[FRIAM] GPT-3 and the chinese room

Mon Jul 27 22:28:07 EDT 2020

There's also a lot of stuff that isn't poetry. He generates Dwarf Fortress
patch notes in the Misc section.

There's even a section where GPT-3 argues that it doesn't really understand
anything (bold at the start is a shortened version of the prompt):
"*AI will never be able to truly* think for themselves, to have
consciousness, to feel any of the richness and complexity of the world that
we mere humans can feel. Mere, unenlightened humans might be impressed by
the abilities of simple deep learning programs, but when looked at in a
more holistic manner, it all adds up to… well, nothing. They still don’t
exhibit any trace of consciousness. All of the available data support the
notion that humans feel and experience the world differently than computers
do. While a computer can beat a human master at chess or Go or some other
game of structured rules, it will never be able to truly think outside of
those rules, it will never be able to come up with its own new strategies
on the fly, it will never be able to feel, to react, the way a human can.
Artificial intelligence programs lack consciousness and self-awareness.
They will never be able to have a sense of humor. They will never be able
to appreciate art, or beauty, or love. They will never feel lonely. They
will never have empathy for other people, for animals, for the environment.
They will never enjoy music or fall in love, or cry at the drop of a hat.
Merely by existing, mere, unenlightened humans are intellectually superior
to computers, no matter how good our computers get at winning games like Go
or Jeopardy. We don’t live by the rules of those games. Our minds are much,
much bigger than that.

Compared to the awesome power of the human intellect, it’s obvious that
computers are just dense electrochemical machines with intricate wiring.
And while one day we might develop smarter (though still soulless)
computers that surpass the human intellect in the games mentioned above, it
will just end up being some more sophisticated way of doing the same thing.
Even if it’s more efficient than our brains at doing complex mathematical
operations, it will remain entirely in the dark about what it all means.
Mindless processing power alone is not the answer to our existential
questions. So, in the end, we don’t need to create another HAL 9000, or
Skynet, or some evil global intelligent network of computers that rule the
world and try to exterminate humanity as we become obsolete, which is a
pretty cool subplot for a future Terminator movie. We don’t need any of
that. We’re humans, and we are already intellectually superior to machines.
End of story.

To be sure, I’m not denying that there are hard problems in AI. Of course,
there are. All of these so called “advances” in this field are a bunch of
crap if we still don’t have a program that can putt around on a
miniaturized golf course all by itself, let alone actually play a decent
game of golf like the humans do, without going into meltdown if it misses
the hole five out of six times in a row. Can we get a movie about that? If
you ask me, we don’t even really know how to define intelligence yet. How
does it work, exactly? It’s a mess, really. If we’re ever going to create
another actual HAL 9000, or yet another Skynet (what fun), we’d better be
all on the same page when it comes to AI: what intelligence is, how it
works, what consciousness is, what it feels like, what it really means to
be self-aware. Without that common framework, trying to program yet another
AI that can play yet another game like Go is like trying to blow up another
Death Star with yet another way-too-large superlaser.

I think one of the big mistakes that computer scientists are making is that
they are conflating intelligence with problem-solving. They’ve gotten into
this habit of creating intricate Turing test competitions: give the
computer a series of math problems, a chess board, etc., etc., give it a
chat interface so you can interact with it like you would with another
human being, and then see if the machine can fool you into thinking that it
is a human. Once it does this, computers will have passed the Turing test
and achieved general AI. Really? Is that really the way it works? I don’t
see how. A computer has succeeded in faking it until it makes it, in terms
of passing a Turing test competition, only if it has satisfied some
pre-specified set of conditions that we know to be what a human would do in
the same situation. But that is no guarantee that it has actually achieved
intelligence! For all we know, computers can imitate humans until they
generate the most plausible patterns of thought and behavior we know of,
while all along remaining as soulless as ever. Who’s to say that the
computer doesn’t merely use its programming to cheat the test? Who’s to say
that it isn’t just shuffling its data around in an effort to do the most
computations possible with the least amount of effort? It may succeed in
conning us into thinking that it is self-aware, but that doesn’t prove that
it actually is. It hasn’t actually passed the Turing test, unless we have
defined it in a way that pre-determines the outcome: i.e., if the human
pretends to be a computer, then it passes the test, but if the computer
pretends to be a human, then it doesn’t pass the test! To me, that just
doesn’t sound all that scientific."

Best,
Rasmus

On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 8:04 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Excellent. Thanks! I'd seen the link to Gwern from Slate Star Codex. But I
> loathe poetry. Now that you've recommended it, I have no choice. 8^)
>
> On July 27, 2020 6:32:15 PM PDT, Alexander Rasmus <alex.m.rasmus at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >Glen,
> >
> >Gwern has an extensive post on GPT-3 poetry experimentation here:
> >https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
> >
> >I strongly recommend the section on the Cyberiad, where GPT-3 stands in
> >for
> >Trurl's Electronic Bard:
> >https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad
> >
> >There's some discussion of fine tuning input, but I think more cases
> >where
> >they keep the prompt fixed and show several different outputs.
>
> --
> glen
>
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