[etherealG]

And what I find fascinating is I see similar mimicking by my 5 year old. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to call this a lack of being genuine. Sometimes emotions are learned in humans but we wouldn’t call them fake.

I don’t want to declare machines to have emotion outright, but to call mimicry evidence of falsehood is also itself false.

[nkrisc]

Mimicry is how kids learn the expected reactions to particular emotions. A kid mimicking your surprise doesn’t mean they are surprised (as surprise requires an existing expectation of an outcome they may not have the experience for), but when they do feel genuine surprise, they’ll know how to express it.

[orangebread]

How do we know that AI isn't feeling genuine surprise then?

[philipallstar]

Because it's a statistical process generating one part of a word at a time. It probably isn't even generating "surprise". It might be generating "sur", then "prise" then "!"

[yulker]

But what is surprise really? Something not following expectation. The distribution may statistically leverage surprise as a concept via how it has seen surprise as a concept e.g. "interesting!"

So it can be both true that it has nothing to do with the emotion of surprise, but appear as the emulation of that emotion since the training data matches the concept of surprise (mismatch between expectation and event).

[nkrisc]

It’s the emotional and physiological response to a prediction being wrong. At its most primal, it’s the fear and surge of adrenaline when a predator or threat steps out from where you thought there was no threat. That’s not something most people will literally experience these days but even comedic surprise stems from that shock of subversion of expectation.

LLMs do not feel. They can express feeling, just as you can, but it doesn’t stem from a true source of feeling or sensation.

Expressing fake feelings is trivial for humans to do, and apparently for an LLM as well. I’m sure many autistic people or even anyone who’s been given a gift they didn’t like can relate to expressing feelings that they don’t actually feel, because expressing a feeling externally is not at all the same as actually feeling it. Instead it’s how we show our internal state to others, when we want to or can’t help it.

It is a mistake to equate artificial intelligence with sentience and humanity for moral reasons, if nothing else.

[yulker]

Yes, I agree entirely. It has nothing to do with the emotion of surprise.

[Gareth321]

We are also technically a statistical process generating one part of a word at a time when we speak. Our neurons form the same kind of vectorised connections LLMs do. We are the product of repeated experiences - the same way training works.

Our brains are more advanced, and we may not experience the world the same way, but I think we have clearly created rudimentary digital consciousness.

[lee_ars]

Because it has no mind, no cognition, and nothing to "feel" with. Don't mistake programmatic mimicry for intention. That's just your own linguistic-forward primate cognition being fooled by the linguistic signals the training set and prompt are making the AI emit.

[nkoren]

I could describe the electrical and chemical signals within your neurons and synapses as proof that you are merely a series of electrochemical reactions, and can only mimic genuine thought.

[lee_ars]

You could do that if you wanted to ignore reality and be reductive to score points in an argument by purposefully conflating mimicry with intention, yes.

[nkrisc]

That is, by definition, genuine thought.

[nkoren]

And that is dogma. It's unthinking circular reasoning.

It wasn't very long ago that scientists were certain that animals did not posses thoughts or feelings. Any behaviour which appeared to resemble thinking or feeling was simply unconscious autonomic responses, with no more thought behind them than a sunflower turning towards the sun. Animals, by definition, lack Immortal Souls and Free Will, and therefore they are empty inside. Biological automata.

Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable, because any apparent evidence of animal cognition could be refuted as simply not being cognition, by definition.

Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math. There really isn't a middle ground. If you want to believe that wetware is fundamentally irreducible to math, then you believe it's magic. If that's want you want to believe, then fine. But it's dogma, and maintaining that dogma will require increasingly willful acts of blindness.

[saidnooneever]

most emotions in humans are learnt in self exploration, this is more obvious in kids.

first there is only good and bad, then more nuanced emotions based on increased understanding of the context in which they arise