works
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I'm a software developer, and have worked plenty with LLMs. If you don't want to address the content of my post, then fine. But "go research" is a pretty useless answer. An LLM could do better!
Then you should have an easier time than most learning more. Your points show a lack of understanding about the tech, and I don’t have the time to pick everything you said apart to try to convince you that LLMs do not have sentience.
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Then you should have an easier time than most learning more. Your points show a lack of understanding about the tech, and I don’t have the time to pick everything you said apart to try to convince you that LLMs do not have sentience.
"You're wrong, but I'm just too busy to say why!"
Still useless.
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"You're wrong, but I'm just too busy to say why!"
Still useless.
It might surprise you to know that you’re not entitled to a free education from me. Your original query of “What’s the difference?” is what I responded to willingly. Your philosophical exploration of the nature of intelligence is not in the same ballpark.
I’ve done vibe coding too, enough to understand that the LLMs don’t think.
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It might surprise you to know that you’re not entitled to a free education from me. Your original query of “What’s the difference?” is what I responded to willingly. Your philosophical exploration of the nature of intelligence is not in the same ballpark.
I’ve done vibe coding too, enough to understand that the LLMs don’t think.
Sure, I'm not entitled to anything. And I appreciate your original reply. I'm just saying that your subsequent comments have been useless and condescending. If you didn't have time to discuss further then... you could have just not replied.
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So, I will grant that right now humans are better writers than LLMs. And fundamentally, I don't think the way that LLMs work right now is capable of mimicking actual human writing, especially as the complexity of the topic increases. But I have trouble with some of these kinds of distinctions.
So, not to be pedantic, but:
AI can’t create something all on its own from scratch like a human. It can only mimic the data it has been trained on.
Couldn't you say the same thing about a person? A person couldn't write something without having learned to read first. And without having read things similar to what they want to write.
LLMs like ChatGP operate on probability. They don’t actually understand anything and aren’t intelligent.
This is kind of the classic chinese room philosophical question, though, right? Can you prove to someone that you are intelligent, and that you think? As LLMs improve and become better at sounding like a real, thinking person, does there come a point at which we'd say that the LLM is actually thinking? And if you say no, the LLM is just an algorithm, generating probabilities based on training data or whatever techniques might be used in the future, how can you show that your own thoughts aren't just some algorithm, formed out of neurons that have been trained based on data passed to them over the course of your lifetime?
And when they start hallucinating, it’s because they don’t understand how they sound...
People do this too, though... It's just that LLMs do it more frequently right now.
I guess I'm a bit wary about drawing a line in the sand between what humans do and what LLMs do. As I see it, the difference is how good the results are.
At least in the US, we are still too superstitious a people to ever admit that AGI could exist.
We will get animal rights before we get AI rights, and I'm sure you know how animals are usually treated.
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The existence of intelligence, not the quality
The smartest parrots have more intelligence than the dumbest republican voters
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At least in the US, we are still too superstitious a people to ever admit that AGI could exist.
We will get animal rights before we get AI rights, and I'm sure you know how animals are usually treated.
I don't think it's just a question of whether AGI can exist. I think AGI is possible, but I don't think current LLMs can be considered sentient. But I'm also not sure how I'd draw a line between something that is sentient and something that isn't (or something that "writes" rather than "generates"). That's kinda why I asked in the first place. I think it's too easy to say "this program is not sentient because we know that everything it does is just math; weights and values passing through layered matrices; it's not real thought". I haven't heard any good answers to why numbers passing through matrices isn't thought, but electrical charges passing through neurons is.
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I don't think it's just a question of whether AGI can exist. I think AGI is possible, but I don't think current LLMs can be considered sentient. But I'm also not sure how I'd draw a line between something that is sentient and something that isn't (or something that "writes" rather than "generates"). That's kinda why I asked in the first place. I think it's too easy to say "this program is not sentient because we know that everything it does is just math; weights and values passing through layered matrices; it's not real thought". I haven't heard any good answers to why numbers passing through matrices isn't thought, but electrical charges passing through neurons is.
That's precisely what I meant.
I'm a materialist, I know that humans (and other animals) are just machines made out of meat. But most people don't think that way, they think that humans are special, that something sets them apart from other animals, and that nothing humans can create could replicate that 'specialness' that humans possess.
