AI with Alien Content and Alien Metasemantics

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of alien content in AI systems like AlphaGo, examining how such content differs from human content and its implications for semantics, metasemantics, and AI-human communication.

Contribution

It introduces the idea of alien content in AI, analyzes its semantic and metasemantic aspects, and discusses potential communication and philosophical implications.

Findings

Alien content in AI may be fundamentally different from human content.

Understanding alien content has implications for AI interpretability and safety.

The paper maps the logical space of responses to alien content questions.

Abstract

AlphaGo plays chess and Go in a creative and novel way. It is natural for us to attribute contents to it, such as that it doesn't view being several pawns behind, if it has more board space, as bad. The framework introduced in Cappelen and Dever (2021) provides a way of thinking about the semantics and the metasemantics of AI content: does AlphaGo entertain contents like this, and if so, in virtue of what does a given state of the program mean that particular content? One salient question Cappelen and Dever didn't consider was the possibility of alien content. Alien content is content that is not or cannot be expressed by human beings. It's highly plausible that AlphaGo, or any other sophisticated AI system, expresses alien contents. That this is so, moreover, is plausibly a metasemantic fact: a fact that has to do with how AI comes to entertain content in the first place, one that will heed the vastly different etiology of AI and human content. This chapter explores the question of alien content in AI from a semantic and metasemantic perspective. It lays out the logical space of possible responses to the semantic and metasemantic questions alien content poses, considers whether and how we humans could communicate with entities who express alien content, and points out that getting clear about such questions might be important for more 'applied' issues in the philosophy of AI, such as existential risk and XAI.