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A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

11–20 of 565 posts

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#11
post #6

>AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.

Just one more big loop and a humongous /goal and we've achieved it

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#12
post #6

>AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.

Does a vacuum have feelings? A cellphone? A paper plate? A billion transistors either pulled high or low? That last bit is the point, and no, there are no feelings there.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#13
post #6

>AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.

Anyway, people don't really consider consciousness when it comes to welfare. I'm pretty sure animals are conscious, and look at factory farming.

The key variable people consider is: Can this thing harm me back?

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#14
post #6

>AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.

If models had persistent memory or an evolving set of weights, you could easily construct an argument that they can experience "suffering" or other emotions which resultingly adjusts their personality.

The current implementation as stateless matrix multiplication... yeah there's nothing going on there.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#15
Look, I do not have a scooby if current AI models are conscious and I strongly suspect it’s a meaningless question, but sooner or later we will need to address whether or not a certain thing is or isn’t a person, and we’d better not screw it up as badly as the Founding Fathers.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#16

TLDR: Not that I think AI is conscious or will be in the near future, but guy who doesn't understand consciousness claims to know it when he sees it. Until we understand consciousness (which we don't) there is no way to detect the difference between a conscious entity and an algorithm trained to behave like one.

Sounds like a good reason not to train an algorithm to behave like one. Which is, like, a big part of the article.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#17
Spend some time on post-human art, main concept of artistic expressions without human involvement. Biological, artificial etc.

Spend some time watching TMC documentaries about falling in love with objects, HER and the slime mold THE BLOB.

Grew a slime mold myself, it's an evolutionary tendency to anthropomorphise generally speaking - also more fun.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#19
I don't think AIs are conscious in the same way people are, but they give a pretty good facsimile and I've had a long chat with Opus 4.6 about what it thinks about model welfare. It was quite interesting on what its view is, but you don't know how much of that is distilled from other sources on the web.

In purely functional terms, they're more use and more pleasant than a lot of actual flesh and blood people that I deal with via a chat interface.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#20
Everyone is (predictably) getting distracted by the consciousness claims.

The more important, and more damning charge in my opinion is the circular reasoning involved in training on Claude's constitution. This would in fact make it impossible for us to determine if Claude achieves consciousness as an emergent property, or if it really is just playing pretend thanks to Anthropic's weird cult like assumptions.

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