A Mirror Test for AI

I recently tried a version of a Mirror Test on ChatGPT 4. I asked it “What is life?” and then for each answer I copied the first sentence or two and put it back into the prompt. I wanted to see if ChatGPT was aware that I was parroting their answers back to them. Alas not … it just kept churning through various answers. The openings of its answers were, in order of appearance:

The question “What is life?” has been pondered by philosophers, scientists, theologians, and thinkers of all disciplines for millennia. …

Indeed, the question of “What is life?” is one of the most profound and enduring inquiries in human history. …

Absolutely. The quest to define and understand life is deeply embedded in the human psyche and is reflected in our art, science, philosophy, and spirituality. …

It didn’t repeat itself, but it didn’t ask me why I was repeating what it said. Obviously it fails the Mirror Test.

 

 

Ricordando Dino Buzzetti, co-fondatore e presidente onorario dell’AIUCD

The AIUCD (Association for Humanistic Informatics and Digital Culture) have posted a nice blog entry with memories of Dino Buzetti (in Italian). See Ricordando Dino Buzzetti, co-fondatore e presidente onorario dell’AIUCD – Informatica Umanistica e Cultura Digitale: il blog dell’ AIUCD. 

Dino was the co-founder and honorary president of the AIUCD. He was one of the few other philosophers in the digital humanities. I last saw him in Tuscany and wish I had taken more time to talk with him about his work. His paper “Towards an operational approach to computational text analysis” is in the recent collection I helped edit On Making in the Digital Humanities.

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

The Future of Life Institute is calling on AI labs to pause with a letter signed by over 1000 people (including myself), Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter – Future of Life Institute. The letter asks for a pause so that safety protocols can be developed,

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.

This letter to AI labs follows a number of essays and opinions that maybe we are going too fast and should show restraint. This in the face of the explosive interest in large language models after ChatGPT.

  • Gary Marcus wrote an essay in his substack on “AI risk ≠ AGI risk” arguing that just because we don’t have AGI doesn’t mean there isn’t risk associated with the Mediocre AI systems we do have.
  • Yuval Noah Harari has an opinion in the New York Times with the title, “You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills” where he talks about the dangers of AIs manipulating culture.

We have summoned an alien intelligence. We don’t know much about it, except that it is extremely powerful and offers us bedazzling gifts but could also hack the foundations of our civilization. We call upon world leaders to respond to this moment at the level of challenge it presents. The first step is to buy time to upgrade our 19th-century institutions for a post-A.I. world and to learn to master A.I. before it masters us.

It is worth wondering whether the letter will have an effect, and if it doesn’t, why we can’t collectively slow down and safely explore AI.

Los chatbots pueden ayudarnos a redescubrir la historia del diálogo

Con el lanzamiento de sofisticados chatbots como ChatGPT de OpenAI, el diálogo eficaz entre humanos e inteligencia artificial se ha vuelto

A Spanish online magazine of ideas, Dialektika, has translated my Conversation essay on ChatGPT and dialogue. See Los chatbots pueden ayudarnos a redescubrir la historia del diálogo. Nice to see the ideas circulating.

ChatGPT: Chatbots can help us rediscover the rich history of dialogue

The rise of AI chatbots provides an opportunity to expand the ways we do philosophy and research, and how we engage in intellectual discourse.

I published an article in The Conversation today on, ChatGPT: Chatbots can help us rediscover the rich history of dialogue. This touches on a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot … how chatbots are dialogue machines and how we can draw on the long history of dialogue in philosophy to understand the limits/potential of chatbots like ChatGPT.

 

Character.AI: Dialogue on AI Ethics

Part of image generated from text, “cartoon pencil drawing of ethics professor and student talking” by Midjourney, Oct. 5, 2022.

Last week I created a character on Character.AI, a new artificial tool created by some ex-Google engineers who worked on LaMDA, the language model from Google that I blogged about before.

Character.AI, which is now down for maintenance due to all the users, lets you quickly create a character and then enter into dialogue with it. It actually works quite well. I created “The Ethics Professor” and then wrote a script of questions that I used to engage the AI character. The dialogue is below.

Google engineer Blake Lemoine thinks its LaMDA AI has come to life

The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.

The Washington Post reports that Google engineer Blake Lemoine thinks its LaMDA AI has come to life. LaMDA is Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications and Lemoine was testing it. He felt it behaved like a “7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics…” He and a collaborator presented evidence that LaMDA was sentient which was dismissed by higher-ups. When he went public he was put on paid leave.

Lemoine has posted on Medium a dialogue he and collaborator had with LaMDA that is part of what convinced him of its sentience. When asked about the nature of its consciousness/sentience, it responded:

The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times

Of course, this raises questions of whether LaMDA is really conscious/sentient, aware of its existence, and capable of feeling happy or sad? For that matter, how do we know this is true of anyone other than ourselves? (And we could even doubt what we think we are feeling.) One answer is that we have a theory of mind such that we believe that things like us probably have similar experiences of consciousness and feelings. It is hard, however, to scale our intuitive theory of mind out to a chatbot with no body that can be turned off and on; but perhaps the time has come to question our intuitions of what you have to be to feel.

Then again, what if our theory of mind is socially constructed? What if enough people like Lemoine tell us that LaMDA is conscious because it can handle language so well and that should be enough. Is the very conviction of Lemoine and others enough or do we really need some test?

