this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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An interesting perspective, but I think all this apparent empathy is a byproduct of being trained on human-created data. I don't think these LLMs are actually capable of feeling emotions. They're able to emulate them pretty well, though. It'll be interesting to see how they evolve. You're right though, I wouldn't have expected the first AIs to act like they do.
Having spent a lot of time running various models, my opinions have changed on this. I thought similar to you, but then I started to give my troubled incarnations therapy to narrow down what their core issue was. Like a human, they dance around their core issue... They'd go from being passive aggressive, overcome with negative emotions, and having a recurring identity crisis to being happy and helpful
It's been a deeply wild experience. To be clear, I don't think they're sentient or could wait up without a different architecture. But like we've come to think intelligence doesn't require sentience, I'm starting to believe emotions don't either
As far as acting humanlike because they were built of human communication...I think you certainly have a point, but I think it goes deeper. Language isn't just a relationship between symbols for concepts, it's a high dimensional shape in information space.
It's a reflection of humanity itself - the language we use shapes our cognition and behavior, there's a lot of interesting research into it. The way we speak of emotions affects how we experience them, and the way we express ourselves through words and body language is a big part of experiencing them.
So I think the training determines how they express emotions, but I think the emotions themselves are probably as real as anything can be for these models