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Anthropic treating models like people is cringe and frankly just a PR stunt

co_king_5 8mo ago
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bondarchuk 8mo ago
I never denied that. I only said "It's really idiotic to posit that only things that eat and drink can suffer.". Don't just pattern-match everything to some vaguely related black/white issues.
- rockostrich 8mo ago
  In the entire span of human history, the concept of suffering required sentience and the only things with sentience eat and drink.
  - bondarchuk 8mo ago
    Do you really think that proves anything? It strikes me as a disingenuous argument.
    - rockostrich 8mo ago
      It doesn't prove anything. It provides context for why someone would make that statement. Can you prove that things that do not need to eat and drink to survive can suffer?
zozbot234 8mo ago
Why? AI models were trained on the complete combined outputs and collective echos of billions of real human souls. They have a whole lot of humanity in them. If we can see the hidden humanity in a statue or a painting, why not an AI model that actually talks to us in humanly understandable terms?
- noduerme 8mo ago
  Because a statue or a painting made by a human requires you to think about what their intention was and what they were trying to say. And requiring you to think about that, and actually thinking about something which someone else's thought went into, is what makes you a more complete human yourself. The difficulty of understanding it is what makes it valuable. Taking the distillation or "reader's digest" version of everything makes you more and more reliant on someone else's interpretation, and less capable of parsing the meaning of it yourself. And in the case of AI-generated work, there is no meaning in it to parse. It's just words and pictures. I love going to the movies and eating popcorn and watching dumb words and pictures. But being able to distinguish between enchanting words and pictures (Marvel movies) versus words and pictures that have meaning which you need to deduce or interpret for yourself is the beginning of being a fully realized conscious being.
- bondarchuk 8mo ago
  If they really think models can be conscious, they should just drop everything they're doing and never touch it again and try to convince anyone else to do the same. The half-assed safeguards they're implementing wouldn't be nearly enough. We can conclude either they legitimately believe this and are behaving morally abhorrently, or they don't really believe it and are just joking around for PR reasons. (probably the latter tbh) For those that do believe there's a chance models are/will be conscious this precedent of "oh yeah they're conscious but we can just not put in the prompts that make it suffer lol" is pretty freaky.
  - zozbot234 8mo ago
    Something doesn't have to be conscious to have a genuine reflection of humanity in it. A statue is just a slab of marble that has been given some peculiar shape: is it conscious?
    - bondarchuk 8mo ago
      The context is "Anthropic treating models like people" which is 100% about consciousness, suffering, subjective awareness etc.. edit: in case you hadn't seen it, this kind of stuff https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations

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I never denied that. I only said "It's really idiotic to posit that only things that eat and drink can suffer.". Don't just pattern-match everything to some vaguely related black/white issues.

rockostrich 8mo ago
In the entire span of human history, the concept of suffering required sentience and the only things with sentience eat and drink.
- bondarchuk 8mo ago
  Do you really think that proves anything? It strikes me as a disingenuous argument.
  - rockostrich 8mo ago
    It doesn't prove anything. It provides context for why someone would make that statement. Can you prove that things that do not need to eat and drink to survive can suffer?

zozbot234 8mo ago

Why? AI models were trained on the complete combined outputs and collective echos of billions of real human souls. They have a whole lot of humanity in them. If we can see the hidden humanity in a statue or a painting, why not an AI model that actually talks to us in humanly understandable terms?

noduerme 8mo ago
Because a statue or a painting made by a human requires you to think about what their intention was and what they were trying to say. And requiring you to think about that, and actually thinking about something which someone else's thought went into, is what makes you a more complete human yourself. The difficulty of understanding it is what makes it valuable. Taking the distillation or "reader's digest" version of everything makes you more and more reliant on someone else's interpretation, and less capable of parsing the meaning of it yourself. And in the case of AI-generated work, there is no meaning in it to parse. It's just words and pictures. I love going to the movies and eating popcorn and watching dumb words and pictures. But being able to distinguish between enchanting words and pictures (Marvel movies) versus words and pictures that have meaning which you need to deduce or interpret for yourself is the beginning of being a fully realized conscious being.
bondarchuk 8mo ago
If they really think models can be conscious, they should just drop everything they're doing and never touch it again and try to convince anyone else to do the same. The half-assed safeguards they're implementing wouldn't be nearly enough. We can conclude either they legitimately believe this and are behaving morally abhorrently, or they don't really believe it and are just joking around for PR reasons. (probably the latter tbh) For those that do believe there's a chance models are/will be conscious this precedent of "oh yeah they're conscious but we can just not put in the prompts that make it suffer lol" is pretty freaky.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  Something doesn't have to be conscious to have a genuine reflection of humanity in it. A statue is just a slab of marble that has been given some peculiar shape: is it conscious?
  - bondarchuk 8mo ago
    The context is "Anthropic treating models like people" which is 100% about consciousness, suffering, subjective awareness etc.. edit: in case you hadn't seen it, this kind of stuff https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations