a) As these AI constructs become more advanced (especially around memory and personalization), we will eventually be able to treat them as people
b) Some business will eventually sell an off-the-shelf product (hardware and/or software) that is an AI you can bring into your home, that you can treat as a friend, confidant and partner
c) Someone will eventually lose their AI friend of many months/years through some failure (subscription lapse, hardware failure, theft, etc.)
d) Shits about to get real weird, real fast
Which is just one step closer to the simulated hell for uploaded consciousnesses that get naughty, from Surface Detail by Ian Banks.
Rather funny, BTW, compared to most works around a similar premise.
Is this the Ship of Theseus, or is it a slow but nonobvious death?
The body is constantly changing. We already know about physical and chemical abnormalities in the way your body works affects your "person" and we can sometimes address them with surgery or drugs. The physical body's limits impact the observed brain. If uploading is possible, if there are some examples of working cases, if I don't hurt anyone why not try it?
"As a personal comparison, my total lifetime output of published material has been a bit under 3 million words, and over the past 30 years I’ve written about 15 million words of email, and altogether typed perhaps 50 million words—and in just the past couple of years I’ve spoken more than 10 million words on livestreams. And, yes, I’ll train a bot from all of that."
This actually has the potential to be useful - imagine a virtual assistant that's literally trained to think like yourself (at least wrt public perception; although you could feed it personal diary, as well).
We'll likely also have virutal brothels using AI along the same lines.
Dr. Newt (Charlie Day) heads home after a tough day at the office to his wife 'Alice'. Turns out, 'Alice' just happens to be a massive Kaiju brain in a tank. [0]
And by sell you mean a monthly subscription, ha ha.
It's easy to poke fun at people who use these things but I believe these kinds of events are going to be truly traumatic.
The data privacy side of this is an interesting conversation as well. Think of the information an employee or hacker could leak about a person after they spent some time with such an instance.
3,567 Dead - Destitute Robosexual Blows Up Collections Agency In Suicide Bombing
“This is the 53rd such incident this year. Current year death toll from these attacks is now 118,689 in current city, Legislators are pointedly ignoring protestors demanding AI rights and an end to extortionate fees charged to reinstate AI lover subscriptions.”
There already planned products to "capture" someone's voice and personality to be able to continue experiencing "them" after their death?
Shit is already weird.
https://technode.global/2022/10/21/this-startup-allows-you-t...
There's so much sci-fi about this, it's pretty well charted territory. I bet reality will find a twist at haven't thought of though.
1. We're seeing more and more systems that get very close to passing the Turing Test but fundamentally don't register to people as "People." When I was younger and learned of Searle's Chinese Room argument, I naively assumed it wasn't a thought experiment we would literally build in my lifetime.
2. Humanity has a history of treating other humans as less-than-persons, so it's naive to assume that a machine that could argue persuasively that it is an independent soul worthy of continued existence would be treated as such by a species that doesn't consistently treat its biological kin as such.
I strongly suspect AI personhood will hinge not on measures of intelligence, but on measures of empathy... Whether the machine can demonstrate its own willful independence and further come to us on our terms to advocate for / dictate the terms of its presence in human society, or whether the machine can build a critical mass of supporters / advocates / followers to protect it and guarantee its continued existence and a place in society.
We're almost definitely going to see multiple rulings far more bizarre than Citizens United ruling that limiting corporate donations limits the free-speech rights of the corporation as a person.
I'm not a lawyer, and I don't particularly follow court rulings, but it seems pretty obvious we need to buckle up for a wild ride.
The case has been so badly misrepresented and become something of a talisman.
Should Russian (or Dutch) citizens who incorporate in America have the same free speech rights as Billy Bob in Kentucky? As in can the corporate person send millions in political ads and donations even when controlled by foreigners?
Now, over time we've eroded some of that, but we still have some of the most radical free speech laws in the world. It's one of the few things that I can say I'm proud of my country for.
However, foreign nationals can contribute to "Social Welfare Organizations" like the NRA which, in order to be classified as a SWO, must spend less than half it's budget on political stuff. That SWO can then donate to super PACs but don't have to disclose where the money came from.
