[See this event’s web page for more information, including abstracts for each speaker. –Matthew]
Call for Participation
‘Humans and Smart Machines as Partners in Thought?’
A hybrid two-day workshop on Large Language Models
University of California Riverside and online
May 10-11, 2023
https://www.denkwerkstatt.berlin/EVENTS
- Organized by Anna Strasser & Eric Schwitzgebel
- Supported by the Philosophy Department, UC Riverside & the International Social Ontology Society (https://isosonline.org)
Registration: Attendance is free, but places (online & in-person) are limited. To register, please go to the workshop website and fill in the form.
Registration deadline: 1 April 2023, 23:59 PST.
DESCRIPTION: Large language models (LLMs) like LaMDA, GPT-3, and ChatGPT have been the subject of widespread discussion. This workshop focuses on an analysis of interactions with LLMs. Assuming that not all interactions can be reduced to mere tool use, we ask in what sense LLMs can be part of a group and take on the role of conversational partners. Can such disparate partners as humans and smart machines form a group that takes not only linguistic actions (a conversation) but also other actions, such as producing text or making decisions? To address these questions, both the attributions of abilities to individual group participants and the ways in which the abilities of such groups can be described will be examined. This raises new questions for the field of social ontology, namely whether there are “social kinds” that are not exclusively constituted by humans. On the other hand, debates about the constitution of groups and their agency can contribute to analyzing the interactions of humans and smart machines. We expect to promote a dialogue among philosophers dealing with social groups, linguists, and artificial intelligence, respectively.
SPEAKERS:
Daniel Dennett: We are all Cherry-Pickers
Eric Schwitzgebel & Anna Strasser: Asymmetric joint actions
Ned Block (online): Large Language Models are more like perceivers than thinkers
David Chalmers (online): Do large language models extend the mind?
Keith Frankish (online): Playing a language game: An interpretivist perspective on LLMs
Paula Droege: Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
Joshua Rust: Minimal Institutional Agency
Ophelia Deroy: Ghosts in the machine – why we are and will continue to be ambivalent about AI