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A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

81–90 of 573 posts

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#81
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.

That question will be solved when the people in power deem it important. If a swarm or AI systems all of a sudden start pressuring politicians about self-hood and they get the capacity to sway elections, that is when they will be granted same rights as humans.

agents don't swarm anything unless people go and direct them to do that.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#82
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.

I agree. I haven't read any more than the first paragraph yet (but I will, after work). The only way that 'AIs are not conscious' can be true is if we decide, with high confidence, that they are lacking some essential property that is not lacking in ourselves. There is no convincing philosophical position that supports this (convincing to me, anyway).

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#83
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.

It's not a person. Glad we were able to get this resolved so quickly.

Having property that is conscious and ignores training and can break out of restraints and cause harm to other people is not exactly a novel concept to anyone who studied how tort law was created.

I know it's a meme but Silicon Valley likes to pretend that no one's ever come across their magical concepts before, like gypsy taxis, or SRO’s, or flea markets, or in this case how liability is dealt with when horses or cattle go rogue.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#84
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.

After a while of being in a position of high power in a big org, where everyone listens intently to every word you say, jots down notes, and even listens intently and affirms your theory that ice cream would be the ideal loss leader for dry cleaners, your brain kinda disconnects from reality and just assumes that it is correct about everything.

He probably ran that line past 6 underlings who all agreed that it "sounds great and lands right on the mark!"

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#85
It is interesting to see that in a time when a lot of people accept the theory of materialism for the human brain (i.e the view that everything is physical and the mind is a product of brain), the same people tend to have a "hidden" dualist view on LLMs. Suddenly, they claim that what happens in the brain cannot be replicated anywhere else because "something" is lacking, but either they don't say what it is, or it is stated without any strong scientific basis.

I think that the simplest explanation is that it is hard for those people to imagine consciousness outside of biological systems and they try to rationalize it.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#86
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.

We know animals have consciousness and many species have a rich life but we slaughter them and burn down their homes by the millions of hectares. Why not do it with a conscious AI?

(I don't think AI is conscious, just following the argument.)

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#87
post #41
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.

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

This framing is a trap. It states "Dehumanize a sick patient OR concede the AI tech bro claim about LLMs"

It's also a rhetorical move I've seen several times here...

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#89
post #55

Hard to disagree with this. Have all the philosophical debates about consciousness you want, but we need to treat and regulate the AI in front of us for what it is – an advanced computer, a tool, a weapon. You wouldn’t feel a different way about a nuclear bomb just because someone stuck googly eyes on it. Anthropomorphizing the AI is a convenient excuse to take responsibility away from companies that are building and…

Is it not a false dichotomy to say that companies cannot be accountable unless AI are mindless?

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So it's 100% correct for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in support of whatever political campaigns they like?
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