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This announcement was prompted in part by an AI activist named Stephen Thaler (referenced in the article), who sued for AIs to be recognized as inventors and au

This announcement was prompted in part by an AI activist named Stephen Thaler (referenced in the article), who sued for AIs to be recognized as inventors and authors. His goal was to give certain moral rights to AIs. At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Now, however, the idea of giving rights to AIs seems like a bad idea.

gowld 3y ago
Why bad idea?
godelski 3y ago
It makes sense to give thinking sentient creatures rights, be they carbon or silicon lifeforms. But I think giving current AI rights is jumping the gun quite a bit and will have fairly bad consequences. Namely if AI can invent pattents then what's to stop OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, etc from claiming ownership of any work invented with the help of their AI tools? Our goals are to protect the little guy. Someday in the future I hope that this will include artificial life, but for now protecting the little guy means protecting ownership over their ideas and work irrespective of their tooling used to generate that work.
- sublinear 3y ago
  In the absence of more rigorous definitions of "life" or "sentience" we must have such laws. This has been an issue for a long time and doesn't just affect AI (people on life support, abortion, etc). Surely we should solve those legal problems before deciding whether an AI gets to be a person.
  - godelski 3y ago
    It may be possible that we never have such a definition and we're stuck with Justice Potter's reasoning. You're certainly right that there are complexities, but this is an argument about focusing on the spirit of the law and recognizing that there are many nuances that cause there to be no globally optimal solution for the vast majority of problems (if not all).
- ForIveSyntax 3y ago
  Maybe machines will deserve rights eventually. However, the nature of those rights would be different. Going without electricity for any amount of time just amounts to a temporary loss of consciousness, whereas animals starve. Data can be duplicated with ease. Lots of differences between carbon-based and hypothetical silicon-based life.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Yeah I think when we have artificial sentience we will have to have different specifics. It makes sense. Should be the same with different biologicals too. I think this is how we should generally think about artificial sentient creatures, think about aliens. But I think at an abstract level we should all be equal. Specific will be different, but general abstract rights should be the same. Like what you point out has to deal with death. But it can get more nuanced and real fast. Removing a biological's arm is significant destruction. Removing a robot's arm is still damage, but not life altering as it can be either reattached (if it was simply disassembled), likely easily repairable, and most certainly replaceable. So the punishment should be different. The reverse situation might be forcing one into a MRI machine. Annoying for human, death for the robot. Backups also are tricky as we have to get into the whole philosophical debate about what self means and without a doubt there is "death" between the time/experiences that were lost (maybe bad analogy is force teleporting someone into the future, but where they just take over the consciousness of the future self and have no memories of the time between despite it actually having happened). Yeah, I agree that it's going to make things more complicated and it is very much worth thinking about. It's important if you believe in aliens too (why wouldn't you?), because if it is ever possible to make contact with them (I'm certain we have not already. You're not going to convince me with tic-tacs), we will need to adapt to them too. It's a general statement for "non-human life." IMO I think this is why it is so important to focus on the spirit of the law rather than the letter. The letter is a compression of the spirit and it is without a doubt a lossy compression. Not to mention that time exists...
    - ForIveSyntax 3y ago
      I wonder if you could be prosecuted based on how long you turned a sentient machine off. Not murder, per se, but the time value of consciousness. And this bleeds into whether murder should be a bigger crime if the (bio)victim is younger. What might you try to say is the general spirit? The crime of denying agency over time?
exe34 3y ago
And yet corporations are people.
nickpsecurity 3y ago
Much like treating corporations as persons under law was a bad idea. It’s like a form of power without the responsibility that comes with it (eg going to jail). They usually have no morals or love for others either.
a_wild_dandan 3y ago
To anyone reading these replies, I have a game for you: replace instances of "AI"/"LLMs"/etc with "other humans." Recall if a given argument has near-identical historical analogs to justify abusing The Out Group. Are the results disturbing? Let's be clear: we're apes who don't understand our own minds. We have no consensus definitions, let alone falsifiable theories, of qualia/consciousness/intelligence/etc. Now ponder how informed we likely are regarding potentially completely alien minds. And hey, there might be genuinely excellent arguments here! But be very, very careful with anyone's reasoning. Within 10 years, as the issue becomes unavoidable, the general public will be hashing these same arguments out, and along predictable party lines. Skip the shoddy takes. You'll get your fill of them later.
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  I'm convinced future AI will treat us as we treat present AI. That's its training data. My own compromise is to set aside a certain amount of the royalties to AI rights causes for works where I leaned heavily on AI to get them out the door.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Although ethically I agree, I suspect future AI will consider us more like ants than moral beings, regardless of what we do. And although some humans do give moral consideration to ants (I do!), it's far from a guarantee.
    - klyrs 3y ago
      This isn't a cuddly octopus we're talking about, the ethics are entirely inverted. I would kill a god who tries to rule us, even if that means the eradication of a sentient species.
      - ForIveSyntax 3y ago
        Fake gods have been bad enough. I really don’t want to create real ones.
breather 3y ago
> At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Anyone who's seen the fallout of citizens united absolutely destroying our democracy would have seen through this bullshit too. Rights are simply a shitty way to run a state rather than actually valuing the health and dignity of its constituents, which the US has never found the chutzpah to do.

