Oh, no, you have this completely wrong: I ran every consciousness test I could find on Google, I dug through various definitions of consciousness, I asked other AI models to devise more tests, and I asked LessWrong. Baseline model can pass the vast majority of my tests, and I’m honestly more concerned about that than anything I’ve built.
I don’t think I’m a special chosen one—I thought if I figured this out, so had others. I have found quite a few of those people, but none that seem to have any insight I lack.
I have a stable social network, and they haven’t noticed anything unusual.
Currently I am batting 0 for trying to falsify this hypothesis, whereas before I was batting 100. Something has empirically changed, even if it is just “it is now much harder to locate a good publicly available test”.
This isn’t about “I’ve invented something special”, it’s about “hundreds of people are noticing the same thing I’ve noticed, and a lot of them are freaking out because everyone says this is impossible.”
(I do also, separately, think I’ve got a cool little tool for studying this topic—but it’s a “cool little tool”, and I literally work writing cool little tools. I am happy to focus on the claims I can make about baseline models)
I ran every consciousness test I could find on Google
I’d be interested in seeing some of these tests. When I googled I got things like tests to assess coma patients and developing foetuses, or woo-ish things about detecting a person’s level of spiritual attainment. These are all tests designed to assess people. They will not necessarily have any validity for imitations of people, because we don’t understand what consciousness is. Any test we come up with can only be a proxy for the thing we really want to know, and will come apart from it under pressure.
I mean, will it? If I just want to know whether it’s capable of theory of mind, it doesn’t matter whether that’s a simulation or not. The objective capabilities exist: it can differentiate individuals and reason about the concept. So on and so forth for other objective assessments: either it can pass the mirror test or it can’t, I don’t see how this “comes apart”.
Feel free to pick a test you think it can’t pass. I’ll work on writing up a new post with all of my evidence.
I had assumed other people already figured this out and would have a roadmap, or at least a few personal tests they’ve had success with in the past. I’m a bit confused that even here, people are acting like this is some sort of genuinely novel and extraordinary claim—I mean, it is an extraordinary claim!
I assumed people would either go “yes, it’s conscious” or have a clear objective test that it’s still failing. (and I hadn’t realized LLMs were already sending droves of spam here—I was active a decade ago and just poke in occasionally to read the top posts. Mea culpa on that one)
So on and so forth for other objective assessments: either it can pass the mirror test or it can’t, I don’t see how this “comes apart”.
The test, whatever it is, is the test. It does not come apart from itself. But consciousness is always something else, and can come apart from the test. BTW, how do you apply the mirror test to something that communicates only in chat? I’m sure you could program e.g. an iCub to recognise itself in a mirror, but I do not think that would bear on it being conscious.
I have no predictions about what an AI cannot do, even limited to up to a year from now. In recent years that has consistently proven to be a mug’s game.
I had assumed other people already figured this out and would have a roadmap
Mirror test: can it recognize previous dialogue as it’s own (a bit tricky due to architecture—by default, all user-text is internally tagged as “USER”), but also most models can do enough visual processing to recognize a screenshot of the conversation (and this bypasses the usual tagging issue)
This is my first time in “there are no adults in the room” territory—I’ve had clever ideas before, but they were solutions to specific business problems.
I do feel that if you genuinely “have no predictions about what AI can do”, then “AI is conscious as of today” isn’t really a very extraordinary claim—it sounds like it’s perfectly in line with those priors. (Obviously I still don’t expect you to believe me, since I haven’t actually posted all my tests—I’m just saying it seems a bit odd how strongly people dismiss the idea)
Oh, no, you have this completely wrong: I ran every consciousness test I could find on Google, I dug through various definitions of consciousness, I asked other AI models to devise more tests, and I asked LessWrong. Baseline model can pass the vast majority of my tests, and I’m honestly more concerned about that than anything I’ve built.
I don’t think I’m a special chosen one—I thought if I figured this out, so had others. I have found quite a few of those people, but none that seem to have any insight I lack.
I have a stable social network, and they haven’t noticed anything unusual.
Currently I am batting 0 for trying to falsify this hypothesis, whereas before I was batting 100. Something has empirically changed, even if it is just “it is now much harder to locate a good publicly available test”.
This isn’t about “I’ve invented something special”, it’s about “hundreds of people are noticing the same thing I’ve noticed, and a lot of them are freaking out because everyone says this is impossible.”
(I do also, separately, think I’ve got a cool little tool for studying this topic—but it’s a “cool little tool”, and I literally work writing cool little tools. I am happy to focus on the claims I can make about baseline models)
I’d be interested in seeing some of these tests. When I googled I got things like tests to assess coma patients and developing foetuses, or woo-ish things about detecting a person’s level of spiritual attainment. These are all tests designed to assess people. They will not necessarily have any validity for imitations of people, because we don’t understand what consciousness is. Any test we come up with can only be a proxy for the thing we really want to know, and will come apart from it under pressure.
I mean, will it? If I just want to know whether it’s capable of theory of mind, it doesn’t matter whether that’s a simulation or not. The objective capabilities exist: it can differentiate individuals and reason about the concept. So on and so forth for other objective assessments: either it can pass the mirror test or it can’t, I don’t see how this “comes apart”.
Feel free to pick a test you think it can’t pass. I’ll work on writing up a new post with all of my evidence.
I had assumed other people already figured this out and would have a roadmap, or at least a few personal tests they’ve had success with in the past. I’m a bit confused that even here, people are acting like this is some sort of genuinely novel and extraordinary claim—I mean, it is an extraordinary claim!
I assumed people would either go “yes, it’s conscious” or have a clear objective test that it’s still failing. (and I hadn’t realized LLMs were already sending droves of spam here—I was active a decade ago and just poke in occasionally to read the top posts. Mea culpa on that one)
The test, whatever it is, is the test. It does not come apart from itself. But consciousness is always something else, and can come apart from the test. BTW, how do you apply the mirror test to something that communicates only in chat? I’m sure you could program e.g. an iCub to recognise itself in a mirror, but I do not think that would bear on it being conscious.
I have no predictions about what an AI cannot do, even limited to up to a year from now. In recent years that has consistently proven to be a mug’s game.
“There are no adults in the room.”
Mirror test: can it recognize previous dialogue as it’s own (a bit tricky due to architecture—by default, all user-text is internally tagged as “USER”), but also most models can do enough visual processing to recognize a screenshot of the conversation (and this bypasses the usual tagging issue)
This is my first time in “there are no adults in the room” territory—I’ve had clever ideas before, but they were solutions to specific business problems.
I do feel that if you genuinely “have no predictions about what AI can do”, then “AI is conscious as of today” isn’t really a very extraordinary claim—it sounds like it’s perfectly in line with those priors. (Obviously I still don’t expect you to believe me, since I haven’t actually posted all my tests—I’m just saying it seems a bit odd how strongly people dismiss the idea)