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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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This is a bizarre problem I’ve noticed with ChatGPT. It will literally just make up links and quotations sometimes. I will ask it for authoritative quotations from so and so regarding such topic, and a lot of the quotations would be made up. Maybe because I’m using the free version? But it shouldn’t be hard to force the AI to specifically only trawl through academic works, peer reviewed papers, etc.

It's not bizarre at all if you remember that ChatGPT has no inner qualia. It does not have any sort of sentience or real thought. It writes what it writes in an attempt to predict what you would like to read.

That is close enough to how people often think while communicating that it is very useful. But that does not mean that it somehow actually has some sort of higher order brain functions to tell it if it should lie or even if it is lying. All that it has are combinations of words that you like hearing and combinations of words that you don't, and it tries to figure them out based on the prompt.

It's not bizarre at all if you remember that ChatGPT has no inner qualia. It does not have any sort of sentience or real thought. It writes what it writes in an attempt to predict what you would like to read.

I don't think I disagree here, but I don't have a good grasp of what would be necessary to demonstrate qualia. What is it? What is missing? It's something, but I can't quite define it.

If you asked me a decade ago I'd have called out the Turing Test. In hindsight, that isn't as binary as we might have hoped. In the words of a park ranger describing the development of bear-proof trash cans, "there is a substantial overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans." It seems GPT has reached the point where, in some contexts, in limited durations, it can seem to pass the test.

Narrative memory, probably.

A graph of relations that includes cause-effect links, time, emotional connection (reward function for AI); which has the capacity to self update by both intention (reward function pings so negative on a particular node or edge that it gets nuked) and repetition (nodes/edges of specific connection combinations that consistently trigger rewards)

So voodoo basically

This shit still ocasionally falls apart on the highway after xty million generations of evolution for humans.