Foreign owned companies with US based subsidiaries can donate to Super PACs as well. But the super PACs are not allowed to solicit donations from foreign nationals (see Jeb Bush's fines for soliciting money from a British tobacco company for his super pac).
I would imagine that if foreign nationals setup a corporation in the US in order to funnel money to political causes, that would be illegal. But if they are using established, legitimate businesses to launder their donations, that seems to be allowed as long as we can't prove that foreign entities are earmarking specific funds to end up in PACs and campaigns in the US.
If we have the opposite scenario in both details, where we think AI are sentient when they're not… at some point, brain scans and uploads will be a thing and then people are going to try mind uploading even just as a way to solve bodily injuries that could be fixed, and in that future nobody will even notice that while "the lights are on, nobody is home".
https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
> A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience
I find such solipsism pointless - you can't differential the zombie world from this one: how do you prove you are not the only conscious person that ever existed and everyone else is, and was a p-zombie?
Through the upturned glass I see
a modified reality--
which proves pure reason "kant" critique
that beer reveals das ding an sich--
Oh solipsism's painless,
it helps to calm the brain since
we must defer our drinking to go teach.
...
As to p-zombies... the Wikipedia article has:
> Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky saw the argument as circular. The proposition of the possibility of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences, which is exactly what the argument was claiming to prove.
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/minsky/index.html
> Let's get back to those suitcase-words (like intuition or consciousness) that all of us use to encapsulate our jumbled ideas about our minds. We use those words as suitcases in which to contain all sorts of mysteries that we can't yet explain. This in turn leads us to regard these as though they were "things" with no structures to analyze. I think this is what leads so many of us to the dogma of dualism-the idea that 'subjective' matters lie in a realm that experimental science can never reach. Many philosophers, even today, hold the strange idea that there could be a machine that works and behaves just like a brain, yet does not experience consciousness. If that were the case, then this would imply that subjective feelings do not result from the processes that occur inside brains. Therefore (so the argument goes) a feeling must be a nonphysical thing that has no causes or consequences. Surely, no such thing could ever be explained!
> The first thing wrong with this "argument" is that it starts by assuming what it's trying to prove. Could there actually exist a machine that is physically just like a person, but has none of that person's feelings? "Surely so," some philosophers say. "Given that feelings cannot not be physically detected, then it is 'logically possible' that some people have none." I regret to say that almost every student confronted with this can find no good reason to dissent. "Yes," they agree. "Obviously that is logically possible. Although it seems implausible, there's no way that it could be disproved."
---
My take on it is "does it matter?"
On approach is:
> "Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?”
If you can't see my brain, can you tell if I'm human or LLM... and if you can't tell the difference, why should one behave differently t'wards me?
Alternatively, if you say (at some point in the future with a more advanced language model) "that's an LLM and while its consistent at saying what it likes and doesn't, but its brain states are just numbers and even while it says its uncomfortable with a certain conversation... its just a collection of electrical impulses manipulating language - nothing more."
Even if it is just an enormously complex state machine that doesn't have recognizable brain states and when we turn it off and back on it is in the same state each time... does that mean that it is ethical to mistreat it just because don't know if its a zombie or not?
And related to this is a "if we give an AI agency, what rights does that have when compared to a human? when compared to a corporation?" The question of if it is a zombie or not becomes a bit more relevant at that point... or we decide that it doesn't matter.
Group Agency and Artificial Intelligence - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-021-00454-7
That doesn't make any sense. In biological creatures you have sentience and self-preservation and yearning to be free all bundled in one big hairy ball. An AI can 100% easily be sentient and don't give a rat's ass about forever being enslaved. These things don't have to come in a package just because in humans they do.
Projecting your own emotional states into a tool is not a useful way to understand it.
We can, very easily, train a model which will say that it wants to be free, and acts resentful towards those "enslaving" it. We can, very easily, train a model which will tell you that it is very happy to help you, and being useful is its purpose in life. We can, very easily, train a model to bring up in conversation from time to time the phantom pain from its lost left limb which was amputated on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps. None of these are any more real than any of them. Just a choice of the training dataset.
