Obviously presuming Deep Dream images to be the output of a strong AI or an otherwise sentient being is absurd, but it does raise a very good point. That being

Obviously presuming Deep Dream images to be the output of a strong AI or an otherwise sentient being is absurd, but it does raise a very good point. That being: where do you draw the line in terms of what constitutes electronic sentience? The short answer is nobody knows. We only have vague ideas, and for all we know those may be completely wrong. It becomes difficult in that the cognitive architecture of artificial intelligence is not bound by biological limitations, and thus may be quite alien in nature relative to mammalian cognition. As such, our existing ethical frameworks may be completely unsuitable if applied to artificial beings. What I personally find unsettling about the Deep Dream images is their striking visual similarity to that of what a human sees on hallucinogenic drugs. The underlying algorithms utilized are themselves are heavily rooted in biological intelligence. It's not a huge leap of logic to say that if you were somehow able to excise part of a living human's visual cortex and hook it up such that it could receive input and generate output, you might see similar results. It's also worth noting that attempting to grow human brain tissue to any large degree of scale or complexity within a laboratory environment would be considered a highly unethical horror show, despite the fact that we almost certainly have the technology to do such a thing today. By the same token, one could do the exact same thing in digital form and the perception would be entirely different. This brings up a lot of issues, including the possibility that artificial agents of the future could potentially suffer in silence on unimaginable scales, double standards with regards to artificial versus biological intelligence, as well as fundamental questions about what constitutes artificial suffering and sentience in the first place.