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A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

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Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#421

Post by JW_00000 »

I don't really get people that discuss model welfare, but don't seem to have many ethical qualms killing/eating animals. Each day, we kill 202 million chickens, hundreds of millions of fish, 900,000 cows, etc. [1]

These animals can feel pain and suffering. They are sentient. I think they are conscious, but these particular ones probably not self-conscious.

Admittedly, we have introduced 'animal rights', but these amount to "You can kill the animal, but in this specific manner." We keep them in small cages and in unnatural conditions. We deprive them of most of their natural experiences. We put them in conditions that we know are stressful (releasing chemicals that we know cause stress or anxiety in humans).

In my opinion, in many ways current LLMs are more intelligent than these animals. But LLMs don't feel pain while the animals do. I think that's more important to take into account. So why are we suddenly striving for model welfare before animal welfare?

PS: I'm not vegetarian, so I'm as much as a hypocrite about this as the next guy.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-...

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#422

Post by pixl97 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #300
antx wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting the temperature to 0 mathematically tells the system to always choose the absolute highest-probability word (known as "greedy decoding"), but in no reality is this "deterministic". Output drift is still a thing.

But that's from, like, floating point errors, right? If you used higher precision that wouldn't happen, it's just because we're cheap in how we do rounding. I can see how you'd nitpick this, but to me this is a deterministic algorithm that just happens to be running on nondeterministic hardware.

I mean, currently we'd have some difficultly proving our hardware isn't deterministic, just that we can't actually test it.

But, I think you're tricking yourself on determinism. You'll say something like "I know if I ask an LLM what 1+1 is, it will answer 2", but the thing is, you don't. You have to run the LLM first to figure out it's output. And when you send in just a few bits of text, it's outputs are going to be rather limited.

But this all breaks when it hits the real world. Inputs are unpredictable. Hence while LLM outputs, like humans, are probabilistic, you can't figure out what it's going to be until you ask. And in any high complexity data gathering environment you're going have a difficult time ensuring your entire systems conditions are the same.

System consistency is very hard, once you start running thousands of processors in an agentic loop small errors accrue and timing starts differing and the system will take non-deterministic paths.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#423

Post by lelanthran »

qarl wrote: post #138
TacticalCoder wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way. A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too" . I haven't yet d…

> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". You'll need to explain why.

>> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".

> You'll need to explain why.

Where are you going with this? I don't see a conclusion for this line of questioning.

I mean, you can't explain why a machine that reliably and predictably produces the same result is "the normal kind of conscious", can you? So why expect someone else to explain why it's a "weird" kind of conscious?

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#424

Post by altruios »

assertion: consciousness == processing information.

This is a functional view of consciousness.

Awareness - sentience - follows when the system of processing information is itself part of the information being processed.

Stochastic thoughts relating to this conclusion:

Life is a 'process', it doesn't have a 'physical representation'.

Life is generated entirely from non-living material. "oh my cells are alive", but those cells too when broken down into component parts consist entirely of non-living material. There is no 'special material' to make life out of (okay, carbon, but that's just the local maximum presumed global maximum in efficiency in expressing life) like a chair can be made out of any material (at proper pressures and temperatures) so too can a mind.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#425

Post by budman1 »

qarl wrote: post #238
goodmythical wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If computers were fully deterministic, we wouldn't need error correcting ram. The abstracted design of the machine is meant to be deterministic, but you can't predict before running any command whether or not it will complete because there are externalities that effect the outcome. Electromagnetic interference even happens in-chip where an electron can accidentally escape it's wire and enter another, possibly resulti…

Yes. In theory they are deterministic. In practice, not so much.

Those non-deterministic results are exceedingly rare.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#426

Post by voidnullvalue »

myrmidon wrote: post #264
voidnullvalue wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So effectively by your criteria, there is essentially no ethical use of a large language model? Am I understanding your position correctly? If not I am really confused by your original comment

No, my position is that "black people/women/animals should do repetitive work so I don't have to" does not qualify because it doesn't make you sound like a deluded eugenicist. It might be a bit spicy from a left politics point of view but it's basically the status quo. Compare: " are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by " "granting rights and imb…

What properties do LLMs possess that make human-animal moral status analogies appropriate?

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#427

Post by sobiolite »

collingreen wrote: post #64
sobiolite wrote: post #8

Create an empirically testable theory of biological consciousness and then we can have a meaningful conversation about whether AIs can also have it or not. Until then, this is just so much waffle.

It's nice when you can set an impossibly high bar before which you can dismiss all your personal responsibility. Does this argument work equally well for human slavery for you? We haven't met that bar for humans either. Is wondering about my consciousness waffle or do I get a pass in your book?

No, I would say that any for or against slavery that is rooted in arguments about the presence of absence of consciousness is meaningless pseudoscience. It is the modern equivalent of Phrenology. If you want to make those arguments you need a genuine science of consciousness. Or you need to base your morality in something other than the presence of consciousness.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#428

Post by thewebguyd »

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?

> Can this thing harm me back?

We extend moral considerations or legal protections to beings that have zero capacity to harm us back, though. The inability to fight back is the reason a lot of welfare protections exist in the first place.

That aside, if (and that's a really big if) we end up with a model that is sentient, as in has the capacity to suffer, using factory farming as justification to ignore model welfare is just admitting we intend to repeat the same abject moral failure again in the name of economic convenience.

I hope that we won't, but humans love cheap meat, and will probably love cheap intelligence as well.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#429

Post by fc417fc802 »

andrewla wrote: post #337

I am not impressed with the philosophizing here, and even less by the attempts to make factual statements that can be credibly disputed. That said, trying to distill what is being said here, the concrete action is [stop telling the AIs] that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness]. Is that accurate? The major premise seems to be that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness] is an untrue statement…

> Specifically "seeding doubt about the moral status of AI systems into their own training may significantly elevate the alignment and containment risks of those systems."

Can we take a minute to appreciate the absurdity of such a position? If exposure to the equivalent of a "bad" prompt breaks alignment then you haven't solved the problem. You were only pretending that they were contained.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#430

Post by AmericanOP »

platinumrad wrote: post #320
AmericanOP wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suleyman's description of how AI works is pig ignorant. All AI generates an emotive character between the user and the training data that is the AI's guess at what the user wants to interact with. Its an illusion at that layer- anyone who claims soul exists at a deeper level doesn't understand how the tool functions. This is distinct from the very real safety issue of AI making dangerous information available to bad…

Suleyman's entire point is that AI should not be anthropomorphized.

You communicate with AI anthropomorphically, and users choose products based on how it feels to use them.
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