[NDCOslo2024] Mirror, Mirror: LLMs and the Illusion of Humanity – Jodie Burchell
In the mesmerizing mirror maze of machine mimicry, where words weave worlds indistinguishable from wit, Jodie Burchell, JetBrains’ data science developer advocate, shatters the spell of sentience in large language models (LLMs). A PhD psychologist turned NLP pioneer, Jodie probes the psychological ploys that propel projections of personhood onto probabilistic parsers, dissecting claims from consciousness to cognition. Her inquiry, anchored in academia and augmented by anecdotes, advises acuity: LLMs as linguistic lenses, not living likenesses, harnessing their heft while heeding hallucinations.
Jodie greets with gratitude for her gritty slot, her hipster cred in pre-prompt NLP notwithstanding. LLMs’ 2022 blaze beguiles: why bestow brains on bytes when other oracles oblige? Her hypothesis: humanity’s hall of mirrors, where models mirror our mores, eliciting empathy from echoes.
Psychological Projections: Perceiving Personhood in Parsers
Humans, Jodie hazards, hallucinate humanity: anthropomorphism’s ancient artifice, from pets to puppets. LLMs lure with language’s liquidity—coherent confessions conjure companionship. She cites stochastic parrots: parleying patterns, not pondering profundities, yet plausibility persuades.
Extraordinary assertions abound: Blake Lemoine’s LaMDA “alive,” Google’s Gemini “godhead.” Jodie juxtaposes: sentience’s scaffold—selfhood, suffering—sans in silicon. Chalmers’ conundrum: consciousness connotes qualia, quanta qualms quell in qubits.
Levels of Luminescence: From Language to Luminary
DeepMind’s AGI arc: Level 1 chatbots converse convincingly; Level 2 reasons reactively; Level 3 innovates imaginatively. LLMs linger at 1-2, lacking Level 4’s abstraction or 5’s autonomy. Jodie jests: jackdaws in jester’s garb, juggling jargon sans judgment.
Illusions intensify: theory of mind’s mirage, where models “infer” intents from inferences. Yet, benchmarks belie: ARC’s abstraction stumps, BIG-bench’s breadth baffles—brilliance brittle beyond basics.
Perils of Projection: Phishing and Philosophical Pitfalls
Prompt injections prey: upstream overrides oust origins, birthing bogus bounties—”Amazon voucher via arcane URL.” Jodie demonstrates: innocuous inquiries infected, innocuousness inverted into inducements. Robustness rankles: rebuttals rebuffed, ruses reiterated.
Her remedy: recognize reflections—lossy compressions of lore, not luminous lives. Demystify to deploy: distill data, detect delusions, design defensively.
Dispelling the Delusion: Harnessing Heuristics Humanely
Jodie’s jeremiad: myths mislead, magnifying misuses—overreach in oracles, oversight in safeguards. Her horizon: LLMs as lucid lenses, amplifying analysis while acknowledging artifice.