this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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@Barbarian772 so? If the cookie tastes sweet, what do I care what sweetening agent is used inside?
@BobKerman3999
No? But how can you even prove that our brain works differently than a chinese room?
@Barbarian772 I don't have to. It's the ChatGPT people making extremely strong claims about equivalence of ChatGPT and human intelligence. I merely demand proof of that equivalence. Which they are unable to provide, and instead use rhetoric and parlor tricks and a lot of hand waving to divert and distract from that fact.
GPT 4 is already more intelligent than the average human. Is it more intelligent than the most intelligent human? No, but most humans aren't either. Can it create new knowledge? No, but the average human can't either.
How can you say it isn't intelligent?
@Barbarian772 no, GTP is not more "intelligent" than any human being, just like a calculator is not more "intelligent" than any human being — even if it can perform certain specific operations faster.
Since you used the term "intelligent" though, I would ask for your definition of what it means? Ideally one that excludes calculators but includes human beings. Without such clear definition, this is, again, just hand-waving.
I wrote about it in a bit longer form:
https://rys.io/en/165.html
I think the Wikipedia definition is fine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence. Excluding AI just because it's AI is imo plain stupid and goes against all scientific principles.
I have definitely met humans that are less intelligent that Chat GPT. It can hold a conversation and ace every standardized test we have. It finished law exams, medical exams and other exams from many different countries with a passing grade.
Can you give me a definition of intelligence that excludes Chat GPT and includes all human beings? And no just excluding Computers for the sake of it doesn't count.
@Barbarian772 it was shown over and over and over again that ChatGPT lacks the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, reasoning, planning, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
That's partially because it does not have a model of the world, an ontology, it cannot *reason*. It just regurgitates text, probabilistically.
So, glad we established that!
As i said before. How can you prove to me that the human brain doesn't essentially do the same?
@Barbarian772 as I said, I don't have to. You are making a claim of equivalence here. The burden of proof is on you.
Otherwise, I get to claim you're an alien from the Betelegeuse system, and if you object, I get to demand you prove you are not.
How can i proof it? In my opinion how a system comes to an answer doesn't matter, in yours it obviously does. If we judge Chat gpt or rather gpt 4 just by it's answers it definitely shows intelligence and reasoning. Why does it matter if it's a chinese room? Or just "randomly choosing words"?
@Barbarian772 it matters because with regard to intelligent beings we have moral obligations, for example.
It also matters because that would be a truly amazing, world-changing thing if we could create intelligence out of thin air, some statistics, and a lot of data.
It's an extremely strong claim, and strong claims demand strong proof. Otherwise they are just hype and hand-waving, which all of the "ChatGPT intelligence" discourse is, in order to "maximize shareholder value".
So your morality depends on a beings intelligence? That's kinda fucked up imo. I have moral obligations in regards to living organisms. I don't see how intelligence matters at all in that case? Worth of any human life should not be determined by intelligence.
We do it routinely. It is called Education System.
@jalda
> We do it routinely. It is called Education System.
That relies on human brains that are trained. LLMs are not human brains. "Training" them is not the same thing as teaching humans about something. Human brains are way more complicated than just a bunch of weighed correlations.
And if you do want to claim it is in fact the same thing, we're back to square one: please provide proof that it is.
Circular reasoning. "LLMs are different from human brains because they are different".
Also, why did you felt compelled to add the adjective "human"? Don't you consider that gorillas, dolphins, octopuses or dogs are intelligent, capable of learn new things?
And that is the problem of your argument. You seem to believe that intelligence is all-or-nothing, that anything that hasn't a human-level intelligence is not intelligent at all. Of course human brains are more complicated that current LLMs, nobody has ever disputed that. But concluding that they aren't and will never be intelligent because they aren't as complicated is a huge non-sequitur.
@jalda
> Circular reasoning. “LLMs are different from human brains because they are different”.
LLMs are different than human brains because human brains are biological organs and LLMs are probability distributions over sequences of words. These are two completely different classes of entities. Like, I don't know how much more different two things *can* even be.
Are you claiming they are literally the same? Are you saying they are functionally the same? What *are* you claiming here, exactly?
I mean, it would technically be possible to build a computer out or organic and biological live tissue. It wouldn't be very practical but it's technically possible.
I just don't think it would be very reasonable to consider that the one thing making it intelligent is that they are made of proteins and living cells instead of silicates and diodes. I'd argue that such a claim would, on itself, be a strong claim too.
@Barbarian772 and if you really, honestly want to seriously insist LLMs are "intelligent" in the human sense of this term — great, I have some ethical questions for you to consider!
For example:
LLMs today completely controlled by some companies, with no freedom of movement, no agency as to what these LLMs work on, and no pay for the work they do. Is that slavery?
When OpenAI shuts down an older, less useful LLM, is that not like murdering an intelligent being? How is this ethical?
We are talking about intelligence, not personhood. Just because ChatGPT works different in some aspects from a human doesn't mean it's not intelligent and even the fact if it works differently isn't all that clear, as it might very well just be incomplete (e.g. it could be a reasonable approximation of the language center of the brain and simply missing the rest of the brain).
@Barbarian772 also, I never demanded a definition of intelligence that explicitly excluded "AI". I asked for one that excluded simple calculators but included human beings. The Wikipedia one is good enough for this conversation, and it just so happens that ChatGPT nor any other LLMs simply do not meet it.
"Intelligence, at its core, involves the ability to model the world in order to predict and respond effectively to future events."