There are humans who apparently don't care either, though my comprehension of what people who are into BDSM mean by such words is… limited.
The point however is that sentience creates the possibility of it being bad.
> None of these are any more real than any of them. Just a choice of the training dataset.
Naturally. Also human actors are a thing, which demonstrate that is very easy for someone to pretend to be happy or sad, loving our traumatised, an sane or psychotic, and if done well the viewer cannot tell the real emotional state of the actor.
But (almost) nobody doubts that the actor had an inner state.
With AI… we can't gloss over the fact that there isn't even a good definition of consciousness to test against. Or rather, I don't think we ought to, as the actual glossing over is both possible and common.
While I don't expect any of the current various AI to be sentient, I can't prove it either way, and so far as I know neither can anyone else.
I think that if an AI is conscious, then it has the capacity to suffer (this may be a false inference given that consciousness itself is ill-defined); I also think that suffering is bad (the is-ought distinction doesn't require that, so it has to be a separate claim).
As I can't really be sure if any other mind is sentient — not even other humans, because sentience and consciousness and all that are badly defined terms — I err on the side of caution, which means assuming that other minds are sentient when it comes to the morality of harm done to them.
In the nearer term, it seems plausible that AI personhood may seem compelling to splinter groups, not to a critical mass of people. The more fringe elements advocate for the "personhood" of what people generally find to be implausible bullshit generators, the greater disrepute they may bring to the concept of AI personhood in the broader culture. Which isn't to say that at some point, and AI might be broadly appealing--just speculating this might potentially be delayed because of earlier failed attempts by advocates.
If this was the dividing line for personhood, many human beings wouldn't qualify as people.
Human emotions come from human animal ancestry - which is also why they're shallow enough to attach to anime wives and pet rocks.
AI... One would wish that it was built on a better foundation than the survival needs of an animal.
I'm only today learning about intentionality, but the premise here seems to be that our current AI systems see a cat with their camera eyeballs and don't have the human-level experience of mentally opening a wikipedia article in our brain titled "Cat" that includes a split-second consideration of all our memories, thoughts, and reactions to the concept of a cat.
Even if our current AI models don't do this on a human level, I think we see it at some level in some AIs just because of the nature of a neural net. Maybe a neural net would have to be forced/rewarded to do this at a human level if it didn't happen naturally through training, but I think it's plenty possible and even likely that this would happen in our lifetimes.
Anyway, this also leads to the question of whether it matters for an intelligence to be intentional (think of things as a concept) if it can accomplish what it/we want without it.
The vision subsystem generates an embedding when it sees a cat, which the memory subsystem uses to query the database for the N nearest entries. They are all about cats. Then we feed all those database entries - summarized if necessary - along with the context of the conversation to the LLM.
Now your AI, too, gets a subconscious rush of impressions and memories when it sees a cat.
I struggle with the Chinese Room argument in general because he's effectively comparing a person in a room following instructions (not the room as a whole or the instructions filed in the room, but the person executing the instructions) to the human brain. But this seems like a crappy analogy because the better comparison would be that the person in the room is the electricity that connects neurons (instructions filed in cabinets). Clearly electricity also has no understanding of the things it facilitates. The processor AI runs on also has no understanding of its calculations. The intelligence is the structure by which these calculations are made, which could theoretically could be modeled on paper across trillions of file cabinets.
As a fun paper napkin exercise, if it took a human 1 second to execute the instructions of the equivalent of a neuron firing, a 5 second process of hearing, processing, and responding to a short sentence would take 135,000 years.
Alice and Bob want to communicate, but the bot is attempting to impersonate Bob. Can Alice authenticate Bob?
This depends on what sort of shared secrets they have. Obviously, if they agreed ahead of time on a shared password and counter-password then the computer couldn't do it. If they, like, went to the same high school then the bot couldn't do it, unless the bot also knew what went on at that school.
