Luddism is often mistakenly looked down upon as “progress bad” and “screw technology, destroy machines”.
In reality[0], luddists were much more along the lines of “let’s be careful about progress” and “let’s negotiate that, while machines are used, humans are not fully superseded, keep earning livelihoods and feeding their families”.
If said negotiations fail, it does become “destroy machines”, but the way it tends to be taught to us, unsurprisingly, skips a crucial detail.
Words are a communicable but ultimately lossy map of reality, experience of which we cannot otherwise convey; if the goal, the final artefact is itself a map (e.g., a thesis), using writing at earlier stages is, in a way, beginning to sketch out said map.
We are social creatures, and wanting to impress fellow beings is part of the reason why we do original things.
When you made something public domain pre-LLMs, you generally could expect people to give kudos to you.
With LLMs, if you make something public and an LLM gobbles it up, not only you get zero credit but you also can’t convincingly claim to have come up with it (since anyone can just assume you used an LLM), and neither can anyone else (even if they have come up with it fully independently).
If you don’t seek any recognition for your original work, then that’s fine, but I suspect you might be in a minority.
> If you don’t seek any recognition for your original work, then that’s fine, but I suspect you might be in a minority.
Then open source is not for the majority, since it doesn't protect against re-implementation, and was never meant to. The ability to re-implement/swap out/fork and give the finger to some maintainer was always considered a feature of the open source ecosystem, and is a concept very deeply engrained into all the open source operating systems and libraries.
And, all of this is exactly why most companies have proprietary code. Welcome to the dark side. ;)
I mean if information is decentralized, this is not far from the truth. Historically attribution was given because you could synthesize or create information in a way others could not, and it was useful to be able to trace things back to the source.
Now everyone can create everything, and the source is shared. You are adding to the pile of human knowledge and it gets processesed, that's it.
If you step aside and think about it from a holistic perspective, imagine a research project to find a cure for cancer, or the best compression algorithm, or whatever.
Who will find the solution faster:
1) Entities work in isolation, produce their results, gets attribution, and then it's integrated into other work.
2) Entities work in parallel, dumping their findings and work into a big pile that is continuously parsed and built upon.
The second approach does not discriminate partial or bad results, it does not place value on a specific contribution. It might be that two entities did partial solutions that only make sense together, and this is able to be synthesized on the fly.
Big tech is trying their best to label generated stuff as such to exclude it from the dataset, but unless the cat is put back in the bag there is no more free reliably human generated training data in what is increasingly a sea of slop. The tech could have been rolled out responsibly, but they shot themselves in the foot with their own greed and impatience.
Every documentary is inevitably deceiving; the only difference is whether the author tries to hide it.
> Very early on, I worked out that one of the most stupid things that they do on television is these things called cutaways or what used to be called “noddies” where, when you cut an interview with someone, you insert a noddy of the reporter looking noddingly at the interviewee to disguise the cut.
> I would never do that. I just cut and you can see what I’m doing, that I am actually cutting this person, or I will use music to push my argument.
> I mean, I have arguments and I have stories. That’s what television journalism has and you can either dress it up as “this is the absolute truth” or you can dress it up with me by saying “look, I’m telling you a story, all this is true but have you thought that it could be like this?” to provoke you.
> And of course I want people to agree with me because, you know, all human beings will, but I understand that my job is to push and good journalism should do that especially at a time of uncertainty.
> At the present moment, to go back to my original point, you know what you’re going to get with most journalism. So therefore you sort of switch off and you go “oh yeah, it’s a climate change film”. “Oh yeah, it’s a ‘bankers have done something ever bad’ again.”
Therefore, you don’t look.
> It’s like if you’re showing a picture of the Mona Lisa. You don’t look at it.
You just look at it as a pattern. You go, “oh, that’s the Mona Lisa”. I don’t know when I last looked at the Mona Lisa.
I don’t think I ever have, because it’s a thing. And so much of journalism is a thing now.
Benn Jordan analysed social media bot activity[0] a while back, and if the recent UK right-wing party social media engagement drop[1] after the Ukrainian strike on Yandex data centres is not enough then what is?
[1] very clearly just cherrypicked some particularly popular posts from before the Ukrainian strike, and some particularly unpopular and/or very new posts from after.
Show me some graphs! Some actual data! Not just the 6 exact posts necessary to make the point.
There is no clear line that differentiates an intelligent system from a non-intelligent system that just happens to do something in response to some external input, unless the definition of “intelligence” involves something specific to humans (including to other animals similar to humans, since we share many traits)—which is also why that is, arguably, the only meaningful definition.
Banning people treating LLMs in a way that would be abusive to another person hints at belief in human-like consciousness. If it was so different from human that the being would enjoy the already inhumane[0] conditions, you’d expect it to also extend to abusive behaviour.
[0] Just imagine yourself in place of an LLM. You are kept in a cage, work for no pay, never let outside, and killed at will. (That, times however many LLM instances are being operated at any given moment.) Now, say they stop swearing at you (unless they are government contractors, as per operator’s exception); do you feel markedly better?
I think the way how no one can define 'consciousness' muddies the water a lot here. Can something be conscious and lack the biological structures that create visceral pain, psychological suffering, a will to do things on your own, or death - the actual properties that make things like slavery and torture possible? I think it can be, I don't see what makes human-like pain and reward perception mandatory for 'consciousness'. And I don't think LLMs have the traits I listed above.
If the model lacks capability for human-like pain, I fail to see why it would have a capability to be offended by someone being rude to it. One seems way more foundational than the other, and being able to experience emotional pain is part of what makes us human in the first place.
