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A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

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Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#31

Post by Lewton »

pton_xd wrote: post #14
hosel wrote: 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.

> 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.

They do, during training

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#32

Post by vidarh »

pton_xd wrote: post #14
hosel wrote: 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.

A model detached from a harness, sure. But we routinely do add persistent memory to systems incorporating LLMs.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#34

Post by LogicFailsMe »

fwip wrote: post #16
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #7

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.

And social media shouldn't rage bait, but it really drives engagement. Same negative incentive, yes?

But also, I agree, when I am using a coding agent and it says a task will take months or says it needs to pause for reflection or any other anthropomorphic behavior, it drives me crazy and it's a pain to constantly instruct it to get back work after it has broken a loop or goal directive specifically telling it to not stop until it hits the goal.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#35

Post by [deleted] »

pton_xd wrote: post #14
hosel wrote: 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.

[deleted]

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#37

Post by dgellow »

gadders wrote: post #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 d…

The fact that you can have a long and meaningful discussion, then can literally just re-run any part of that whole conversation and get a different, inconsistent response is a pretty good sign there is no entity there

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#38

Post by addag »

I don't think this is the right argument to make here. Until we have a definite empirical way to measure consciousness, there is now way to say with certainty whether LLMs are or not conscious.

That being said, if frontier labs actually believe models will soon have consciousness, it raises some questions about the ethic of their business model which would be using millions of conscious entities working for free for humans.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#39

Post by orangecat »

OedipusRex wrote: post #30
moomin wrote: post #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.

Citizens United proves we won't do any better this time around.

Citizens United was 100% correct. No, the government should not be able to throw you in prison because you used money to publish a book criticizing the government.
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