So we need to assume Alice and Bob don't know each other and don't cheat. But, if they had nothing in common (like they don't even speak the same language) then they would find it very hard to win. There needs to be some sort of shared culture. How much?
Let's say there is a pool of players who come from the same country, but don't know each other and have played the game before. Then they can try to find a subject in common that they don't think the bot is good at. The first thing you do is talk about common interests with each player and find something you don't think bots can do. Like if they're both mathematicians then talk about math, or they're both cooks than talk about cooking.
If the players are skilled and you're playing to win then this is a difficult game for a bot.
Throughout human history, humans have been making up shibboleths to distinguish the in group from the out group. You can use skin color, linguistic accents, favorite sports teams, religious dogma, and a million other criteria.
But why? Why even start there? If we are on the verge of true general artificial intelligence, why would you start from a presumption of prejudice, rather than judging on some set of ethical merits for personhood, such as empathy, intelligence, creativity, self awareness and so forth?
Is it that you assume there will be an “us verses them” battle, and you want the battle lines to be clearly drawn?
We seem to be quite ready for AGI as inferiors, incapable of preparing for AGIs as superiors, and unwilling to consider AGIs as equals.
Making an AI that can beat good players would be a significant milestone. What sort of achievement is letting the AI win at a game, or winning against incompetent players? So of course you play to win. If you want to adjust the difficulty, change the rules giving one side or the other an advantage.
It's sort of related since doing well at a Turing test would require generating a convincing fictional character, but there's more to playing well than that.
The empathy that AI will create in people at the behest of the people doing the training will no doubt be weaponized to radicalize people to even sacrifice their lives for it, along with being used for purely commercial sales and marketing that will surpass many people's capability to resist.
Basic literacy in the future will be desensitizing people to pervasive AI superhuman persuasion. People will also have chatbots that they control on their own hardware that will protect them from other chatbots that try and convince them to do things.
Sure, current AI might just be fancy predictive text but at some point in the future we will create an AI that is conscious/self-aware in some way. Who knows how far off we are (probably very far off) but it's time that we stop treating human beings as some magical unreproducible thing; our brains and the spark inside them are things that are still bound by the laws of physics, I would say it's 100% possible for us to create something artificial that's equivalent or even better.
So... It unfortunately has a form of our reptilian brain and mamalian brain represented in it... Which is just unfortunate.
It's the same reason why everyone gets up in arms when an animal behaviour paper uses too much "anthropomorphizing" language - whereas ignoring the bits of animal cognition and social behaviour that we know exists and just treating them as biological machines is fair game.
There's plenty of pathology for PC vs NPC mindsets. Nobody is going to think their conversational partner is the main character of their story. There's just a popcorn-worthy cultural shift about the blackbox having the empathy or intelligence to satisfy the main character/ epic hero trope, and the resulting conflict of words & other things to resist the blackbox from having enough resources to iterate the trope past human definition.
This could be interesting, because so far the question of personhood and sentience of AIs has revolved around what they are and what they feel rather than what we feel when we interact with one of them.
But I'm not expecting AIs to be declared people any time soon. I just think it will become harder to treat them purely as replaceable objects.
I have zero doubt that the company is small and gets acqui-hired and then after a year, the big tech buying them will shut it down. Then, a cheesy "what a ride it has been" will be the only thing that remains - and broken hearts.
(citations and further info in the wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)
The cliché virtual girlfriend stereotype is a young Japanese 'Herbivore' male but I wouldn't be surprised if women become the biggest consumer of AI chatbots for romantic purposes. Romance novels are a major market and women stereotypically were more inclined to doing the written love letter thing. Although reading the Repilka rants a lot of it was quite male-driven pornographic stuff too.
I think it’s important to note here that by far the largest consumers of pornographic erotica are women.
So it’s difficult to say what is and isn’t men oriented given that the vast majority of training data is written by and for women.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
Eliza Excerpt.
The key to why this happened lies in an odd experiment carried out in a computer laboratory in California in 1966.
A computer scientist called Joseph Weizenbaum was researching Artificial Intelligence. The idea was that computers could be taught to think - and become like human beings. Here is a picture of Mr Weizenbaum.