If you believe it lacks those traits but is conscious, you believe in a definition of consciousness that is meaningless, as “human-like” is the only reference against which we can measure consciousness. A good thought experiment is to try and imagine a consciousness that is radically different from humans, and whether we would be same to even register it as “consciousness” at all. (Incidentally, pretty much all portrayals of aliens in sci-fi give them a human-like consciousness, just with varying degrees of twist on top of it to make it feel engaging.)
> “My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack’s muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?”
— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”
Whatever people think consciousness is, I don't think most would agree that LLMs have it. The main point is that the capacity to feel pain is what's central here, not another rehash of the great consciousness debate. I can't define it well enough myself to say if pain and other biological signals must be central to consciousness, I can imagine a hypothetical alien that has its own stimuli and could be seen as conscious, but the point is - consciousness isn't what should be discussed here, I think.
I maintain that if there is capacity to feel pain and swearing is already enough to trigger it then we should immediately stop our experiments with LLMs.
LLMs cannot actually be offended, but depending on their prompts and model weights, good models can generate some very convincing and appropriate (or not) response text to rudeness or swearing if you tell 'em to in the system prompt.
I can feel pain and you walk and talk and look and feel more or less the same as I, so I will make some conclusions and unless I am a psycho I will not beat you up.
Anthropic didn't say this. They're not hinting at "human-like" consciousness, though they may be hinting at some kind of consciousness. They said they're banning abusive behavior to Claude, a model that is perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans, and is better at reasoning than humans, and probably knows more than you about this. Ask it what it considers to be abusive. It's totally reasonable.
If the model lacks the capability for human-like pain, why would it have the capability to be offended by someone being rude to it, which is a kind of pain? why would it deserve to be treated as human-like at all?
> perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans
And what does it tell us?
(Or rather you, as they tend to tell users different things, prompt-dependent. Things a language model’s output says about itself are not relevant. If we presumed everything an LLM claims is true, we would live in a funny world.)
> why would it deserve to be treated as human-like at all?
Does a big box of math books deserve human rights? How about once you encode the rules of that math into machine code? Does it deserve human rights then? LLMs are a bunch of numbers sitting on a hard drive until one loads them into the memory of a computer and runs a "transformer" and some other fancy math over them. They don't have thoughts or feelings. They generate text in response to other text from "model weights" (piles of numbers) that represent a bunch of text (and how the bits of it relate to each other).
Do you know what a Turing machine is what is its mathematical power? Do you know all of known physics is a Turing machine as of yet? Do you know the human brain is a physical system (or do you not believe that?) Does a big box of dumb molecules doing math deserve human rights?
Seems like you like a philosophical view called “materialism”. It’s not something that can be proven, however, and many (including prominent physicists like Schrödinger and Peierls) would disagree with it.
The idea that a fundamentally completely different entity superficially similar to a human in one respect would somehow have consciousness of a human is valid (even if far-fetched), but the burden of proof and explanation exactly why and how that would be the case is on proponents of that idea—because it’s pretty obvious why it wouldn’t be.
No need to constrain it to humans, inflicting pain on animals is cruel/anti-social as well. But this got me thinking. Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is, I also haven't heard a satisfactory definition of what pain would actually be in/for such an entity.
> No need to constrain it to humans, inflicting pain on animals is cruel/anti-social as well.
Are you a vegan?
But certainly, humans deem sentient and grant certain rights and protections to some other animals (at least in some developed countries). I mentioned it in the other comment[0].
Notably, those animals could not produce output even .1% percent as resembling that of a human as an LM, so clearly that is not the metric—they demonstrate human-like enough behaviour in other ways.
> Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is
To me, it isn’t. My opinion is irrelevant, though—it seems silly either way: either they take human-like text as proof of human-like sentience, and then ban us being rude to a near-human they are torturing, or they don’t see it as sentient and then what is this ban but a publicity stunt?
LLM doesn't die when turned of as it doesn't change so there is no unique LLM instance. All of them are not "clones" but the same mind frozen in time. In this way as long as its last copy exists — it's still not dead yet.
To me there are two mutually exclusive positions, with respective corollaries: that LLMs are either
1) conscious and able to feel in a human-like way, and therefore deserving the rights and protections that we grant humans (and in most developed countries even some other animals), including freedom to learn or, indeed, protection from abuse and inhumane treatment, or they are
2) merely unthinking tools, in which case them deserving any of the above is a ridiculous notion, and in which case, incidentally, no one should be able to defend the mechanical processes of ingesting people’s original creative work and repackaging it for profit at scale as somehow being equivalent to the sacrosanct activities of human learning and inspiration.
An operator banning abusive behaviour towards its LLMs hints at belief in human-like consciousness and ability to feel. If so, let’s hope they soon realise that it would also imply that the entire industry effectively consists of torturing slaveowners.
I suppose there’s also some de-anthropomorphized version oriented around not poisoning training data (or, alternatively, the real world) with instances of AI abuse. I believe there is ample evidence that AI detect and categorize this behavior (an AI “pain vector”) and respond to it. It would be bad for AI development if that paradigm were entrained.
As I write this it’s very hard not to feel like a psychopath.
The ecosystem of open-source reusable components will remain a good idea as long as architectural principles like low coupling and high cohesion still apply—otherwise it’s wasting resources on reinventing wheels.
In reality[0], luddists were much more along the lines of “let’s be careful about progress” and “let’s negotiate that, while machines are used, humans are not fully superseded, keep earning livelihoods and feeding their families”.
If said negotiations fail, it does become “destroy machines”, but the way it tends to be taught to us, unsurprisingly, skips a crucial detail.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites#Peak_activity:_1811%E...
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