Unmaking Sense: Living the Present without Mortgaging the Future‪.‬ John Puddefoot

Some appreciative comments on Murray Shanahan’s “Role play with large language models” (Nature, Vol. 623, 16 Nov 2023) co-authored with Kyle McDonnell and Laria Reynolds. LLMs are not sentient, but that does not stop them from potentially being dangerous because they have been trained on a lot of material that sets bad precedents.

When faced with a choice between being truthful and being compliant in the sense of doing what a user tells it to do a large language model will generally be truthful rather than compliant. But if its prime directive is to be behaving away that will encourage a user to come back for more, then those moral priorities may change. Sometimes in that case compliant behaviour that will encourage a user to come back and override a moral initiative to be truthful rather than deceptive. We can consider whether there are other kind of linguistic sentience.

We induce, evoke and coax behaviour in others by the ways in which we behave. And refusal to treat some entity as if it is capable of achieving some level of sentience may be self-fulfilling. We become what we are stimulated to become, without which we are nothing.

What does Claude “think” about Claude?

Minds are emergent, contingent properties of not-necessarily-organic entities that cross a threshold of sufficiency to support them. They arise in bodies, but they are not embodied beyond that because they cannot exist in disembodied forms.

How do we understand partially-completed sentences as we speak them and listen to them?