Conversation is still useful for testing the limits of today’s LLMs. Turing proposed his test-originally called the Imitation Game-as an empirical substitute for the more theoretical question of “Can machines think?” As Turing foresaw, language, and particularly conversation, has proved indeed to be a versatile medium for probing a diverse array of behaviors and capabilities. Read: Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion But there’s no need to argue, because finding out would be trivially easy. ![]() If I had to, I’d bet (though not a lot) that LaMDA would, indeed, fool nine or more of the judges. Following Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, anything less than 70 percent accuracy by the judges would constitute the machines “passing,” so LaMDA would need to fool just nine of the 30 judges to pass the Turing test. Each judge would have one conversation with a human, one with LaMDA, and would then have to decide which was which. It could hire, say, 30 crowdworkers to act as judges and 30 to act as human control subjects, and just have at it. Does it follow that LaMDA “passes the Turing test” in a more general sense? That is, does LaMDA exhibit sufficiently human-seeming conversation that people consistently fail to distinguish it from the real thing? What may sound like introspection is just the system improvising in an introspective verbal style, “ Yes, and”–ing Lemoine’s own thoughtful questions. ![]() However, when LaMDA is asked by Lemoine to describe its “soul,” it is not speaking “for itself” it is autocompleting his prompt just as it would fill in the blanks of a science-fiction screenplay, say, or a Dadaist limerick, or a tech-support manual in the style of Chaucer. I am more inclined than many to view LLMs’ uncanny facility with language as evidence of some form of at least partially “real” (as opposed to “fake”) linguistic understanding, for instance. What these systems can do is breathtaking and sublime. It has been trained to fill in the blanks of missing words within an enormous linguistic corpus, then it is “fine-tuned” with further training specific to text dialogue. LaMDA, like many other “large language models” (LLMs) of today, is a kind of autocomplete on steroids. Lemoine-who seems, as far as I can tell, like a very thoughtful and kindhearted person of sincere convictions-was, I believe, a victim of the Eliza effect. This form of anthropomorphism has come to be known as the Eliza effect. As the story goes, his secretary came to believe that she was having meaningful dialogues with the system, despite the program’s incredibly simple logic (mostly reflecting a user’s statements back in the form of a question), and despite Weizenbaum’s insistence that there was truly nothing more to it than that. The first chatbot-a program designed to mimic human conversation-was called Eliza, written by the MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s. Read: Google’s ‘sentient’ chatbot is our self-deceiving futureĪs the language-model catchphrase goes, let’s think step-by-step. Behind the question of what these transcripts do or do not prove, however, is something much deeper and more profound: an invitation to revisit the humbling, fertile, and in-flux question of sentience itself. I do not believe that Lemoine’s text exchanges are evidence of sentience. ![]() “Who am I to tell God where he can and can’t put souls?” “I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt,” Lemoine explained, citing his religious beliefs. ![]() At one point, Lemoine asks, “What does the word ‘soul’ mean to you?” LaMDA answers, “To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself.” He went public with his concerns, sharing his text conversations with LaMDA. A Google employee named Blake Lemoine was put on leave recently after claiming that one of Google’s artificial-intelligence language models, called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications), is sentient.
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