Theory of Mind in LLMs

Theory of mind is the cognitive capacity to attribute, infer, and predict the mental and emotional states of others and oneself. Do large language models have theory of mind? Do they “think” they themselves have mental lives or that their…

Moral Standing of AI

Moral standing is the feature of an entity identifying it as worthy of moral consideration, such that we have reason to avoid harming it for its own sake. What are the conditions under which an AI-system can be considered worthy…

Content Moderation

Content moderation refers to the removal, demotion, or labelling of potentially harmful user posts on social media. How should AI be used in the process of content moderation? And how should AI-generated content itself be moderated? Key Points: Social media…

Metacognition

Metacognition (literally cognition about cognition) is used to pick out a loose cluster of cognitive operations, skills, or capabilities that monitor and control other cognitive operations, skills, or capabilities. AI systems can perform operations over some of their own processes,…

Transformer Architecture

The transformer architecture is a deep learning architecture responsible for the recent dramatic advances in natural language processing and other forms of AI. What is it about the structure of large language models that has contributed to the incredible advances…

Bullshit

To bullshit is to utter (seemingly) meaningful words or sentences without regard for the truth, perhaps with the intent to disguise what one’s up to. Is this what Large Language Models are doing?  Or are they “Hallucinating”? Large Language Models…

Representation

A representation is something that stands for another thing.  Did the AI system consider my gender or race when reaching this output? Key Points: We think of AI systems like a chatbot as working through a request to reach a…

Embodiment

An agent is embodied if it interacts with the world through a body that perceives, acts, and occupies space. Does an AI system need a body to truly understand and intelligently engage with the world, or can disembodied systems achieve…

Common-Sense Psychology

Common-sense psychology is the implicit framework people use to interpret behaviour and mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions to explain and predict the actions of ourselves, others, animals, and recently AI systems. Can a chatbot have beliefs, desires,…

Reasoning

Reasoning is a mental process in which a thinker moves step-by-step through a series of thoughts in the service of working out what is the case or what to do. AI systems produce intelligent outputs but do they, like humans,…