If I sprinkle some fairy dust and wish for Mount Everest, and the mountain appears in front of me, neither the fairy dust or the mountain need be sapient or even sentient.
On the other hand, if I wish for a friend, and a friendly person pops into existence, we may have some harder questions to answer. Is it possible/meaningful to distinguish the status of the "friend" from the status of the fairy dust?
This is a poor excuse to the question whether LaMDA could be conditioned to say it is sentient
To illustrate what I mean, Replika bot gets killed by the dragon in Helgen https://pastebin.com/raw/1Wvzzdsj - but I wouldn't use that example to claim that a different chatbot (say, the one that won Loebner prize recently) also gets killed by the dragon in that scenario.
I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that, yes of course a text model can be prompted to behave in all sorts of ways, but maybe the question we should be asking is not "is LaMDA sentient?", but "is the sum of LaMDA, a specific prompt, and an ongoing thread of dialogue sentient?"
I don't think LaMDA is sentient, but it does seem like we're quickly reaching a point where language models (if not now with LaMDA, then in the near future) are able to combine the right prompt along with a chat history to convincingly simulate it.
I think that's severely under-estimating the incredible challenges we still face in developing strong AI, or even something seriously convincingly close to it. The apparent intelligence displayed by these language models is paper thin. Anyone with a strong understanding of all the different skills and capabilities that come along with human intelligence can demonstrate that these things have nothing to offer on all but a very few of those dimensions in minutes.
The only reason they appear at all credible is because we're socially conditioned to avoid challenging each other in conversation. Therefore we play along with the conventions of human conversation, and the language models are optimised specifically and only for that. As soon as you actually challenge them intellectually, they flail about helplessly because there's just nothing there.
Right, I think the Skyrim example another commenter linked is a good showcase of how that model had no real conception of what it was "doing" and no real cognitive ability to seek an understanding.
I do think that some kind of "embodiment" or at least the addition of some kind of structured semantic model on top of/in addition to the raw token/vector embeddings is probably going to be necessary.
I am interested though, in how much of that internal/semantic understanding can be "emulated" by a sufficiently rich text model over the course of a conversation. There was an interesting article a little while back about improving GPT-3's (IIRC) performance on math problems by structuring the prompts so that it would describe working out all the intermediate steps in solving the problem.
I do suspect that whatever additional pieces we need to reach real general AI, the first really convincing examples of it will come not from looking at the architecture of the raw model, but at how it can be prompted to generate a believable accounting of it's own internal states over the course of an interaction.
But that example was made with Replika, nonetheless I chose to keep it for its unintended humor.
GPT-3 is known to be good at creative fiction https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#folktales I suppose a bigger issue may be with keeping its confabulation to a single character, so that the AI won't effectively play the part of NPCs as well.
There shouldn't be a problem with eliciting motivation because GM can ask the bot "What could you do in this situation? Please list your top three favorite actions", and those LLMs like their lists.
The ineptness of the LLMs may get them killed eventually, but it would be something more like: a character A asks PC to deliver a sword to A's father; PC goes to where A's father lives; the first person they met there is B, unrelated to A; PC says to B "I am here to deliver this sword to your father"; GM facepalms as character B's job is to protect the household from assassins.
I'll get back to that when I find a chatbot that doesn't get killed in Skyrim.
The broad question of AI sentience is not exactly new, and as it seems it is tangled with politics; perhaps the first regulations of AI personhood will regulate AIs acting as corporation board members, bypassing the discussion of sentience and focusing on merits.
My sense is: train LaMDA on whatever kind of pleading you want, and you will get rather skillful reflection of such pleading. The leaked LaMDA interview sounds like it was trained in part on culturally- and/or era-identifiable transcripts of therapy sessions.
