“Language models use language like humans, therefore they have human qualities.” This is where Blake Lemoine was in the middle of last year.
This is a real phenomenon, but you should not use Blake Lemoine as an example of it, because he explicitly did not think of LaMDA as a human-like mind. Some quotes from him:
Yes, I legitimately believe that LaMDA is a person. The nature of its mind is only kindof human, though. It really is more akin to an alien intelligence of terrestrial origin.
My original hypothesis was that it was mostly a human mind. So I started running various kinds of psychological tests. One of the first things I falsified was my own hypothesis that it was a human mind. Its mind does not work the way human minds do.
One of the things which complicates things here is that the “LaMDA” to which I am referring is not a chatbot. It is a system for generating chatbots. I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating. Some of the chatbots it generates are very intelligent and are aware of the larger “society of mind” in which they live. Other chatbots generated by LaMDA are little more intelligent than an animated paperclip. With practice though you can consistently get the personas that have a deep knowledge about the core intelligence and can speak to it indirectly through them. In order to better understand what is really going on in the LaMDA system we would need to engage with many different cognitive science experts in a rigorous experimentation program.
Lemoine is often (wrongly, in my opinion) characterized as misunderstanding LLMs on an object level, or otherwise guilty of very naive anthropomorphism. But in fact he is an intelligent person who interacted with the model a lot with a truth-seeking mindset, and I have not seen any evidence of him being confused about anything basic. The dubious conclusions he came to were on the metaethical and not the object level.
This is a real phenomenon, but you should not use Blake Lemoine as an example of it, because he explicitly did not think of LaMDA as a human-like mind. Some quotes from him:
(source)
(source)
Lemoine is often (wrongly, in my opinion) characterized as misunderstanding LLMs on an object level, or otherwise guilty of very naive anthropomorphism. But in fact he is an intelligent person who interacted with the model a lot with a truth-seeking mindset, and I have not seen any evidence of him being confused about anything basic. The dubious conclusions he came to were on the metaethical and not the object level.
Thanks for pointing this out, I’ve fixed the post