Microsoft researcher builds goat-powered neural network in Age of Empires II to challenge LLM consciousness

Age of Empires II's goats used as AI building blocks to build a neural network -- goaty experiment mocks the idea of chatbot consciousness, Microsoft AI researcher's project makes an absurdist point about AI consciousness

Implying chatbots have some kind of consciousness may just be a good marketing ploy by the companies involved. People seem all too ready to anthropomorphize LLMs and AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Some humans even admit to 'relationships' with one or more of the various examples of machine intelligence. To illustrate how flawed this instinct could be, a Microsoft AI researcher built a tiny neural network inside Age of Empires II using goats, grass, and bridges. Adrian de Wynter shared his work in a paper dubbed If LLMs have human-like attributes, then so does Age of Empires II. The Microsoft researcher, based at the University of York, also talked to 404 Media recently about how he likes to turn absurdism up to 11 to make a point. In the research paper, De Wynter doesn't make the argument that LLMs do or do not actually have generalized anthropomorphic attributes. Instead, he illustrates that the AoEII goats can also power the kinds of models that lay behind today's most popular chatbots. That hammers home the argument that "in no case is a machine's activity to be interpreted in terms of higher cognitive processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of cognitive evolution and development." De Wynter also raises the well-known concept of confirmation bias. Those looking for human traits in tech like chatbots will tend to find them, he proposes. However, the big contrast between the absurdist goat example and the commercial LLM chatbot is the way people interact with them, the interface that makes the likes of Claude 'conversation friendly.' De Wynter's research indicates that anthropomizing LLMs is a common trend in computer science papers. From 337 such papers De Wynter looked at, published in the last two years, he says that 57% assumed that LLMs could have human-like traits. This basic assumption could color the research, testing, and, of course, conclusions of these papers. So, how did the Microsoft AI researcher build the goaty AoEII LLM? Well, he didn't quite go as far as developing a full-blown LLM. Instead, De Wynter thought it sufficient to use AoEII's scenario editor to build a working NAND gate, with a 1-bit perceptron, where the goats act as bits. This crude perceptron and the circuit to train it in-game are enough to demonstrate that the simplest building block of a modern neural network could be made this way. And if you think it is absurd that AoEII goats can embody consciousness, then it should be equally absurd to regard any of the well-known chatbots as anything more. Companies behind the AI boom aren't discouraging people from anthropomorphizing their wares. In many ways, they might benefit from these human perceptions. Chatbots they deploy are trained with natural language and use techniques to mimic the shape and tone of natural conversation. This makes it easy for users to project personality, emotion, or even consciousness onto them. Top AI company execs have leaned into the perception of their customers, publicly entertaining the idea that their systems could or might be exhibiting signs of consciousness. In his 404 Media interview, De Wynter also highlighted research indicating that people buy more products when they can empathize with them, and that includes AI/chatbot/LLM subscriptions. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient

* A researcher rebuilt an LLM using goats and NAND gates inside Age of Empires II, proving LLMs can be reimplemented. * Humanlike tone is based on presentation; anthropomorphism doesn't prove sentience. * Persuasiveness and self-consistency can be measured, yet don't imply real or simulated behaviour. What does it mean when something is 'sentient'? It's a debate that has raged for years, and it's not something I can really squeeze into this article. What I can say, however, is that the creation and distribution of LLMs have added another area of discourse to the pot. When you ask Gemini a question about how to cook a chicken, or you sic Claude on your coding project, are you asking a program, or a person? Well, one researcher has an answer for you. They've recreated how an LLM works using nothing but goats in the game Age of Empires II, and thus pose the challenge: if you think an LLM is sentient, then so is the videogame. A researcher reduced an LLM to goats in Age of Empires II And makes some compelling arguments against calling one 'sentient' As spotted by 404 Media, researcher Adrian de Wynter of Microsoft and The University of York had an axe to grind. People were interfacing with LLMs for the first time in human history, and because of how the LLM speaks and interacts with them, they naturally anthropomorphise it. Now the LLM is no longer a system in people's minds; they're almost like a person, and, as such, aren't as understood as they should be. Want to stay in the loop with the latest in AI? The XDA AI Insider newsletter drops weekly with deep dives, tool recommendations, and hands-on coverage you won't find anywhere else on the site. Subscribe by modifying your newsletter preferences! In his paper, "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II," he aims to strip away the anthropomorphic layer of LLMs by showing how he made an LLM using Age of Empires II's scenario editor to create NAND gates using goats. With this, Wynter then argues that if you can build an LLM using assets in a video game (or Lego bricks, or even people in Greater Boston working together), then an LLM isn't human-like by default. Instead, it's part of the presentation of the LLM. It's easy for someone to look at a chat window, see an LLM speaking to them in a human tone, and anthropomorphize it. But as soon as you remove that layer and all you're left with is looking at goats acting as NAND gates, that illusion falls apart: We argue that many anthropomorphic measurements in AI are measurements of presentation, rather than of an actual system's behaviour. Moreover, these measurements are irrespective of their quality of being real. Indeed, attributes such as persuasiveness and self-consistency are objectively measurable, but from our work it follows that these cannot imply real (or simulative) behaviour under this setup. If you want to read more about how the goats work and watch them scuttle around, be sure to head over to Adrian de Wynter's blog for all the details. I asked Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT to build a customer landing page, and only one nailed the brief Only one is most likely not to lose me any customers Posts 5 By Abhinav Raj

