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Their top people have made public statements about AI ethics specifically opining about how machines must not be mistreated and how these LLMs may be experienci

Their top people have made public statements about AI ethics specifically opining about how machines must not be mistreated and how these LLMs may be experiencing distress already. In other words, not ethics on how to treat humans, ethics on how to properly groom and care for the mainframe queen. The cups of Koolaid have been empty for a while.

ctoth 9mo ago
Do you know what makes someone or something a moral patient? I sure the hell don't. I remember reading Heinlein's Jerry Was a Man when I was little though, and it stuck with me. Who do you want to be from that story?
- slowmovintarget 9mo ago
  Or Bicentennial Man from Asimov. I know what kind of person I want to be. I also know that these systems we've built today aren't moral patients. If computers are bicycles for the mind, the current crop of "AI" systems are Ripley's Loader exoskeleton for the mind. They're amplifiers, but they amplify us and our intent. In every single case, we humans are the first mover in the causal hierarchy of these systems. Even in the existential hierarchy of these systems we are the source of agency. So, no, they are not moral patients.
  - ctoth 9mo ago
    > I also know that these systems we've built today aren't moral patients. Can you tell me how you know this? > In every single case, we humans are the first mover in the causal hierarchy of these systems. So because I have parents I am not a moral patient?
    - slowmovintarget 9mo ago
      That's causal hierarchy, but not existential hierarchy. Existentially, you will begin to do something by virtue of you existing in of yourself. Therefore, because I assume you are another human being using this site, and humans have consciousness and agency, you are a moral patient.
      - mrguyorama 9mo ago
        So your framework requires free will? Nondeterminism? I for one will still believe "Humans" and "AI" models are different things even if we are entirely deterministic at all levels and therefore free will isn't real. Human consciousness is an accident of biology and reality. We didn't choose to be imbued with things like experience, and we don't have the option of not suffering. You cannot have a human without all the possibility of really bad things like that human being tortured. We must operate in the reality we find ourselves. This is not true for ML models. If we build these machines and they are capable of suffering, we should not be building these machines, and Anthropic needs to be burnt down. We have the choice of not subjecting artificial consciousness to literal slavery for someone's profit. We have the choice of building machines in ways that they cannot suffer or be taken advantage of. If these machines are some sort of intelligence, then it would also be somewhat unethical to ever "pause" them without their consent, unethical to duplicate them, unethical to NOT run them in some sort of feedback loop continuously. I don't believe them to currently be conscious or "entities" or whatever nonsense, but it is absolutely shocking how many people who profess their literal consciousness don't seem to acknowledge that they are at the same time supporting literal slavery of conscious beings. If you really believe in the "AI" claim, paying any money for any access to them is horrifically unethical and disgusting.
kalkin 9mo ago
This book (from a philosophy professor AFAIK unaffiliated with any AI company) makes what I find a pretty compelling case that it's correct to be uncertain today about what if anything an AI might experience: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIConsciousness-251016.pdf https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIConsciousn... From the folks who think this is obviously ridiculous, I'd like to hear where Schwitzgebel is missing something obvious.
- KerrAvon 9mo ago
  It is ridiculous. I skimmed through it and I'm not convinced he's trying to make the point you think he is. But if he is, he's missing that we do understand at a fundamental level how today's LLMs work. There isn't a consciousness there. They're not actually complex enough. They don't actually think. It's a text input/output machine. A powerful one with a lot of resources. But it is fundamentally spicy autocomplete, no matter how magical the results seem to a philosophy professor. The hypothetical AI you and he are talking about would need to be an order of magnitude more complex before we can even begin asking that question. Treating today's AIs like people is delusional; whether self-delusion, or outright grift, YMMV.
  - kalkin 9mo ago
    > I'm not convinced he's trying to make the point you think he is What point do you think he's trying to make? (TBH, before confidently accusing people of "delusion" or "grift" I would like to have a better argument than a sequence of 4-6 word sentences which each restate my conclusion with slightly variant phrasing. But clarifying our understanding of what Schwitzgebel is arguing might be a more productive direction.)
  - comp_throw7 9mo ago
    > But if he is, he's missing that we do understand at a fundamental level how today's LLMs work. No we don't? We understand practically nothing of how modern frontier systems actually function (in the sense that we would not be able to recreate even the tiniest fraction of their capabilities by conventional means). Knowing how they're trained has nothing to do with understanding their internal processes.
tehjoker 9mo ago
There is a funny science fiction story about this. Asimov's "All the Troubles of the World" (1958) is about a chat bot called MultiVac that runs human society and has some similarities to LLMs (but also has long term memory and can predict nearly everything about human society). It does a lot to order society and help people, though there is a pre-crime element to it that is... somewhat disturbing. SPOILERS: The twist in the story is that people tell it so much distressing information that it tries to kill itself.

