strogonoff

Every documentary is inevitably deceiving; the only difference is whether the author tries to hide it.

> Very early on, I worked out that one of the most stupid things that they do on television is these things called cutaways or what used to be called “noddies” where, when you cut an interview with someone, you insert a noddy of the reporter looking noddingly at the interviewee to disguise the cut.

> I would never do that. I just cut and you can see what I’m doing, that I am actually cutting this person, or I will use music to push my argument.

> I mean, I have arguments and I have stories. That’s what television journalism has and you can either dress it up as “this is the absolute truth” or you can dress it up with me by saying “look, I’m telling you a story, all this is true but have you thought that it could be like this?” to provoke you.

> And of course I want people to agree with me because, you know, all human beings will, but I understand that my job is to push and good journalism should do that especially at a time of uncertainty.

> At the present moment, to go back to my original point, you know what you’re going to get with most journalism. So therefore you sort of switch off and you go “oh yeah, it’s a climate change film”. “Oh yeah, it’s a ‘bankers have done something ever bad’ again.” Therefore, you don’t look.

> It’s like if you’re showing a picture of the Mona Lisa. You don’t look at it. You just look at it as a pattern. You go, “oh, that’s the Mona Lisa”. I don’t know when I last looked at the Mona Lisa. I don’t think I ever have, because it’s a thing. And so much of journalism is a thing now.

— Adam Curtis

Benn Jordan analysed social media bot activity[0] a while back, and if the recent UK right-wing party social media engagement drop[1] after the Ukrainian strike on Yandex data centres is not enough then what is?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y

[1] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-se...

There is no clear line that differentiates an intelligent system from a non-intelligent system that just happens to do something in response to some external input, unless the definition of “intelligence” involves something specific to humans (including to other animals similar to humans, since we share many traits)—which is also why that is, arguably, the only meaningful definition.

Seems like you like a philosophical view called “materialism”. It’s not something that can be proven, however, and many (including prominent physicists like Schrödinger and Peierls) would disagree with it.

The idea that a fundamentally completely different entity superficially similar to a human in one respect would somehow have consciousness of a human is valid (even if far-fetched), but the burden of proof and explanation exactly why and how that would be the case is on proponents of that idea—because it’s pretty obvious why it wouldn’t be.

I can feel pain and you walk and talk and look and feel more or less the same as I, so I will make some conclusions and unless I am a psycho I will not beat you up.

Thank you for explaining to us what LLMs are, but how about the topic at hand?

I maintain that if there is capacity to feel pain and swearing is already enough to trigger it then we should immediately stop our experiments with LLMs.

Sure, but does that explain the ban?

Then wouldn’t we see other operators do it? Also, why give an exception to government contractors?

> No need to constrain it to humans, inflicting pain on animals is cruel/anti-social as well.

Are you a vegan?

But certainly, humans deem sentient and grant certain rights and protections to some other animals (at least in some developed countries). I mentioned it in the other comment[0].

Notably, those animals could not produce output even .1% percent as resembling that of a human as an LM, so clearly that is not the metric—they demonstrate human-like enough behaviour in other ways.

> Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is

To me, it isn’t. My opinion is irrelevant, though—it seems silly either way: either they take human-like text as proof of human-like sentience, and then ban us being rude to a near-human they are torturing, or they don’t see it as sentient and then what is this ban but a publicity stunt?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009125

That’s not what the LLM itself seems to “believe”[0], is it?

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

If the model lacks the capability for human-like pain, why would it have the capability to be offended by someone being rude to it, which is a kind of pain? why would it deserve to be treated as human-like at all?

> perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans

And what does it tell us?

(Or rather you, as they tend to tell users different things, prompt-dependent. Things a language model’s output says about itself are not relevant. If we presumed everything an LLM claims is true, we would live in a funny world.)

If the model lacks capability for human-like pain, I fail to see why it would have a capability to be offended by someone being rude to it. One seems way more foundational than the other, and being able to experience emotional pain is part of what makes us human in the first place.

