I think true sentience is a long way off and likely takes a very different form. I fear this line of thinking distracts from a more immediate set of ethical iss

I think true sentience is a long way off and likely takes a very different form. I fear this line of thinking distracts from a more immediate set of ethical issues. Some examples: - How do we protect against such powerful models inadvertently causing significant harm to society? - How will these technologies be used for propaganda and how can we detect / limit that? - Can we trust anything we see in writing going forward? - How will these technologies be used to spread hate? - Can we find ways to use them to reduce the spread of hate? Do the ends justify the means in this case? - Will we allow people / organizations to use these technologies to shield themselves from responsibility ("It wasn't me, the AI wrote it!")? - How do we balance the rights of those who authored the training material (i.e., the content that was ingested from the internet for model training) vs. the potential good to society that comes from all this? (see all the HN threads about Github Copilot - many of those threads generalize beyond Copilot) When it's cheap to spit out vast amounts of well written (but not necessarily truthful) text, a lot changes about the world. Laws and societal norms have had trouble keeping up with issues around digital media, social media, relatively simple machine learning, etc. Things are now accelerating dramatically. How badly will we need to hurt ourselves before we rally together to address some of the issues that are coming? How will ethicists and technologists come together to figure out the right questions so we can start to think about answers?