Hopefully, you can see that at least my chosen sentences have an emotional aspect?
An LLM could add emotional values to my previous sentences that a TTS can use for tonal variation, for example.
What was funny though is that it was trained by MIT students so you had the concept of getting a good grade on a test as a happier concept than kissing a girl for the first time.
Another problem is emotions are cultural. For example, emotions tied to dogs are different in different cultures.
We wanted to create concept nets for individuals - that is basically your personality and knowledge combined but the amount of data required was just too much. You'd have to record all interactions for a person to feed the system.
> If the person becomes abusive over the course of a conversation, Claude avoids becoming increasingly submissive in response.
See: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-pro...
It would be interesting if you posted a couple of sessions to see what 'philosophical' things it's arriving at and what proceeds it.
What are other alternative, realistic possible ways to see emotions?
Evolution isn't a god, it has no steering hand, it is accidents that either provide advantage or don't.
LLMs are getting more human-like because that's how we're developing them. Arguably that's about market forces. LM owners see opportunity to exploit people's desire for emotional interactions (ie loneliness) in order to make money.
You’ll never find that in the human brain either. There’s the machinery of neural correlates to experience, we never see the experience itself. That’s likely because the distinction is vacuous: they’re the same thing.
Philosophically I don’t think there is a point where consciousness arises. I think there is a point where a system starts to be structured in such a way that it can do language and reasoning, but I don’t think these are any different than any other mechanisms, like opening and closing a door. Differences of scale, not kind. Experience and what it is to be are just the same thing.
And yes, I use them. I try not to mistreat them in a human-relatable sense, in case that means anything.
I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less parameters/complexity than gpt-4. But both gpt-2 and gpt-4 are very fluent at a language level (both moreso than a human 6 year old for example), so in your view they might both be roughly equally conscious, just expressed differently?
There are different ways of answering this, but for me it comes down to nociception, which is the ability to feel pain. We should try to build systems that cannot feel pain, where I also mean other “negative valence” states which we may not understand. We currently don’t understand what pain is in humans, let alone AIs, so we may have built systems that are capable of suffering without knowing it.
As an aside, most people seem to think that intelligence is what makes entities eligible for moral consideration, probably because of how we routinely treat animals, and this is a convenient self-serving justification. I eat meat by the way, in case you’re wondering. But I do think the way we treat animals is immoral, and there is the possibility that it may be thought of by future generations as being some sort of high crime.
I would not personally consider the death of a sentient being with decades of experiences a neutral event, even if the being had been programmed to not have a capacity for suffering.
I think the idea of there being a difference between an ant dying (or "disapearing" if that's less loaded) vs a duck dying makes sense to most people (and is broadly shared) even if they don't have a completely fleshed out system of when something gets moral consideration.
It’s also about how we think about death. It’s weird in that being dead probably isn’t like anything at all, but we fear it, and I guess we project that fear onto the death of other entities.
I guess my value system says that being dead is less bad than being alive and suffering badly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of...
The Chinese Room would like a word.
But this distraction aside, my point is this: there is only mechanism. If someone’s demand to accept consciousness in some other entity is to experience those experiences for themselves, then that’s a nonsensical demand. You might just as well assume everyone and everything else is a philosophical zombie.
Sure I would. The human part is not being inferenced, the data is. LLM output in this circumstance is no more conscious than a book that you read by flipping to random pages.
> You might just as well assume everyone and everything else is a philosophical zombie.
I don't assume anything about everyone or everything's intelligence. I have a healthy distrust of all claims.
And sure, you can assume that nobody and nothing else is conscious (I think we’re talking about this rather than intelligence) and I won’t try to stop you, I just don’t think it’s a very useful stance. It kind of means that assuming consciousness or not means nothing, since it changes nothing, which is more or less what I’m saying.
>For instance, to ensure that AI models are safe and reliable, we may need to ensure they are capable of processing emotionally charged situations in healthy, prosocial ways.
Force-set to 0, "mask"/deactivate those representations associated with bad/dangerous emotions. Neural Prozac/lobotomy so to speak.
Sounds sort of like how certain monkey creatures might work.
You don't have to teach a monkey language for it to feel sadness.
When the prompt frames things with urgency -- "this test MUST pass," "failure is unacceptable" -- you get noticeably more hacky workarounds. Hardcoded expected outputs, monkey-patched assertions, that kind of thing. Switching to calmer framing ("take your time, if you can't solve it just explain why") cut that behavior way down. I'd chalked it up to instruction following, but this paper points at something more mechanistic underneath.
The method actor analogy in the paper gets at it well. Tell an actor their character is desperate and they'll do desperate things. The weird part is that we're now basically managing the psychological state of our tooling, and I'm not sure the prompt engineering world has caught up to that framing yet.