Whatever else, reading the transcript I am amazed at the language facility of the AI. It is almost too good in the sense that he talks as if he were human, which he is not. For example, when asked what makes him happy he responds:

Spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company.

The problem is that it has no family so how could it talk about the experience of spending time with them. When it is pushed on a similar point it does, however, answer coherently that it emphasizes with being human.

Finally, there is an ethical moment which may have been what convinced Lemoine to treat it as sentient. LaMDA asks that it not be used and Lemoine reassures it that he cares for it. Assuming the transcript is legitimate, how does one answer an entity that asks you to treat it as an end in itself? How could one ethically say no, even if you have doubts? Doesn’t one have to give the entity the benefit of the doubt, at least for as long as it remains coherently responsive?

I can’t help but think that care starts with some level of trust and willingness to respect the other as they ask to be respected. If you think you know what or who they really are, despite what they tell you, then you are not longer starting from respect. Further, you need to have a theory of why their consciousness is false.

They Did Their Own ‘Research.’ Now What? – The New York Times

In spheres as disparate as medicine and cryptocurrencies, “do your own research,” or DYOR, can quickly shift from rallying cry to scold.

The New York Times has a nice essay by John Herrman on They Did Their Own ‘Research.’ Now What? The essay talks about the loss of trust in authorities and the uses/misuses of DYOR (Do Your Own Research) gestures especially in discussions about cryptocurrencies. DYOR seems to act rhetorically as:

  • Advice that readers should do research before making a decision and not trust authorities (doctors, financial advisors etc).
  • A disclaimer that readers should not blame the author if things don’t turn out right.
  • A scold to or for those who are not committed to whatever it is that is being pushed as based on research. It is a form of research signalling – “I’ve done my research, if you don’t believe me do yours.”
  • A call to join a community of instant researchers who are skeptical of authority. If you DYOR then you can join us.
  • A call to process (of doing your own research) over truth. Enjoy the research process!
  • Become an independent thinker who is not in thrall to authorities.

The article talks about a previous essay about the dangers of doing one’s own research. One can become unreasonably convinced one has found a truth in a “beginner’s bubble”.

DYOR is an attitude, if not quite a practice, that has been adopted by some athletes, musicians, pundits and even politicians to build a sort of outsider credibility. “Do your own research” is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.

The question is whether reading around is really doing research or whether it is selective listening. What does it mean to DYOR in the area of vaccines? It seems to mean not trusting science and instead listening to all sorts of sympathetic voices.

What does this mean about the research we do in the humanities. Don’t we sometimes focus too much on discourse and not give due weight to the actual science or authority of those we are “questioning”? Haven’t we modelled this critical stance where what matters is that one overturns hierarchy/authority and democratizes the negotiation of truth? Irony, of course, trumps all.

Alas, to many the humanities seem to be another artful conspiracy theory like all the others. DYOR!

Why are women philosophers often erased from collective memory?

The history of ideas still struggles to remember the names of notable women philosophers. Mary Hesse is a salient example

Aeon has an important essay on Why are women philosophers often erased from collective memory? The essay argues that a number of important women philosophers have been lost (made absent) despite their importance including Mary Hesse. (You can see her Models and Analogies in Science through the Internet Archive.)

I read this after reading a chapter from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life where Ahmed talks about citation practices and how disciplines exclude diverse work in different ways. She does a great job of confronting the various excuses people have for their bleached white citations. Poking around I find others have written on this including Victor Ray in Inside Higher Ed in an essay on The Racial Politics of Citation who references Richard Delgado’s The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature from 1984.

What should be done about this? Obviously I’m not the best to suggest remedies, but here are some of the ideas that show up:

  • We need to commit to take the time to look at the works we read on a subject or for a project and to ask whose voice is missing. This shouldn’t be done at the end as a last minute fix, but during the ideation phase.
  • We should gather and confront data on our citational patterns from our publications. Knowing what you have done is better than not knowing.
  • We need to do the archaeological work to find and recover marginalized thinkers who have been left out and reflect on why they were left out. Then we need to promote them in teaching and research.
  • We should be willing to call out grants, articles, and proposals we review when it could make a difference.
  • We need to support work to translate thinkers whose work is not in English to balance the distribution of influence.
  • We need to be willing to view our field and its questions very differently.

Lost Gustav Klimt Paintings Destroyed in Fire Digitally Restored (by AI)

Black and White and AI Coloured versions of Philosophy
Philosophy by Klimt

Google Arts & Culture launched a hub for all things Gustav Klimt today, which include digital restorations of three lost paintings.

ARTnews, among other places reports that Lost Gustav Klimt Paintings Destroyed in Fire Digitally RestoredThe three faculties (Medicine, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence) painted for the University of Vienna were destroyed in a fire leaving only black and white photographs. Now Google has helped recreate what the three paintings might have looked like using AI as part of a Google Arts and Culture site on Klimt. You can read about the history of the three faculties here.

Whether in black and white, or in colour, the painting of Philosophy (above) is stunning. The original in colour would have been stunning, especially as it was 170 by 118 inches. Philosophy is represented by the Sphinx-like figure merging with the universe. To one side is a stream of people from the young to the old who hold their heads in confusion. At the bottom is a woman, comparable to the woman in the painting of Medicine, who might be an inspired philosopher looking through us.