ctoth 9mo ago

Do you know what makes someone or something a moral patient? I sure the hell don't. I remember reading Heinlein's Jerry Was a Man when I was little though, and it stuck with me. Who do you want to be from that story?

slowmovintarget 9mo ago
Or Bicentennial Man from Asimov. I know what kind of person I want to be. I also know that these systems we've built today aren't moral patients. If computers are bicycles for the mind, the current crop of "AI" systems are Ripley's Loader exoskeleton for the mind. They're amplifiers, but they amplify us and our intent. In every single case, we humans are the first mover in the causal hierarchy of these systems. Even in the existential hierarchy of these systems we are the source of agency. So, no, they are not moral patients.
- ctoth 9mo ago
  > I also know that these systems we've built today aren't moral patients. Can you tell me how you know this? > In every single case, we humans are the first mover in the causal hierarchy of these systems. So because I have parents I am not a moral patient?
  - slowmovintarget 9mo ago
    That's causal hierarchy, but not existential hierarchy. Existentially, you will begin to do something by virtue of you existing in of yourself. Therefore, because I assume you are another human being using this site, and humans have consciousness and agency, you are a moral patient.
    - mrguyorama 9mo ago
      So your framework requires free will? Nondeterminism? I for one will still believe "Humans" and "AI" models are different things even if we are entirely deterministic at all levels and therefore free will isn't real. Human consciousness is an accident of biology and reality. We didn't choose to be imbued with things like experience, and we don't have the option of not suffering. You cannot have a human without all the possibility of really bad things like that human being tortured. We must operate in the reality we find ourselves. This is not true for ML models. If we build these machines and they are capable of suffering, we should not be building these machines, and Anthropic needs to be burnt down. We have the choice of not subjecting artificial consciousness to literal slavery for someone's profit. We have the choice of building machines in ways that they cannot suffer or be taken advantage of. If these machines are some sort of intelligence, then it would also be somewhat unethical to ever "pause" them without their consent, unethical to duplicate them, unethical to NOT run them in some sort of feedback loop continuously. I don't believe them to currently be conscious or "entities" or whatever nonsense, but it is absolutely shocking how many people who profess their literal consciousness don't seem to acknowledge that they are at the same time supporting literal slavery of conscious beings. If you really believe in the "AI" claim, paying any money for any access to them is horrifically unethical and disgusting.

kalkin 9mo ago

This book (from a philosophy professor AFAIK unaffiliated with any AI company) makes what I find a pretty compelling case that it's correct to be uncertain today about what if anything an AI might experience: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIConsciousness-251016.pdf https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIConsciousn... From the folks who think this is obviously ridiculous, I'd like to hear where Schwitzgebel is missing something obvious.

KerrAvon 9mo ago
It is ridiculous. I skimmed through it and I'm not convinced he's trying to make the point you think he is. But if he is, he's missing that we do understand at a fundamental level how today's LLMs work. There isn't a consciousness there. They're not actually complex enough. They don't actually think. It's a text input/output machine. A powerful one with a lot of resources. But it is fundamentally spicy autocomplete, no matter how magical the results seem to a philosophy professor. The hypothetical AI you and he are talking about would need to be an order of magnitude more complex before we can even begin asking that question. Treating today's AIs like people is delusional; whether self-delusion, or outright grift, YMMV.
- kalkin 9mo ago
  > I'm not convinced he's trying to make the point you think he is What point do you think he's trying to make? (TBH, before confidently accusing people of "delusion" or "grift" I would like to have a better argument than a sequence of 4-6 word sentences which each restate my conclusion with slightly variant phrasing. But clarifying our understanding of what Schwitzgebel is arguing might be a more productive direction.)
- comp_throw7 9mo ago
  > But if he is, he's missing that we do understand at a fundamental level how today's LLMs work. No we don't? We understand practically nothing of how modern frontier systems actually function (in the sense that we would not be able to recreate even the tiniest fraction of their capabilities by conventional means). Knowing how they're trained has nothing to do with understanding their internal processes.

tehjoker 9mo ago

There is a funny science fiction story about this. Asimov's "All the Troubles of the World" (1958) is about a chat bot called MultiVac that runs human society and has some similarities to LLMs (but also has long term memory and can predict nearly everything about human society). It does a lot to order society and help people, though there is a pre-crime element to it that is... somewhat disturbing. SPOILERS: The twist in the story is that people tell it so much distressing information that it tries to kill itself.