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A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

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Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#131

Post by rcxdude »

voidhorse wrote: post #44
grey-area wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A paper plane does have some important similarities to a full-sized aircraft, though. I don't think 'biological brains are really complex' makes it obvious that an LLM is conscious or not.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#132

Post by vidarh »

willy_k wrote: post #56
vidarh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even know how to disprove that this statement with "AI" replaced by "other humans" other than by listening to people self-reporting and taking their word for it and/or defining the words in ways that do not rely on a subjective experience. Until we know how to objectively measure if someone or something is conscious, it seems unreasonable to make statements with any kind of certainty about it.

Sure, if you take a materialist empiricist perspective, which is myopic at best. As humans we have the unique and wonderful ability to know truths by themselves. Machines do not have minds, and they can not.

You have absolutely no evidence for any of these assertions. This is a religious belief in the total absence of evidence, not science.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#133

Post by chuckadams »

drybjed wrote: post #107
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.

> [at the hearing regarding the civil rights of androids like Data] > Capt. Picard: Now, the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this... creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be; it will reach far beyond this courtroom and this... one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom - expanding them…

And 20-odd years later, a terrorist attack prompts Starfleet to outlaw and eradicate his entire species.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#134

Post by [deleted] »

Insanity wrote: post #117
platinumrad wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a big house, and in this case Suleyman's criticism of Anthropic's not-so-subtle attempts to convince the world that Claude has a "soul" is entirely correct.

All these companies have a nauseating narrative around AI. I want to believe they are intentionally deceitful and not actually delusional. Hard to tell though which one it is.

[deleted]

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#135

Post by Arodex »

addag wrote: post #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…

If a LLM says "I am in pain", is it just stringing together words or is it feeling pain? Does pain exist for a being that never felt any kind of physical pain, never had any pain receptors?

There are humans who don't have any pain receptors because of genetic mutations. They cut themselves all the time, they bleed, they break bones and they don't seem distressed by it even on a purely mental, intellectual level.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#136

Post by TacticalCoder »

qarl wrote: post #28

Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM" Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness (2025) - "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI". Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (2023) - "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy t…

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 decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not.

Meanwhile: seed / temperature = 0 and I'll happily turn the power button off of any glorified abacus without feeling bad about it.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#138

Post by qarl »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #136
qarl wrote: post #28

Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM" Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness (2025) - "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI". Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (2023) - "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy t…

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.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#139

Post by pixl97 »

mlinhares wrote: post #81
nowittyusername wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh rly.

So you are saying agents do swarm with the right prompt.

I really wish the "people have to tell LLMs to do anything" would just stop because it's silly bullshit at this point.

Agents follow a prompt. This prompt can be made by humans. It can be made by output from another LLM. It can be made by hooking up any number of sensors as input to an LLM. Hell, if we wanted to burn the power we could likely teach this loop straight into the architecture.

Stop making 'people' special when saying this. You and all other life are born with a "go next" prompt because life without it didn't succeed. This goes from higher human thinking all the way down to viruses self assembly and actuation. Putting agents in a loop is not particularly hard. Putting agents in a loop and 1. managing expense is hard. 2. Keeping them on task is very hard. 3. Keeping them from doing some crazy unhinged shit is really really hard.

As model time horizons increase and the ability for us to compress context and increase context size the more complex (and unhinged) behavior we'll see.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#140

Post by axionbraid »

dgellow wrote: post #48
vidarh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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