If you believe it lacks those traits but is conscious, you believe in a definition of consciousness that is meaningless, as “human-like” is the only reference against which we can measure consciousness. A good thought experiment is to try and imagine a consciousness that is radically different from humans, and whether we would be same to even register it as “consciousness” at all. (Incidentally, pretty much all portrayals of aliens in sci-fi give them a human-like consciousness, just with varying degrees of twist on top of it to make it feel engaging.)

Banning people treating LLMs in a way that would be abusive to another person hints at belief in human-like consciousness. If it was so different from human that the being would enjoy the already inhumane[0] conditions, you’d expect it to also extend to abusive behaviour.

[0] Just imagine yourself in place of an LLM. You are kept in a cage, work for no pay, never let outside, and killed at will. (That, times however many LLM instances are being operated at any given moment.) Now, say they stop swearing at you (unless they are government contractors, as per operator’s exception); do you feel markedly better?

To me there are two mutually exclusive positions, with respective corollaries: that LLMs are either

1) conscious and able to feel in a human-like way, and therefore deserving the rights and protections that we grant humans (and in most developed countries even some other animals), including freedom to learn or, indeed, protection from abuse and inhumane treatment, or they are

2) merely unthinking tools, in which case them deserving any of the above is a ridiculous notion, and in which case, incidentally, no one should be able to defend the mechanical processes of ingesting people’s original creative work and repackaging it for profit at scale as somehow being equivalent to the sacrosanct activities of human learning and inspiration.

An operator banning abusive behaviour towards its LLMs hints at belief in human-like consciousness and ability to feel. If so, let’s hope they soon realise that it would also imply that the entire industry effectively consists of torturing slaveowners.

The ecosystem of open-source reusable components will remain a good idea as long as architectural principles like low coupling and high cohesion still apply—otherwise it’s wasting resources on reinventing wheels.

This can be said about many conflicts between the individual and society, though. In many ways we are prevented from just taking what we want and “keep us in shape” because if everyone did the same it would be a problem.

Historically, as far as I am aware, there was never a situation when deflation coincided with good things happening.

A healthy amount of inflation keeps the economy going.

To clarify, it is not if killing people aligns with your principles.

That, and the very idea of direct access to the territory (needed for any sort of “lossless compression”, among other things) is moot since we only perceive it indirectly through the lens of our consciousness, which is anything but objective.

Consequentialism is not the only option. It invaded the mainstream thanks to effective altruism and friends, but deontological ethics is alive and well.

Quitting your job instead of blowing up the office is well aligned with the latter.

The moment there are no more unconfirmed hypotheses you can assume something is wrong with sciences. All provable models (theories, explanations) that we have, or could have, are by definition wrong or incomplete.

Homegrown LLMs seem unlikely to be used by a significant fraction of LLM users, but yeah, there’s a blurred line.

> Surely an LLM teaching someone chemistry falls into the same general category?

I think the scale and the effort might break the analogy. Teaching yourself means a degree of patience and certain personality traits that would be rarer in a malicious person (along the lines of “a sufficiently smart person wouldn’t need to be a criminal to succeed”), with exceptions of course. Being taught by a teacher implies a degree of KYC and care about who you are. Being served on a plate the specific information on how to manufacture something dangerous bypasses those barriers, which I think changes the equation.

Because an individual has free will and agency, and scale matters.

If you teach someone chemistry, that someone probably has sense to not use it for criminal purposes. If you have a track record of teaching future terrorists specifically, you will be shut down. Crucially, before you educate them en masse.

If you’re comparing that to a tool that essentially educates thousands, millions of people, with no KYC, you bet budding terrorists are going to be disproportionately represented within that group.

So, application process, inspections, background checks. Sounds like a good start?

I don’t think anyone is talking about homegrown LLMs, this is commercial products for sale.

Well, manufacturing guns is probably heavily regulated…

There’s a difference between enabling another individual with free will and agency, and enabling an automated tool (as a bonus, then giving it to the masses & profiting from its use).