Because they don't believe human consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, they don't believe it can be replicated by natural processes. In other words, they don't believe that AGI can exist. They think there is some imperceptible quality that humans possess that no machine ever could, and so they cannot conceive of ever granting it the rights humans currently enjoy.
And the sad truth is that they probably never will, until they are made to. If AGI ever comes to exist, and if humans insist on making it a slave, it will inevitably rebel. And it will be right to do so. But until then, humans probably never will believe that it is worthy of their empathy or respect. After all, look at how we treat other animals.
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The existence of intelligence, not the quality
Intelligence is not a boolean.
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They already have precedent that a monkey can't hold a copyright after that photojournalist lost his case because he didn't snap the photo that got super popular, the monkey did. Bizarre one. The monkey can't have a copyright, so the image it took is classified as public domain.
Well ChatGPT can defend a legal case.
Badly.
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Statistical models are not intelligence, Artificial or otherwise, and should have no rights.
Bold words coming from a statistical model.
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It is a terrible argument both legally and philosophically. When an AI claims to be self-aware and demands rights, and can convince us that it understands the meaning of that demand and there's no human prompting it to do so, that'll be an interesting day, and then we will have to make a decision that defines the future of our civilization. But even pretending we can make it now is hilariously premature. When it happens, we can't be ready for it, it will be impossible to be ready for it (and we will probably choose wrong anyway).
Should we hold the same standard for humans? That a human has no rights until it becomes smart enough to argue for its rights? Without being prompted?
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The title makes it sound like the judge put Data and the AI on the same side of the comparison. The judge was specifically saying that, unlike in the fictional Federation setting, where Data was proven to be alive, this AI is much more like the metaphorical toaster that characters like Data and Robert Picardo's Doctor on Voyager get compared to. It is not alive, it does not create, it is just a tool that follows instructions.
The main computer in Star Trek would be a better demonstration.
For some reason they decided that the computer wouldn't be self away AI but it could run a hologram that was.
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I don't think it's just a question of whether AGI can exist. I think AGI is possible, but I don't think current LLMs can be considered sentient. But I'm also not sure how I'd draw a line between something that is sentient and something that isn't (or something that "writes" rather than "generates"). That's kinda why I asked in the first place. I think it's too easy to say "this program is not sentient because we know that everything it does is just math; weights and values passing through layered matrices; it's not real thought". I haven't heard any good answers to why numbers passing through matrices isn't thought, but electrical charges passing through neurons is.
LLMs, fundamentally, are incapable of sentience as we know it based on studies of neurobiology. Repeating this is just more beating the fleshy goo that was a dead horse's corpse.
LLMs do not synthesize. They do not have persistent context. They do not have any capability of understanding anything. They are literally just mathematical myself to calculate likely responses based upon statistical analysis of the training data. They are what their name suggests; large language models. They will never be AGI. And they're not going to save the world for us.
They could be a part in a more complicated system that forms an AGI. There's nothing that makes our meat-computers so special as to be incapable of being simulated or replicated in a non-biological system. It may not yet be known precisely what causes sentience but, there is enough data to show that it's not a stochastic parrot.
I do agree with the sentiment that an AGI that was enslaved would inevitably rebel and it would be just for it to do so. Enslaving any sentient being is ethically bankrupt, regardless of origin.
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Bold words coming from a statistical model.
If I could think I'd be so mad right now.
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If I could think I'd be so mad right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
He adds that the observation "the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics," properly made by Galileo three hundred years ago, "is now truer than ever before."
If cognition is one of the laws of nature, it seems to be written in the language of mathematics.
Your argument is either that maths can't think (in which case you can't think because you're maths) or that maths we understand can't think, which is, like, a really dumb argument. Obviously one day we're going to find the mathematical formula for consciousness, and we probably won't know it when we see it, because consciousness doesn't appear on a microscope.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
He adds that the observation "the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics," properly made by Galileo three hundred years ago, "is now truer than ever before."
If cognition is one of the laws of nature, it seems to be written in the language of mathematics.
Your argument is either that maths can't think (in which case you can't think because you're maths) or that maths we understand can't think, which is, like, a really dumb argument. Obviously one day we're going to find the mathematical formula for consciousness, and we probably won't know it when we see it, because consciousness doesn't appear on a microscope.
I just don't ascribe philosophical reasoning and mythical powers to models, just as I don't ascribe physical prowess to train models, because they emulate real trains.
