I have been reading Jeff Hawkins' _1000 Brains_ which is roughly *his*
take on AI from the perspective of the Neuroscience *he* has been doing
for a few decades, including building models of the neocortex.
What struck me strongly was how much *I* expect anything I'd want to
call artificial *consciousness* to engage in "co-munnication" in the
strongest sense. Glen regularly admonishes us that "communication" may
be an illusion and something we don't actually *do* or maybe more to the
the point "it doesn't mean what we think it means"?
So for all the parlor tricks I've enjoyed playing with chatGPT and
DALL-E and maybe even more spectacularly the myriad examples *others*
have teased out of those systems, I am always looking for what sort of
"internal state" these systems are exposing to me in their
"utterances". And by extension, I am looking to see if it is in any
way apprehending *me* through my questions and prompts.
Dialog with chatGPT feels pretty familiar to me, as if I'm conversing
with an unusually polite and cooperative polymath. It is freeing to
feel I can ask "it" any question which I can formulate and can expect
back a pretty *straight* answer if not always one I was hoping for.
"It" seems pretty insightful and usually picks up on the nuances of my
questions. As often as not, I need to follow up with refined questions
which channel the answers away from the "mundane or obvious" but when I
do, it rarely misses a trick or is evasive or harps on something from
it's own (apparent) agenda. It only does that when I ask it questions
about it's own nature, formulation, domain and then it just seems
blunted as if it has a lawyer or politician intercepting some of those
questions and answering them for it.
I have learned to "frame" my questions by first asking it to defer it's
response until I've given it some ... "framing" for the actual
question. Otherwise I go through the other series of steps where I
have to re-ask the same question with more and more context or ask a
very long and convoluted question. At first it was a pleasure to be
able to unlimber my convoluted-question-generator and have it (not mis)
understand me and even not seem to "miss a trick". As I learned to
generate several framing statements before asking my question, I have
found that I *can* give it too many constraints (apparently) such that
it respects some/most of my framing but then avoids or ignores other
parts. At that point I have to ask follow-up, elaborating,
contextualizing questions.
I do not yet feel like I am actually seeing into chatGPT's soul or in
any way being seen by it. That will be for a future generation I
suspect. Otherwise it is one hella "research assistant" and "spitball
partner" on most any topic I've considered that isn't too contemporary
(training set ended 2021?).
- Steve
On 4/4/23 5:54 PM, Prof David West wrote:
Based on the flood of stories about ChatAI, it appears:
- they can 'do' math and 'reason' scientificdally
- they can generate essays, term papers, etc.
- they can engage in convincing dialog/conversations
- as "therapists"
- as "girlfriends" (I haven't seen any stories about women falling in love
with their AI)
- as kinksters
- they can write code
The writing code ability immediately made me wonder if, given a database of
music instead of text, they could write music?
The dialog /conversation ability makes me wonder about more real-time
collaborative interaction, improv acting / comedy? Or, pair programming? The
real-time aspect is critical to my question, as I believe there is something
qualitatively different between two people doing improv or pair programming
than simply engaging in dialog. I think I could make a much stronger argument
in the case of improv music, especially jazz, but AIs aren't doing that yet.
davew
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