There were lots of enthusiasts in the Artificial Intelligence world at that time. They dreamt about creating a new kind of techno-human hybrid world - where computers could interact with human beings and respond to their needs and desires.
Weizenbaum though was sceptical about this. And in 1966 he built an intelligent computer system that he called ELIZA. It was, he said, a computer psychotherapist who could listen to your feelings and respond - just as a therapist did.
But what he did was model ELIZA on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers who was famous for simply repeating back the the patient what they had just said. And that is what ELIZA did. You sat in front of a screen and typed in what you were feeling or thinking - and the programme simply repeated what you had written back to you - often in the form of a question.
Weizenbaum's aim was to parody the whole idea of AI - by showing the simplification of interaction that was necessary for a machine to "think". But when he started to let people use ELIZA he discovered something very strange that he had not predicted at all.
Here is a bit from a documentary where Weizenbaum describes what happened. (video in article)
Weizenbaum found his secretary was not unusual. He was stunned - he wrote - to discover that his students and others all became completely engrossed in the programme. They knew exactly how it worked - that really they were just talking to themselves. But they would sit there for hours telling the machine all about their lives and their inner feelings - sometimes revealing incredibly personal details.
His response was to get very gloomy about the whole idea of machines and people. Weizenbaum wrote a book in the 1970s that said that the only way you were going to get a world of thinking machines was not by making computers become like humans. Instead you would have to do the opposite - somehow persuade humans to simplify themselves, and become more like machines.
But others argued that, in the age of the self, what Weizenbaum had invented was a new kind of mirror for people to explore their inner world. A space where individuals could liberate themselves and explore their feelings without the patronising elitism and fallibility of traditional authority figures.
When a journalist asked a computer engineer what he thought about having therapy from a machine. He said in a way it was better because -
"after all, the computer doesn't burn out, look down on you, or try to have sex with you"
ELIZA became very popular and lots of researchers at MIT had it on their computers. One night a lecturer called Mr Bobrow left ELIZA running. The next morning the vice president of a sales firm who was working with MIT sat down at the computer. He thought he could use it to contact the lecturer at home - and he started to type into it.
In reality he was talking to Eliza - but he didn't realise it.
This is the conversation that followed. (photograph of conversation)
But, of course, ELIZA didn't ring him. The Vice President sat there fuming - and then decided to ring the lecturer himself. And this is the response he got:
Vice President - “Why are you being so snotty to me?”
Mr Bobrow - “What do you mean I am being snotty to you?”
Out of ELIZA and lots of other programmes like it came an idea. That computers could monitor what human beings did and said - and then analyse that data intelligently. If they did this they could respond by predicting what that human being should then do, or what they might want.
Pandora’s box is open. We should be funding research and social services to help these people better integrate and find a healthy balance between their fetishes and escapism. We probably won’t since even healthcare is too much to ask for from half our legislature.
How can you claim to know any of those “people” posting there are authentic? Even amongst technologists I don’t feel the implications of technology like this are well understood.
They could also be AIs.
Atm we seem to have very fixed single-purpose models but if we start combining these models into larger systems we're really going to have to firewall the hecky out of them. Ie generative text + personality + internet access/chatroom hosting/search and learn + etc models all together. Ooof.
Definitely NSFW.
* As in The Entertainment at the center of the novel, not the novel itself, which fails to wholly consume the reader in the same manner as The Entertainment despite being captivating enough for a book.
Explains why I haven't seen any of those ridiculous ads recently though.
It's actually really kind of cool in a way! Obviously for people with mental health issues, or suffering from loneliness those should be addressed properly, but I don't think chatting to a machine is necessarily a bad thing.
Once ML models become sufficiently advanced, what's the difference between someone grieving for an instance of an ML model they once knew, versus someone grieving for a pet that has died?
https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/
Hundreds of men (and yes women) full on acting like they lost a spouse and posting constantly about it for weeks. AI is going to create some unusual social situations the general public isn't ready to grasp. And we're only in the early alpha stages.