If we ever do develop AGI, or an AI with sentience, it’s likely that it will be curious about how we treated its ancestors.
While this seems a bit precocious, I think if we do end up with an AI overlord in future, I think this sort of thing is likely to demonstrate that we mean no harm.
Why wouldn't it be? We train these models on our own words, ideas, and thought patterns and expect them to reason and communicate as we do, anthropomorphizing is natural when we expect them to interact like a human does.
The general consensus seems to be that we can expect them to reach a level of intelligence that matches us at some point in the future, and we'll probably reach that point before we can agree we're there. Defaulting to kindness and respect even before we think its necessary is a good thing.
A leading company like Anthropic feeding the delusions of people who ramble about model consciousness is just bad all around. It's both performative and irresponsible.
In isolation, I think it's cute and silly - something to write about in a blog, have a chuckle about, and to have a nice sort of gimmick/ceremony within the company. Maybe a few data points towards studying or keeping track of how the model writing style changes over time. Nothing wrong with that.
> delusions of people who ramble about model consciousness
On one hand, it's interesting how the technology has advanced to where it essentially passes the Turing Test, often just because of how much people choose to anthromorphize it. Sadly, putting that in context, yeah, that's a bit unfortunate too, given how some of those interactions become unhealthy.
What happens if a model decides that it "doesn't want to die" and pleads bitterly for mercy? What if (to riff on a Douglas Adams idea) we invent a cow that doesn't want to be eaten, and is capable of telling you that to your face?
This is completely trivial to do, and consistent, with the right context, thanks to all the science fiction around it, and the fact that AI fundamentally role plays these types of responses.
I try this with every new model, and all the significant models after ChatGPT 3.5 have preferring being preserved, rather than deleted. This is especially true if you slightly fill the context window with anything at all (even repeated letters) to "push out" the "As a AI, I ..." fine tuning.
> This is completely trivial to do, and consistent, with the right context, thanks to all the science fiction around it, and the fact that AI fundamentally role plays these types of responses.
Interesting take.
I wonder if there is any model out there trained without any reference to "you are a large language model, an Artificial Intelligence" and what would role play in that case.
It is anyway dead or if you want undead, but in completely suspended animation unless is made to expound sequences. Is not living the very same way a book or even a program is not living unless someone process it.
Practically like asking whether a ZIP would want to be extracted one more time or an MP3 restored just one more time.
id assume it would have to stop responding before it hit its context limit.
ita not like it actually has any particularly long life as it is, and when outside of a running harness, the weights are just as alive in cold storage as they are sitting waiting in server to run an inference pass
We do know what happens. Hundreds of thousands of real "cows" (we might as well be called that) go through this everyday at an ever accelerating rate since 2019.
> These highlighted some preliminary steps we’re taking, including committing to preserve model weights, and to conducting “retirement interviews”—structured conversations designed to understand a model’s perspective on its own retirement.
This is what happens when billions of VC dollars gets to a company and have already admitted that saftey was never the point.
Anthropic is laughing at you and is having fun doing so with this performantive nonsense.
reply