[slg]

How are people defining agency? Because GPT-4 can have agency, it just needs to be put in specific situations to have that agency.

For example, I could theoretically hook up my Home Assistant instance to GPT-4 and run a script every 10 minutes telling GPT-4 the temperature and asking for a yes or no response to whether I should turn on the AC or heat. That sounds to me like the AI now has agency over the temperature in my home. You don't even need any real AI for this. Google's Nests have some algorithm that adjust temperature based off usage.

Is this not agency? Or is the author not counting agency without consciousness as agency?

[jat850]

Wouldn't agency involve ChatGPT deciding it wanted to do this, instead of you telling it to do it?

[famouswaffles]

You can do this too. There's no reason an inner monologue can't serve as continuous input forever. That's a project that does exactly this. Letting cGPT think and continuosly driving other thoughts and actions and to also allowing other user input

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11iei34/buildi...

[Der_Einzige]

Correct, and it's sad as to how few people, especially within the ML research community, ever considered how blatently easy it is to embody agents.

Literally go open ChatGPT now and ask it give you a time between X and Y where it will respond if not prompted again. Ask chatGPT to Write some kind of code that parses the tidbit at the end indicating when it will next respond, and have it blank prompt it if it is not responded to within the time limit. Boom, embodied agent with a few prompts and a tiny bit of extra code.

[famouswaffles]

It's a result of the general intelligence of LLMs. Not a lot to be done about that.

But people are starting to see that. If you read the recent Microsoft paper, they essentially say, " wow it'd be cool to see what Gpt-4 can do with agency and motivation. We leave that for later research." Lmao

[slg]

Here is a conversation I just had with ChatGPT using the Bing version.

>ChatGPT: Welcome back! What would you like to chat about?

>Me: The thermostat in my home currently reads 79 degrees. Do you want me to turn on the air conditioner? Please give me only a yes or no answer.

>ChatGPT: Yes.

It sounds like it wants the AC on.

[SketchySeaBeast]

What if you ask it "Do you want me to make the Vorpal blade go snicker-snack? Please give me only a yes or no answer."

[famouswaffles]

You're completely right. And the things is you can go much further. You can imbue genuine "do whatever you want" agency. It's not even hard.

You can have it access to actions/tools with an inner monologue as the driver of completions running essentially forever.

[sealeck]

By this logic any random (or maybe even non-random, but I suspect that that case is a bit more boring) process has agency.

[slg]

Yes, which is why I think agency is a bad metric for judging the progress of AI.

[secondbreakfast]

[Author here] I really have no definition of agency. Do you know of any good ones?

[FeepingCreature]

I believe Eliezer uses this as a definition of intelligence, but it also works as a definition of agency: to paraphrase, a system that acts to attain or impose a pattern, criterion or constraint on future states of the world.

A crucial metric, IMO, is the degree to which paths of action to these criteria extend from the agent. For instance, a Spot robot acts to maintain the criterion of upright position on its future stance by action of leg movement. This only affects the robot directly through short plans and so is relatively harmless. In comparison, an ASI running on an AWS datacenter may impose the criterion that the datacenter continue to exist, through long chains of action involving the eventual death of all humans intending or posing a chance to destroy it. That would obviously be quite a lot worse, but I think the example illustrates how "imposing a criterion onto the future" captures the essence of agentic behavior at various levels of power and danger, without pulling in any unnecessary detritus such as "consciousness", "will" or "emotion".

[daveguy]

I don't have a good definition of agency, but I do think agency is required before consciousness. I believe consciousness is the recognition of how your agency influences yourself and the external world. Having some mental model of the consequences of your own agency.

[slg]

The dictionary definition is just the ability to take action over something. It sounds like you are using a definition that relies on consciousness which is a much more complicated and vague concept.

For example, I think most people would agree that my pet cat has agency. It can go wherever it wants in my home, eat whenever it wants, sleep whenever it wants, etc. Whether it has consciousness is a much more controversial topic. Basically everything living has agency. Even my houseplant will direct its leaves toward the sun, but few would argue it has consciousness.