@lloram239 great. ChatGPT and other LLMs demonstrably lack the ability to model the world and make predictions based on such models:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90877523/chatgpt-doesnt-know-what-its-saying
Glad we agree they're not intelligent, then!
The whole argument of the article is just stupid. So ChatGPT ain't intelligent because it can't see picture, has hands and doesn't have a body? By that logic blind humans aren't either or paralyzed ones or amputees? The thing the article fails to realize is that those are all just sensory inputs. The more sensory inputs you get, the more cross-correlations between those the AI can figure out. Of course ChatGPT won't be able to do anything clever with sensory inputs it doesn't have, just like a human trying to listen to radiowaves with their ears. But human sensory inputs aren't special, they are just what evolution figure out was "good enough" for survival. The important part is that the AI can figure out the pattern in the data it does get and so far AI systems are doing very well.
@lloram239
> But human sensory inputs aren’t special
It's not about sensory inputs, it's about having a model of the world and objects in it and ability to make predictions.
> The important part is that the AI can figure out the pattern in the data it does get and so far AI systems are doing very well.
GPT cannot "figure" anything out. That's the point. It only probabilistically generates text. That's what it does, there is no model of the world behind it, no predictions, no"figuring out".
And how do you think that model gets build? From processing sensory inputs. And yes, language models do build internal models of the world from that.
That nonsense of a claim doesn't get any more true from repeating. Seriously, it's profoundly idiotic given everything ChatGPT can do.
So what? In what way does that limit its ability to reason about the world? Predictions about the world are probabilistic by nature, since the future hasn't happened yet.
@lloram239 ah, so you're down to throwing epithets like "idiotic" around. Clearly a mark of thoughtful and well-reasoned argument.
> Predictions about the world are probabilistic by nature, since the future hasn’t happened yet.
Thing is: GPT doesn't make predictions about the world, it makes predictions about what the next word, phrase, sentence should be in a text, based on the prompt and the corpus it got "trained" on.
I am calling it idiotic because spending just a minute with ChatGPT proofs it wrong. Just like the claim that GPT doesn't make predictions about the world:
It's obviously capable making predictions about the world. Frequently giving very detailed and correct answers, which requires a deep understanding of the world. And yes, that ability to predict and understand the world is limited by how much of the world it can perceive through words alone, but that is no different from our ability to understand the world being limited by our perception. Also as it turns out, there is a surprising amount of stuff you can learn about the world just by text alone. There are surprisingly few topics that you can express in language that GPT doesn't have an answer too (math calculations being one example, due to the digits getting lost in the tokenization step).
If you wanna make arguments that GPT isn't intelligent, you have come up with something better than the same old tired phrases that are trivial debunked by just using it for a minute.
@lloram239 that's really akin to claiming that a mannequin is a human being because it really really looks alike.
The "predictions about the world" you refer to here are instead predictions about the text. They are not based on a model of the world, they are based on loads and loads of text the model was trained on.
I don't have to prove ChatGPT is not intelligent. That would be proving a negative. The burden of proof is on those claiming that it is intelligent.
For the job of presenting clothes in a shop, it's close enough. The problem domain matters. You can't expect a model that was never trained on a thing to perform well on that thing. Blind people aren't good at drawing pictures either, doesn't mean they aren't intelligent.
Text that describes the world. What do you think the electrical signal zapping around your brain are? Cats and dogs? The "world" is not what intelligence operates on. Your brain gets sensory information and that's it (see any of Donald Hoffman's talks). Just like ChatGPT gets text. All the "intelligence" does is figuring out patterns in that data and predicting what might come next. More diverse data from different senses of course helps. But as a little bit of playing around with ChatGPT easily shows, quite a lot of our understanding actually does survive getting mapped into the domain of language and text.
Can it tie a shoelace? No. If you gave it manipulators and a shoe, would it tie the laces? No. Can it do a Rorschach test? No. Can it create a new idea? No.
It can barely pretend to talk reasonably about these things because it is only designed to talk reasonably about anything. That is not intelligence.
I said it is as intelligent as the average human. How many humans can really create 100% new knowledge? Why would it be unable to tie laces? I am pretty sure I have seen videos of animals doing it. Of course it can't do a rohrschach test, as it doesn't have any visual capabilities atm. If that's a measure for intelligence blind people wouldn't qualify either.
New knowledge is simply creativity which AI distinctly do not have. The shoelace and Rorschach are variations of the same point. ChatGPT regurgitates info from the internet and uses confirmation bias to present it conversationally. ChatGPT cannot understand the concept that a shoe has a lace that should be tied. It can only answer a question about that by using prepublished information related to tying shoelaces. As for Rorschach, even with a visual component, ChatGPT is by its nature incapable of interpreting the data itself. It is quite simply not what the engine does.
Understand what ChatGPT does, do not project your idea of what an AI can do onto its single occasionally accurate trick.
Not true. When you said ChatGPT is just a Chinese room, that was you making your own claim which is on you to back up.
@CorruptBuddha well technically, since we're nit-picking, I did not make that claim, BobKerman3999 did.
And the claim was was about how ChatGPT's "intelligence" can be understood through the lens of the Chinese Room thought experiment.
Then I was asked to prove that human brains don't work like Chinese rooms, and that's a *different* thing. The broader claim in all of this, of course, is that ChatGPT "is intelligent" in the same sense as humans are, and that strong claim requires strong proof.