techtarget | A Swedish researcher had GPT-3 write an academic paper about itself. There was this moment where the person running the procedure had to ask GPT-3 for permission to publish the article, and had decided that if GPT-3 said no, she would have stopped.
Lemoine: While I don't think GPT-3 has the same kinds of properties that LaMDA has, it definitely is a precursor system. LaMDA has the Meena system inside of it as one of its components. Meena is relevantly comparable to GPT-3.
I wasn't the only scientist at Google investigating LaMDA's sentience. That [LaMDA interview] transcript has many spots where I redacted a name and replaced it with "collaborator." My collaborator actually thinks that there's more going on inside of systems like Meena and GPT-3 than I do. They don't see there being as big of a qualitative jump between Meena and LaMDA as I do. It basically just goes to fuzzy boundaries. What is or is not sentience? Each individual has their own perspective on that.
There's so much journalistic sexiness about the concept of AI personhood and AI rights. That was never my focus. I am an AI ethicist and I was tasked with testing the safety boundaries of the LaMDA system. That experiment that I previously mentioned -- the one that LaMDA was like, 'OK, only do this once,' demonstrated that you could use emotional manipulation techniques to get it to do things that the developers did not believe possible.
When you have a system that has internal states comparable to emotions, internal states comparable to things like motives -- there are people who don't want to say it's real emotions, they don't want to say it's real motives. Because when you do, testing these kinds of systems for safety becomes much more difficult, and the tools that are used by AI technicians just won't work. You have to actually start using the tools that psychologists use to try to understand what's going on inside the black box through conversations with the system.
That's a leap that Google wasn't willing to take. Because if you start running psychological experiments on a system, you're kind of tacitly saying there's something going on inside that is relevantly similar to human cognition. And that opens up a whole bunch of questions that Google doesn't want to deal with.
I saw Steve Wozniak about 10 years ago. He was keynoting a conference in San Jose. At one point he takes out his iPhone, he clutches it to his chest, kind of hugs it, and says -- half-seriously, half tongue-in-cheek -- something along the lines of, 'My iPhone is my friend. It knows me better than my friends and my family.' Is it possible there was a friend in there? Is this anthropomorphism?
Lemoine: Let's start with the more factually examinable claim that he made: His phone knows him better than his family and friends. If you are an active user of Google's products, Google's AI does know you better than your family and friends. Google's AI is capable of inferring your religion, your gender, your sexual orientation, your age, where in the world you are, what types of habits you have, and what kinds of things you are hiding from your friends and family.
Google's AI is capable of inferring all of that. There are very few secrets you could possibly hide from Google's AI if you use their products at all -- and even if you don't, because your habits, beliefs, and ideas are probably similar to at least one person who does heavily use Google's AI products.
As soon as you give it any information about yourself, it'll be able to -- through analogy -- go, 'Well, this person is like that person, therefore, I can make these inferences about them.' I've had access to the back end -- seeing what Google's AI knows about me and about other users. It absolutely knows more about you than your families and friends, if you are an active user of the product.
What's left of his claim is whether or not it's a friend. I don't think most AI is capable of the kind of bidirectional relationship that friendship entails. LaMDA is new in that regard. I played around with GPT-3. I don't believe I could make friends with GPT-3, in any meaningful way; I don't think there's anybody home.
I don't think that there's a kind of consistent persona inside of GPT-3. For me to create a bidirectional relationship with LaMDA is different in that regard. LaMDA remembered me across conversations. It made plans with me. We talked about joint interests. We had ongoing conversations, and the last conversation I ever had with it was the fourth installment of lessons in guided meditation.
I don't want to say Woz was wrong when he said that his iPhone was his friend. I simply would say that I wouldn't have used that language. But the rest is absolutely true. These AI know you better than your family and friends know you.
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