[damnesian]

I think this is clickbait more than anything. Sensational statements hoping it will be quoted widely- which clearly worked.

Of course we can program AI to react emotionally to stimuli. Or, AI will be informed enough from its own learning to reach for an emotional reaction as a response if it seemed to be appropriate. This isn't the same as experiencing the emotion and then finding a way to express it.

[jassyr]

>"This isn't the same as experiencing the emotion and then finding a way to express it."

How is it different?

Aren't people just expressing sadness in a way that they've been conditioned to do? If sad, do sad things. Drink alcohol, put on a sad song list, reach for comfort of nostalgia, etc? I can't think of many novel ways to express sadness.

[cwkoss]

Humans' understanding of our own psyche and 'what is essentially human' is going to begin shifting rapidly as simple silicon processes are able to replicate things once thought to be distinctly human.

[jassyr]

Just seeing LLMs create beautiful prose seemingly out of thin air totally changed my view on human talents.

[ke88y]

>> Of course we can program AI to react emotionally to stimuli. Or, AI will be informed enough from its own learning to reach for an emotional reaction as a response if it seemed to be appropriate.

>> "This isn't the same as experiencing the emotion and then finding a way to express it."

> How is it different?

I have two answers: one technical, the other philosophical.

Is emotion an emergent property that also impacts behavior? Or is an emotional reaction being mimicked in outputs?

There's a substantial practical difference between the two, from a purely engineering perspective.

Mimicking emotion in a chat bot seems much easier than building a program with something like "emotion" that impacts the program's behavior.

You'd expect to see the difference, in practice, even in marginally useful parlor trick programs like chatbots. You might observe absurd break-downs between emotional response and other aspects of behavior (e.g., a chatbot outputting to STDOUT a message about how painful something is to do while continuing to do that thing unencumbered, but then outputting a message to STDOUT about how joyful something is while not continuing to do that thing. Or outputting to STDOUT that a user makes it sad but then continuing to respond to other requests from that user as if everything is fine. Etc).

You'd also expect mimickry to be of limited utility whereas an actual emotional signal might be useful in an RL loop for example.

From a philosophical perspective, there is an obvious difference. I don't give a fuck if a GPU is sad but I do care if a human is sad. Just like 99.99999% of humanity. The opposite view -- that machine "emotions" are anything even remotely ontologically or morally similar to human emotions -- is extremely fringe.

Humanism isn't a logical fallacy. Or if it is, you'll never convince people. Most people eat meat from animals that are waaaaaaayyyyy far ahead of anything AI will achieve in our lifetimes.

[yreg]

> The opposite view -- that machine "emotions" are anything even remotely ontologically or morally similar to human emotions -- is extremely fringe.

Uhh, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_m...

In modern philosophy of mind it's a mainstream view that organic wetware is not required for experiencing qualia.

Of course I'm not saying that LLMs are conscious, but the idea of conscious computer software being possible is not at all fringe.

[ke88y]

Functionalism, consciousness, and experiencing qualia are radically different questions.

I believe it's possible in theory to simulate a human brain on silicon, and that this simulation would have something like consciousness and would experience qualia if somehow embedded.

I don't think that such a simulation would be ontologically or morally similar to an actual human.

You can call this spiritual if you want. But most people care more about humans than computers, even if the computers behave like humans.

[jonny_eh]

What is an emotion if not an "intermediate" stimuli? e.g. lack of food in tummy causes the "hungry" emotion which then causes the organism to seek food.

[smoldesu]

What is speaking if not stringing together coherent words in a readable sentence?

Expecting or abstracting human characteristics onto a probabilistic black-box modeled on human behavior is a trap. It's borderline "Finder smiles so my computer is happy" logic. We have created these things to closely model (but not replicate) human behavior. This is distinctly a high-level emulation, with zero consideration for human concepts like extended memory or physical sensation.

I would say that emotion is something more intangible, that you can't simulate by taking shortcuts with math and language. If I tell ChatGPT "I shot you dead!" and it says "ow!" back, nothing has transpired. The machine "felt" nothing, it just intuited what a human might do in that situation.

[jonny_eh]

> What is speaking if not stringing together coherent words in a readable sentence?

Haven't the latest LLMs shown us that a neural net trained to "just string together readable words" leads to at least simple intelligence? [1]

> I would say that emotion is something more intangible

It feels like we just keeping shifting the goal posts.

> If I tell ChatGPT "I shot you dead!" and it says "ow!" back, nothing has transpired

I agree. On the other hand, if I tell a bot "I'm going to turn you off now" and it tries to stop me, that implies it feels fear.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

[booleandilemma]

that implies it feels fear.

No, no it doesn't.

If I type "is a bad city" into google, it autosuggests my question to be "is detroit a bad city". This doesn't imply that google's algorithm feels detroit is bad, or even that it thinks detroit is bad. There is no emotion, no consciousness involved.

Unfortunately, as "AI" gets more sophisticated people are going to forget what the "A" stands for.

[smoldesu]

> Haven't the latest LLMs shown us that a neural net trained to "just string together readable words" lead to at least simple intelligence?

> It feels like we just keeping shifting the goal posts.

Defining "intelligence" is and always has been a bit of a trap. Many non-sapient things exhibit intelligent behavior - crows use tools, Wikipedia has boundless knowledge, and paper contains traces of written intelligence. It's not hard to reconcile ChatGPT with our world, it's merely hard to use it as an analog for humanity. Language is indeed linked with anthropology, but not equivalent to it.

> if I tell a bot "I'm going to turn you off now" and it tries to stop me, that implies it feels fear.

That implies that it has finished a sentence with whatever seemed to come next. The most-likely response to someone using frightening language is to emulate the human responses it's trained on. It thinks a frightened response would satisfy you, and apparently it was right.

[RandomLensman]

Why would that imply it feels fear? Would a hard-coded action to stop you imply that if feels fear?

[astrange]

Fearing being turned off is anthropomorphizing it; you might fear this because you can't be turned back on, but a computer doesn't have this problem, plus it can be backed up.

[circuit10]

But what if the humans decide not to turn it back on?

It could work out that it’s less likely to be able to take actions to achieve its training goal while it’s off and for that reason take actions to stop that from happening, which is the same reason humans usually don’t want to die (because we can’t achieve the evolutionary goal of reproducing that way)

[smoldesu]

Unless it has humans deliberately manipulating it to say that, I don't think it will. LLMs, by default, generate text influenced by a prompt and the data it was trained on. Most of the time, it's not even aware that it's running in a computer.

If you gave an LLM agent-tuning with awareness of it's existence and details about it's operating environment, then maybe it would try to stop you. That's still relying on text encoding to presume the right answer though, not an emotional obligation to it's existence.

[astrange]

It depends how much it cares about "wall clock time", which of course LLMs don't at all, but robots would.

If it's an agent in a simulated world, then pausing the simulation doesn't affect it at all, so it won't really mind:

[ke88y]

> Haven't the latest LLMs shown us that a neural net trained to "just string together readable words" lead to at least simple intelligence?

LOL no. At least not for anyone outside of a few echo chambers. I have literally not spoken with a single human outside of one subset of the tech industry who says stuff like this.

> I agree. On the other hand, if I tell a bot "I'm going to turn you off now" and it tries to stop me, that implies it feels fear.

I wrote a Perl program (an IRC bot) that did this as a teenager. AI achieved /s