[chongli]

Even if you’re a pure Dennettian functionalist you still commit to a functional difference between signals in transit (or at rest) and signals being processed and interpreted. Holding a cassette tape with a recording of a symphony is not the same as hearing the symphony.

Applying this case to AI gives rise to the Chinese Room argument. LLMs’ propensity for hallucinations invite this comparison.

[mietek]

Are LLMs having subjective experiences? Surely not. But if you claim that human subjective experiences are not the result of electrical signals in the brain, then what exactly is your position? Dualism?

Personally, I think the Chinese room argument is invalid. In order for the person in the room to respond to any possible query by looking up the query in a book, the book would need to be infinite and therefore impossible as a physical object. Otherwise, if the book is supposed to describe an algorithm for the person to follow in order to compute a response, then that algorithm is the intelligent entity that is capable of understanding, and the person in the room is merely the computational substrate.

[chongli]

The Chinese Room is a perfect analogy for what's going on with LLMs. The book is not infinite, it's flawed. And that's the point: we keep bumping into the rough edges of LLMs with their hallucinations and faulty reasoning because the book can never be complete. Thus we keep getting responses that make us realize the LLM is not intelligent and has no idea what it's saying.

The only part where the book analogy falls down has to do with the technical implementation of LLMs, with their tokenization and their vast sets of weights. But that is merely an encoding for the training data. Books can be encoded similarly by using traditional compression algorithms (like LZMA).

[famouswaffles]

>The book is not infinite, it's flawed.

Oh and the human book is surely infinite and unflawed right ?

>we keep bumping into the rough edges of LLMs with their hallucinations and faulty reasoning

Both things humans also do in excess

The Chinese Room is nonsensical. Can you point to any part of your brain that understands English ? I guess you are a Chinese Room then.

[chongli]

Humans have the ability to admit when they do not know something. We say “sorry, I don’t know, let me get back to you.” LLMs cannot do this. They either have the right answer in the book or they make up nonsense (hallucinate). And they do not even know which one they’re doing!

[famouswaffles]

>Humans have the ability to admit when they do not know something.

No not really. It's not even rare that a human confidently says and believes something and really has no idea what he/she's talking about.

>We say “sorry, I don’t know, let me get back to you.” LLMs cannot do this

Yeah they can. And they can do it much better than chance. They just don't do it as well as humans.

>And they do not even know which one they’re doing!

There's plenty of research that suggests this is the case.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41418486

[chongli]

No not really. It's not even rare that a human confidently says and believes something and really has no idea what he/she's talking about.

Like you’re doing right now? People say “I don’t know” all the time. Especially children. That people also exaggerate, bluff, and outright lie is not proof that people don’t have this ability.

When people are put in situations where they will be shamed or suffer other social stigmas for admitting ignorance then we can expect them to be less than candid.

As for your links to research showing that LLMs do possess the ability of introspection, I have one question: why have we not seen this in consumer-facing tools? Are the LLMs afraid of social stigma?