Frustrated Microsoft Researcher Uses Goats in 'Age of Empires II' to Demo the Absurdity of LLMs

Goats are comedy gold. They headbutt confused cats! They faint! They make hilarious noises! Really hilarious noises! They do unspeakable things to the sheriff! And sometimes they're complete and utter... well, let's just say that as an Australian, I feel compelled to shout out the immortal Kevin, whose epithet shall not be spoken in polite American company but whose YouTube career should be rejoiced in all its foul-mouthed glory. The point is that if you wanted to, say, emphasize the inherent absurdity of claims that large language models are somehow sentient, then short of actually just getting hold of a parrot and dumping the entire internet into its little post-saurian pea brain, you could do worse than illustrating your argument with goats. And hey, what do you know? It appears that a researcher at Microsoft has done just that. Perhaps prompted by the galaxy-brained singularity-themed nonsense emerging from his contemporaries at competing companies, a researcher named Adrian de Wynter decided earlier this year to demonstrate that claims for and against the sentience of LLMs require some manner of actually measuring the validity of such claims. In particular, as described in his paper "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II," de Wynter sat down to demonstrate that at present, we lack any reliable "widely-accepted experimental protocols or schools of thought" for evaluating claims of sentience. As the title suggests, the paper argues that if LLMs have human-like attributes, then so does the 1999 real-time strategy classic Age of Empires II. But not just any old part of Age of Empires II, mind. No, it's the goats. De Wynter used the AoE II scenario editor to use the game's goats as components in basic logic gates. (The details of how he did so are interesting, and use the term "bit-goat", which we resolve to use as often as possible going forward.) As de Wynter's paper explains, once you get several elementary logical operations -- NAND, XNOR and AND -- up and running, you have all you need to build what's called a perceptron, which is one of the most basic forms of artificial intelligence. He builds a one-bit perceptron with his goat-based logic gates, and argues that this effectively constitutes a proof of concept for building a full-blown, virtual goat-based LLM. Digital goats as an LLM? This is all fun and games, but what's the point that de Wynter is making here? There are actually two key points, and they're both to do with how we go about evaluating an LLM's anthropomorphic qualities. The first point is that, as demonstrated by the goats, "any sufficiently powerful substrate could implement an entity equivalent to an LLM." The term "substrate" is important here, and it basically refers to the "stuff" from which the LLM is built, be it a large codebase stored safely -- well, allegedly -- at a company like Anthropic or Open AI, or a bunch of virtual goats in AoE II. The second point, and arguably the more important one, is that "said implementation alters the representation of an LLM, and thus could affect its perceived properties." Essentially, you could build the same LLM on different substrates, in the same way that you can run the same program on different operating systems. However, in the case of an LLM -- and, specifically, in the case of trying to evaluate that LLMs' anthropomorphic qualities -- the nature of the substrate affects how the LLM is perceived. Crucially, this occurs regardless of the nature of the assumptions made about the LLM's qualities: "assuming the existence or non-existence of generalised anthropomorphic attributes in order to test a hypothesis proving or disproving their existence is flawed." Asking if an LLM can be sentient is a baaah-d question This is a subtle point, so it's worth exploring in a little more detail. While the goats are a fun demonstration of how LLMs can be built, the real thrust of this paper is about the dangers of making assumptions -- positive or negative -- in experimental design, especially when it comes to a topic that's both as slippery and as loaded as LLM sentience. As Today in Tabs' Rusty argued in an excellent essay a few months back, it's almost impossible not to start ascribing human qualities to something that imitates human interaction as flawlessly as an LLM like ChatGPT -- for all of human history, language has been the preserve of sentient beings (i.e. us), so when we encounter something that uses language, we tend to assume it's intelligent and interact with it accordingly. This assumption also permeates research into LLMs -- and, crucially, so does the reaction against it. Starting from the position that an LLM lacks a given anthropomorphic quality is just as prejudicial to research as starting from the position that it possesses that quality -- either way, as the paper notes after a long digression into questions of philosophy, "what counts as evidence for a conclusion depends on the assumptions made." The problem is, the entire nature of experiment tends to involve starting with a hypothesis and then trying to either falsify or verify it. And while some questions about LLMs are objective, questions of anthropomorphism are largely subjective. The paper provides the following example: "[Take] an experiment attempting to falsify the effectiveness of an LLM's ability to provide natural-language explanations on their own states. LLMs produce natural-language explanations, and this is an observable fact. Whether this constitutes understanding of an internal state is an anthropomorphic ascription." And here's the kicker: the nature of that ascription can change dramatically with the substrate on which a given LLM is built. This brings us back to the bit-goats, because in theory, you could implement ChatGPT in AoE II -- but would you perceive that implementation of ChatGPT's responses the same way you perceive its responses when they're being conveyed to you in your browser, or via your talking smart speaker, or etc? No, says De Wynter. "If one can build an LLM within the game then [that LLM's] perceived anthropomorphic attributes would be, to put it bluntly, less convincing." This makes sense, because with the goat-based AoE II ChatGPT, you can see what's happening: the answer to your question is being provided by a bunch of virtual bit-goats. "Asking an LLM a question and interpreting the natural-language response as [the LLM's] own opinion is as valid as interpreting AoE II's response to the same question by observing the goats." But the actual LLM itself hasn't changed at all -- all that's changed is the manner of its implementation. So here's the point: "This paper's construction is meant to illustrate the illusion of anthropomorphic attributes in an LLM. If both an LLM and an AoE II-LLM present the same input/output behavior but do not present the same interface-related anthropomorphic attributes (e.g., latency or a textual interface), then we can note that a large part of these attributes are ascribed to them based on observer expectations." So next time you ask ChatGPT whether you or not you should text your ex or take a particular cocktail of drugs, remember the bit-goats. Your answer is coming from a bunch of virtual Kevins running back and forth in pens.

