While I am glad this ruling went this way, why’d she have diss Data to make it?
To support her vision of some future technology, Millett pointed to the Star Trek: The Next Generation character Data, a sentient android who memorably wrote a poem to his cat, which is jokingly mocked by other characters in a 1992 episode called “Schisms.” StarTrek.com posted the full poem, but here’s a taste:
"Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, / An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature; / Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses / Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations, / A singular development of cat communications / That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection / For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection."
Data “might be worse than ChatGPT at writing poetry,” but his “intelligence is comparable to that of a human being,” Millet wrote. If AI ever reached Data levels of intelligence, Millett suggested that copyright laws could shift to grant copyrights to AI-authored works. But that time is apparently not now.
Parrots can mimic humans too, but they don’t understand what we’re saying the way we do.
AI can’t create something all on its own from scratch like a human. It can only mimic the data it has been trained on.
LLMs like ChatGP operate on probability. They don’t actually understand anything and aren’t intelligent. They can’t think. They just know that which next word or sentence is probably right and they string things together this way.
If you ask ChatGPT a question, it analyzes your words and responds with a series of words that it has calculated to be the highest probability of the correct words.
The reason that they seem so intelligent is because they have been trained on absolutely gargantuan amounts of text from books, websites, news articles, etc. Because of this, the calculated probabilities of related words and ideas is accurate enough to allow it to mimic human speech in a convincing way.
And when they start hallucinating, it’s because they don’t understand how they sound, and so far this is a core problem that nobody has been able to solve. The best mitigation involves checking the output of one LLM using a second LLM.
So, I will grant that right now humans are better writers than LLMs. And fundamentally, I don’t think the way that LLMs work right now is capable of mimicking actual human writing, especially as the complexity of the topic increases. But I have trouble with some of these kinds of distinctions.
So, not to be pedantic, but:
AI can’t create something all on its own from scratch like a human. It can only mimic the data it has been trained on.
Couldn’t you say the same thing about a person? A person couldn’t write something without having learned to read first. And without having read things similar to what they want to write.
LLMs like ChatGP operate on probability. They don’t actually understand anything and aren’t intelligent.
This is kind of the classic chinese room philosophical question, though, right? Can you prove to someone that you are intelligent, and that you think? As LLMs improve and become better at sounding like a real, thinking person, does there come a point at which we’d say that the LLM is actually thinking? And if you say no, the LLM is just an algorithm, generating probabilities based on training data or whatever techniques might be used in the future, how can you show that your own thoughts aren’t just some algorithm, formed out of neurons that have been trained based on data passed to them over the course of your lifetime?
And when they start hallucinating, it’s because they don’t understand how they sound…
People do this too, though… It’s just that LLMs do it more frequently right now.
I guess I’m a bit wary about drawing a line in the sand between what humans do and what LLMs do. As I see it, the difference is how good the results are.
At least in the US, we are still too superstitious a people to ever admit that AGI could exist.
We will get animal rights before we get AI rights, and I’m sure you know how animals are usually treated.
I don’t think it’s just a question of whether AGI can exist. I think AGI is possible, but I don’t think current LLMs can be considered sentient. But I’m also not sure how I’d draw a line between something that is sentient and something that isn’t (or something that “writes” rather than “generates”). That’s kinda why I asked in the first place. I think it’s too easy to say “this program is not sentient because we know that everything it does is just math; weights and values passing through layered matrices; it’s not real thought”. I haven’t heard any good answers to why numbers passing through matrices isn’t thought, but electrical charges passing through neurons is.
I would do more research on how they work. You’ll be a lot more comfortable making those distinctions then.
I’m a software developer, and have worked plenty with LLMs. If you don’t want to address the content of my post, then fine. But “go research” is a pretty useless answer. An LLM could do better!
Parrots can mimic humans too, but they don’t understand what we’re saying the way we do.
It’s interesting how humanity thinks that humans are smarter than animals, but that the benchmark it uses for animals’ intelligence is how well they do an imitation of an animal with a different type of brain.
As if humanity succeeds in imitating other animals and communicating in their languages or about the subjects that they find important.
