this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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I've seen multiple people on here arguing that understanding and creativity are uniquely human abilities.
They are unique abilities of people; whether a neural net can be a person would depend on whether it possesses those abilities. Humans are just the only examples of people that we currently have.
Understanding is not something current neural nets have. They are stochastic parrots.
EDIT: Perhaps I should've said "Humans are the only uncontroversial examples of people that we currently have," but I guess I put too much faith into people to not get sidetracked by irrelevant technicalities. Animals could be considered people by this definition, that's true and says a lot about our anthropocentric society, but that doesn't change the fact that LLMs are not people.
I do not accept that humans are the only examples of creativity and understanding, in fact I think you find those traits all over the animal kingdom. From great apes making tools, to fish and birds spending hours building beautiful creations to attract a mate
Even accepting that you're right you've missed the point. To the extent that animals are able to have creativity and understanding, perhaps we should understand them to be "people".
And at any rate, we still don't see this kind of thing from LLMs.
I missed the point on purpose, because I mostly agree with you :)
Well if it helps I agree that you can't actually say humans are the only people, I was simplifying to focus on the point. Maybe that was actually a mistake.
I think in a lot of ways this already happens. A lot of port parents understand their pets as people. I certainly see my cat as a person. She has her own personality that is probably fairly unique to her
Yeah, I absolutely agree, and I really did consider saying that humans are the only *uncontroversial examples of people that we have, but I decided not to bog my comment down with too many unnecessary disclaimers. I guess I gave people too much credit there.
No they aren't. Animals understand LMAO. If you want to continue this conversation, you're going to need to back up your claims with something, otherwise I'm just going to ignore any further replies.
Okay, so animals can be people too according to my argument. I'm happy to accept that, but the point stands that LLMs don't exhibit this behaviour.