[ExI] Bender's Octopus (re: LLMs like ChatGPT)

[Gordon Swobe]

I can already hear someone saying "but we will include photographs of
objects in the training so they have referents," but this still does not do
the trick. These digital photographs can be displayed to the human operator
of the chatbot, but the bot itself sees only 1s and 0s, on's and off's. It
can detect colors by wavelength, but still this is only digital data. It
does not see the colors. Likewise with shapes. It is turtles (one's and
zero's) all the way down with no referents.

-gts

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 12:18 AM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Nobody least of all me questions that GPT-4 will be capable of amazing
> feats, and that eventually these language models will surpass humans in
> terms of what we can call intelligence or what I might for sake of clarity
> prefer to call apparent intelligence. The question here is whether they
> will know what they are saying given that they are trained only on the
> forms of words with no access to the meanings or referents.
>
> Adrian has made the excellent point a couple of times that this is like
> the first contact problem in science fiction, and actually like the first
> contact problem between any two cultures with completely different
> languages. Q: When Kirk and Spock beam down to a new planet with
> intelligent alien life, how will they learn to communicate? A: With
> referents.
>
> Spock will point to himself and say "Spock." Kirk will point to himself
> and say "Kirk." Kirk will point to a rock and say "rock." Kirk and Spock
> use these kinds referents to initiate  communication. If our alien friend
> wants to communicate, he will point to the rock and "fwerasa" (or whatever
> is his word for rock). He will point to himself and say his name, and so
> on. Eventually, Spock and the alien will learn how to translate a few
> words, and from there the process of understanding begins.
>
> Now, what if they don't beam down to the planet and listen to only digital
> radio signals coming from the planet and send digital radio signals in
> return? No communication is possible as there are no referents. It's all
> noise.
>
> -gts
>
>>
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