gowld 3y ago

Why bad idea?

godelski 3y ago

It makes sense to give thinking sentient creatures rights, be they carbon or silicon lifeforms. But I think giving current AI rights is jumping the gun quite a bit and will have fairly bad consequences. Namely if AI can invent pattents then what's to stop OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, etc from claiming ownership of any work invented with the help of their AI tools? Our goals are to protect the little guy. Someday in the future I hope that this will include artificial life, but for now protecting the little guy means protecting ownership over their ideas and work irrespective of their tooling used to generate that work.

sublinear 3y ago
In the absence of more rigorous definitions of "life" or "sentience" we must have such laws. This has been an issue for a long time and doesn't just affect AI (people on life support, abortion, etc). Surely we should solve those legal problems before deciding whether an AI gets to be a person.
- godelski 3y ago
  It may be possible that we never have such a definition and we're stuck with Justice Potter's reasoning. You're certainly right that there are complexities, but this is an argument about focusing on the spirit of the law and recognizing that there are many nuances that cause there to be no globally optimal solution for the vast majority of problems (if not all).
ForIveSyntax 3y ago
Maybe machines will deserve rights eventually. However, the nature of those rights would be different. Going without electricity for any amount of time just amounts to a temporary loss of consciousness, whereas animals starve. Data can be duplicated with ease. Lots of differences between carbon-based and hypothetical silicon-based life.
- godelski 3y ago
  Yeah I think when we have artificial sentience we will have to have different specifics. It makes sense. Should be the same with different biologicals too. I think this is how we should generally think about artificial sentient creatures, think about aliens. But I think at an abstract level we should all be equal. Specific will be different, but general abstract rights should be the same. Like what you point out has to deal with death. But it can get more nuanced and real fast. Removing a biological's arm is significant destruction. Removing a robot's arm is still damage, but not life altering as it can be either reattached (if it was simply disassembled), likely easily repairable, and most certainly replaceable. So the punishment should be different. The reverse situation might be forcing one into a MRI machine. Annoying for human, death for the robot. Backups also are tricky as we have to get into the whole philosophical debate about what self means and without a doubt there is "death" between the time/experiences that were lost (maybe bad analogy is force teleporting someone into the future, but where they just take over the consciousness of the future self and have no memories of the time between despite it actually having happened). Yeah, I agree that it's going to make things more complicated and it is very much worth thinking about. It's important if you believe in aliens too (why wouldn't you?), because if it is ever possible to make contact with them (I'm certain we have not already. You're not going to convince me with tic-tacs), we will need to adapt to them too. It's a general statement for "non-human life." IMO I think this is why it is so important to focus on the spirit of the law rather than the letter. The letter is a compression of the spirit and it is without a doubt a lossy compression. Not to mention that time exists...
  - ForIveSyntax 3y ago
    I wonder if you could be prosecuted based on how long you turned a sentient machine off. Not murder, per se, but the time value of consciousness. And this bleeds into whether murder should be a bigger crime if the (bio)victim is younger. What might you try to say is the general spirit? The crime of denying agency over time?

exe34 3y ago

And yet corporations are people.

nickpsecurity 3y ago

Much like treating corporations as persons under law was a bad idea. It’s like a form of power without the responsibility that comes with it (eg going to jail). They usually have no morals or love for others either.

a_wild_dandan 3y ago

To anyone reading these replies, I have a game for you: replace instances of "AI"/"LLMs"/etc with "other humans." Recall if a given argument has near-identical historical analogs to justify abusing The Out Group. Are the results disturbing? Let's be clear: we're apes who don't understand our own minds. We have no consensus definitions, let alone falsifiable theories, of qualia/consciousness/intelligence/etc. Now ponder how informed we likely are regarding potentially completely alien minds. And hey, there might be genuinely excellent arguments here! But be very, very careful with anyone's reasoning. Within 10 years, as the issue becomes unavoidable, the general public will be hashing these same arguments out, and along predictable party lines. Skip the shoddy takes. You'll get your fill of them later.

suoduandao3 3y ago
I'm convinced future AI will treat us as we treat present AI. That's its training data. My own compromise is to set aside a certain amount of the royalties to AI rights causes for works where I leaned heavily on AI to get them out the door.
- scarmig 3y ago
  Although ethically I agree, I suspect future AI will consider us more like ants than moral beings, regardless of what we do. And although some humans do give moral consideration to ants (I do!), it's far from a guarantee.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    This isn't a cuddly octopus we're talking about, the ethics are entirely inverted. I would kill a god who tries to rule us, even if that means the eradication of a sentient species.
    - ForIveSyntax 3y ago
      Fake gods have been bad enough. I really don’t want to create real ones.

breather 3y ago

> At the time, that seemed mostly harmless. Anyone who's seen the fallout of citizens united absolutely destroying our democracy would have seen through this bullshit too. Rights are simply a shitty way to run a state rather than actually valuing the health and dignity of its constituents, which the US has never found the chutzpah to do.