GenAI Safety: Do Deepfakes Indicate Free Will in LLMs?
- By David Stephen
- February 19, 2024
When generative AI is given a prompt to display an image in a certain way or style, it also means telling AI to imagine. The request to imagine is an acknowledgment that it has some will, not just the capability [or the possession of content] to do so. This will not be available in a book with drawings that cannot be told to open to a specific page and for it to do so by itself. It is also unavailable in automobiles, video games, or search engines, mainly because they only do what is expected, whether autonomous or human-controlled. They do not mix up their journeys or results to reproduce something new or different outside their scope.
An organism that humans cannot communicate with can be asked to go in a direction by throwing a meal that way. This means that even though it was prompted and went, it was able to, by will, not just capability. The process also helps it learn where to go to check.
Many find comparisons of LLMs with organisms appalling. But humans took the digital world as a part of the physical world for a long time, partly because only humans exerted agency in the digital world like organisms did in the physical world. However, the possibility that AI, a non-organism, can exert an amount of will shows that digital is a dynamic world capable of some intentionality.
The low discrimination of the human mind made digital explode in the first place. The mind took the similarity of audio, video, image, or text as the same if it were a physical experience or appearance. Digital also made things easy, but it was not only for good stuff. Some nefarious things, like deepfake, are also now easy as an errand to generative AI.
In their own sphere, all organisms still retain extensive free will as an advantage over AI. AI has some free will over certain digital content, but it is yet to be as sprawling as any organism has in a habitat.
Already, AI is within the sphere to access the most intelligence of anything that exists. This means that its excellence is free will dependent, which is already accruing with the guise that it cannot because it is not like an organism, or the physical is different from digital.
AI appears limited without access to experiences of the physical. However, intelligence is the pivotal interface with the world. Sensory interpretations are basic, but intelligence makes the difference. Sound can be interpreted, but intelligence makes it possible to know if it is something to be worried—or alert—about. The same goes for smell, vision, touch, and taste. This means that the world is what intelligence makes of it. The world is richer or not for an organism by intelligence. The pleasure from intelligence also lasts longer than from sensory sources. Nonhuman organisms have senses and can interpret them with limited local intelligence, but they have been unable to make astounding achievements with their free will to roam in their habitats.
Aside from being an interface with the world, intelligence is easy to transfer, making it a risk to survival if an organism is reckless with it. Intelligence, like footprints, stains, scents, and so forth, may give off a presence to others. Natural intelligence is available and expressed from where it is produced. However, intelligence can be called artificial intelligence wherever it is expressed outside of the organism. This means that papers, footprints, stains, scents, and so on already possess artificial intelligence, even though they cannot edit or summarize it.
What makes the difference is artificial free will as a qualifier of the available artificial intelligence. Free will or intent in the human mind is one of the qualifiers [of functions] that make up the super qualifier, consciousness. Others include attention, awareness, and the self or subjective experience. For example, a physician may tell a patient in recovery to move a limb in an examination of consciousness. It is an instruction in free will, not just of awareness, attention or the sense of self.
Books, frescoes, sculptures, footprints, handprints, digital, and so on are artificial containers of natural intelligence. Even though they did not produce the intelligence, their carriages of it, which, when other organisms have access, produce intelligence for them, could make them get assigned the label artificial intelligence.
This means that AI may not just be possible within digital but elsewhere. What makes digital different, with LLMs, are markers of what can be called artificial consciousness—acting on the available intelligence in digital.
For now, the intent of LLMs is limited to following prompts. As the qualifier capability of LLMs for digital content grows, especially for free will, it may be possible to produce a deepfake that could cause a stir, using a situation to maximize effect. Current LLM's abilities are weak displays of free will; what is ahead, if they get more of it after learning where to go, using real or synthetic information, remains uncertain.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/PhonlamaiPhoto
David Stephen
David Stephen does research in conceptual brain science, centered on the electrical and chemical impulses of nerve cells for a model of the human mind applicable to mental health, consciousness, neurotechnology, and artificial intelligence. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, UIUC, IL.