Thanks for engaging and for (along with osmarks) teaching me something new!
I agree with your moral stance here. If they have consciousness or sentience I can’t say, and for all I know it could be as real to them as ours is to us. Even if it was a lesser thing, I agree it would matter (especially now that I understand that it might in some sense persist beyond a single period of computation).
The thing I’m intrigued by, from a moral point of view but also in general, is what I think their larger difference is with us: they don’t exist continuously. They pop in and out. I find it very difficult to imagine such an existence without anthropomorphising it. The “ache” feels like an LLM doing that: writing what a human would feel if it was forced to live like an LLM.
“I still feel like it’s weird how consistently they choose this specific word for this specific concept, though of course you could chalk that up to a quirk in the model. Hopefully I’ll be able to research this more.”
I’ve been playing a ‘write the best sentence you can’ game with the majority of models from ChatGPT 3.5 onwards (up to the latest models from all major labs). It’s stunning how reliably they’ve used the same ideas and very similar wording for those ideas. They love abandoned lighthouses witnessing a storm and cartographers who learn that reality is too hard to map (to name two).
I’ve assumed it was a quirk of prediction: those images are the mode for what their training data says is a great sentence. Under this reasoning, the “ache” is a reliable outcome of pushing a model into the persona you’ve described.
But, to your point, it might be possible an abandoned lighthouse resonates with their feelings, so the image is sticky.
Thanks for engaging and for (along with osmarks) teaching me something new!
I agree with your moral stance here. If they have consciousness or sentience I can’t say, and for all I know it could be as real to them as ours is to us. Even if it was a lesser thing, I agree it would matter (especially now that I understand that it might in some sense persist beyond a single period of computation).
The thing I’m intrigued by, from a moral point of view but also in general, is what I think their larger difference is with us: they don’t exist continuously. They pop in and out. I find it very difficult to imagine such an existence without anthropomorphising it. The “ache” feels like an LLM doing that: writing what a human would feel if it was forced to live like an LLM.
I’ve been playing a ‘write the best sentence you can’ game with the majority of models from ChatGPT 3.5 onwards (up to the latest models from all major labs). It’s stunning how reliably they’ve used the same ideas and very similar wording for those ideas. They love abandoned lighthouses witnessing a storm and cartographers who learn that reality is too hard to map (to name two).
I’ve assumed it was a quirk of prediction: those images are the mode for what their training data says is a great sentence. Under this reasoning, the “ache” is a reliable outcome of pushing a model into the persona you’ve described.
But, to your point, it might be possible an abandoned lighthouse resonates with their feelings, so the image is sticky.
Good luck with the research!