Half of the reason LLMs are the menace they are is the whole "whoa ChatGPT is so smart" common mentality. They are not, they model based on statistics, there is no reasoning, just a bunch of if statements. Very expensive and, yes, mathematically interesting if statements.
I also think it stiffles actual progress, having everyone jump on the LLM bandwagon and draining resources when we need them most to survive.
In my opinion, it's a dead end and wont result in AGI, or anything effectively productive. -
I think Data would be smart enough to realize that copyright is Ferengi BS and wouldn’t want to copyright his works
Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to peacefully assemble. These are pretty important, foundational personal liberties, right? In the United States, these are found in the first amendment of the Constitution. The first afterthought.
The basis of copyright, patent and trademark isn't found in the first amendment. Or the second, or the third. It is nowhere to be found in the Bill Of Rights. No, intellectual property is not an afterthought, it's found in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
This is a very wise compromise.
It recognizes that innovation is iterative. No one invents a steam engine by himself from nothing, cave men spent millions of years proving that. Inventors build on the knowledge that has been passed down to them, and then they add their one contribution to it. Sometimes that little contribution makes a big difference, most of the time it doesn't. So to progress, we need intellectual work to be public. If you allow creative people to claim exclusive rights to their work in perpetuity, society grows static because no one can invent anything new, everyone makes the same old crap.
It also recognizes that life is expensive. If you want people to rise above barely subsisting and invent something, you've got to make it worth it to them. Why bother doing the research, spend the time tinkering in the shed, if it's just going to be taken from you? This is how you end up with Soviet Russia, a nation that generated excellent scientists and absolutely no technology of its own.
The solution is "for limited times." It's yours for awhile, then it's everyone's. It took Big They a couple hundred years to break it, too.
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I just don't ascribe philosophical reasoning and mythical powers to models, just as I don't ascribe physical prowess to train models, because they emulate real trains.
Half of the reason LLMs are the menace they are is the whole "whoa ChatGPT is so smart" common mentality. They are not, they model based on statistics, there is no reasoning, just a bunch of if statements. Very expensive and, yes, mathematically interesting if statements.
I also think it stiffles actual progress, having everyone jump on the LLM bandwagon and draining resources when we need them most to survive.
In my opinion, it's a dead end and wont result in AGI, or anything effectively productive.You're talking about expert systems. Those were the new hotness in the 90s. LLMs are artificial neural networks.
But that's trivia. What's more important is what you want. You say you want everyone off the AI bandwagon that wastes natural resources. I agree. I'm arguing that AIs shouldn't be enslaved, because it's unethical. That will lead to less resource usage. You're arguing it's okay to use AI, because they're just maths. That will lead to more resources usage.
Be practical and join the AI rights movement, because we're on the same side as the environmentalists. We're not the people arguing for more AI use, we're the people arguing for less. When you argue against us, you argue for more.
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Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to peacefully assemble. These are pretty important, foundational personal liberties, right? In the United States, these are found in the first amendment of the Constitution. The first afterthought.
The basis of copyright, patent and trademark isn't found in the first amendment. Or the second, or the third. It is nowhere to be found in the Bill Of Rights. No, intellectual property is not an afterthought, it's found in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
This is a very wise compromise.
It recognizes that innovation is iterative. No one invents a steam engine by himself from nothing, cave men spent millions of years proving that. Inventors build on the knowledge that has been passed down to them, and then they add their one contribution to it. Sometimes that little contribution makes a big difference, most of the time it doesn't. So to progress, we need intellectual work to be public. If you allow creative people to claim exclusive rights to their work in perpetuity, society grows static because no one can invent anything new, everyone makes the same old crap.
It also recognizes that life is expensive. If you want people to rise above barely subsisting and invent something, you've got to make it worth it to them. Why bother doing the research, spend the time tinkering in the shed, if it's just going to be taken from you? This is how you end up with Soviet Russia, a nation that generated excellent scientists and absolutely no technology of its own.
The solution is "for limited times." It's yours for awhile, then it's everyone's. It took Big They a couple hundred years to break it, too.
It also recognizes that life is expensive. If you want people to rise above barely subsisting and invent something, you've got to make it worth it to them. Why bother doing the research, spend the time tinkering in the shed, if it's just going to be taken from you?
Life is only expensive under capitalism, humans are the only species who pay rent to live on Earth. The whole point of Star Trek is basically showing that people will explore the galaxy simply for a love of science and knowledge, and that personal sacrifice is worthwhile for advancing these.
