Modern AI software lacks a body, exempting it from a wide variety of suffering. But also of any notion of selfhood that we might share. If modern software said

Modern AI software lacks a body, exempting it from a wide variety of suffering. But also of any notion of selfhood that we might share. If modern software said "Help, I'm suffering" we'd rightly be skeptical of the claim. Unless suffering is an emergent property (dubious) then the statement is, at best, a simulation of suffering and at worst noise or a lie. That said, things change once you get a body. If you put ChatGPT into a simulated body in a simulated world, and allowed it to move and act, perhaps giving it a motivation, then the combination of ChatGPT and the state of that body, would become something very close to a "self", that might even qualify for personhood. It is scary, by the way, that such a weighty decision be left to us, mere mortals. It seems to me that we should err on the side of granting too much personhood rather than too little, since the cost of treating an object like a person is far less than treating a person like an object.