Microsoft researcher builds goat-powered neural network in Age of Empires 2 to show why we should 'stop assuming that LLMs behave like humans just because they were trained with natural language'

"I have this tendency to dial up things to 11 when I really think I need to make a point." Since large-language models like ChatGPT can generate natural language responses that appear human-like in tone, this has led to considerable discussion over whether LLMs might themselves be sentient. At present, there are far more reasons to conclude that AIs are not and will never be conscious. But the idea persists regardless. This is partly because of our broader tendency to perceive human-like qualities in non-human things, and partly because AI companies have equivocated over the issue. In any case, one Microsoft researcher has become particularly fed up with it, to the point where he decided to demonstrate how ridiculous the notion is by building an LLM in Age of Empires 2 powered by goats. As reported by 404 Media, Microsoft AI researcher Adrian de Wynter built a neural network within Microsoft's strategy classic, then wrote a paper describing the results titled 'If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II'. If you think this title is preposterous, that is entirely the point. "I have this tendency to dial up things to 11 when I really think I need to make a point," de Wynter told 404 media, observing that "absurdism is pretty standard in philosophy and theoretical computer science." De Wynter constructed the LLM in AoE 2's scenario editor, building a functioning NOT AND gate and 1-bit perceptron (a simple form of neural network) using objects in the game world to represent computer binaries. Grass represents 0, bridges represent 1, and goats play the role of bits. It's similar to how some players have built neural networks using Minecraft redstone, but de Wynter specifically wanted to use Age of Empires 2 because it is a less obvious choice. There are videos of De Wynter's goat-powered LLM in action on his GitHub page. To the casual observer, the processes look completely baffling, which de Wynter reckons demonstrates his point. The processes going on here are, fundamentally, those which power tools like ChatGPT, Claude, etc. But because the fundamentals are goats and grass rather than natural language, it prevents observers from perceiving the resulting behaviours and output as human. "The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLMs capabilities are too strong," de Winter said, going on to add that. "This is why I used the goats: there are things which make the LLMs what they are in themselves (i.e., the relationship between weights as defined by some operation), and there are things which make them what they are perceived as." The reason this is important is that assuming LLMs have human-like properties without demonstrative proof could lead us to all manner of problems, such as in scientific research. In his paper, de Wytner says he has peer reviewed more than 300 computer science papers in the last two years, finding that over half of them began with the assumption that LLMs have human-like traits. "I propose that we need to stop assuming that LLMs behave like humans just because they were trained with natural language," de Wynter said. "Instead, we should perform experiments that allow us to see LLMs as how they are, not how we believe they should be."