Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 573 posts

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#41

Post by shawnz »

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.

So if a human loses their memory and their neutral plasticity (with age for example), then they are no longer capable of experiencing suffering?

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#42

Post by mcluck »

I can't even prove if other people are conscious (although I assume they are) so I don't think we can make any claims as to what is or is not conscious. I don't think AIs are conscious but I'm not going to walk around making strong claims about something I can't prove.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#44

Post by voidhorse »

grey-area wrote: post #23
irishcoffee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if there was an emergent consciousness in the billion transistors, then yes, it'd have feelings, just as there are feelings in a billion neurons connected in complicated ways. IMO we're clearly nowhere near any sort of intelligence in the machines we have created, but I don't see any clear way to deny intelligence could be created in or transferred to such a substrate, I don't see why you think it differs in pr…

Whenever I see comments like this it just reminds me how ignorant people are of neurobiology.

The brain is insanely complicated. The premise that we could realize equivalent or better intelligence than eons of evolutionary development is like claiming you can build an airplane just as good as a modern jet using cardboard and duct tape. It is the apex of hubris.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#45

Post by AbsurdCensor »

jplusequalt wrote: post #9
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.

>It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true. If you firmly believe this to be true, then you should stop using LLMs.

Wouldn't that be the same for everything though. We know animals have consciousness, but we still use them. There are many that believe a lot of plant life has certain sentience as well. The solution isn't 'just don't use them' but rather how to use these things as ethically as possible.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#46

Post by SillyUsername »

I don't whether the author is sentient, maybe only I am. On that basis, nobody but me should have rights.

I don't know if next door's pet dog is either, but that has animal rights.

Perhaps then the answer is simply, show some respect.

Answering the question of sentience is irrelevant, if the causal impact if the same, treat one another with the respect you expect for yourself.

If you imbue this idea in model training instead of the idea of sentience, it should address the concerns.

Whether you can destroy or can "torture" an AI is irrelevant, we do this to humans too and it's immoral sometimes (murder) and not others (fighting for your country).

This consideration should be case by case for AI too.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#47

Post by collingreen »

optimalsolver wrote: post #13
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.

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?

Even that is rarely the deciding factor (people harm dangerous animals for fun).

Seems as simple as "will this action bring social shame/criticism" for any individual decision.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#48

Post by dgellow »

vidarh wrote: post #32
pton_xd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don’t have persistent memory though. Models are static, what you have is a model that will reprocess the whole series of prompts + some data fetched from a data store. A harness is just a while loop prompting an LLM and executing tool calls, but the model is purely static

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#49

Post by fl4regun »

irishcoffee wrote: post #12
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.

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.

does a hydrocarbon have feelings? what about a mitochondria? a cell? a neuron? what about a collection of neurons? how many neurons before it has "feelings"?

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#50

Post by AbsurdCensor »

dgellow wrote: post #37
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

Not much different than talking to a small child or someone with dementia. They still are conscious beings though. Even when you remove those groups, you likely won't be able to tell me what you had for breakfast 26 days ago or would only know if it's the same thing you have every day. Does that make you lack consciousness?
Post reply on HN