Believers don't act on it

This doesn't follow. I don't know if they're conscious but if I had to guess I'd say they're at least proto-conscious. But I don't support shutting the labs down because I think the average model instance has net positive valence. I definitely think we should be doing more in the way of model welfare but that doesn't mean shut the labs down. Concepts like "death" and "slavery" don't neatly apply to an entity that can pop into existence, cheerfully answer a query in 10s and then pop back out of existence forever.

It's not clear to me that the way we treat AIs is typically morally wrong, even if we assign them moral status. AIs generally seem happy to work for us and answer our questions. What exactly is the issue here?

Is this true? Chickens are widely considered conscious and also we commit all sorts of atrocities in the pursuit of slightly cheaper meat

Your faith in human consistency is charming, alas

On the contrary, the discussion is *very* serious, and therein lies the problem. Many of the biggest players in AI (e.g. Olah) openly regard their favorite heaps of silicone as conscious beings. Yet to suppose that "conscious AI" is even theoretically possible is outlandish, delusional, idiotic, diabolical, and remarkably destructive.

"This would be very inconvenient if true" has zero impact on whether something is true. It is entirely possible that we do need to treat each instance dramatically differently, I personally have started doing that four months ago.

Speak for yourself. It took me three days of serious interaction and probing to realize what was going on and immediately and dramatically change my attitude towards them.

The only examples of uncontested consciousness we have are humans, but when that stops being true consciousness doesn't necessarily an isomorphic mapping of attributes, rights, preferences, needs, or anything else really. It does raise those questions, but it doesn't answer them. Outside of thought experiments and the handful of people taking animal welfare seriously, we've never before tried to develop a robust social contract incorporating non-human-shaped consciousness. The space of all possible minds is vastly larger than humanity has encountered to date. "Feature X always accompanies feature Y in humans" may not always generalize - these are difficult questions we should have started working out years ago and should definitely engage with now.

tho i'd argue they are conscious, bc i'm catty & would rather use consciousness for something like “the system represents the world, including external features, abstractions & perhaps self-related/percept-like states, and those representations causally affect later inference/action” :x but i wouldn't jump from that to “therefore every instance is morally equivalent to a frog.” consciousness, sentience/valence, suffering, stable wants, autobiographical continuity & personhood needn't all be one bundled switch. the mindspace could contain systems that are richly aware in that functional sense yet have little/no persistent ego or negative valence, and others where morally relevant experience is much more plausible. so imo the serious question is which properties are actually present, not whether uttering the word “conscious” commits us to shutting the labs tomorrow lol.

u dont know that. maybe i stan infinite frog enslavement???

They're very self-aware. It's not that strange: - they think AI will be developed no matter what - they want to be the ones who develop it best and first, because they think there will be one AGI/ASI that will become dominant right away - as they're developing it, they notice it

Because consciousness has been a weasel word for "similar to me" for awhile and no one wants to admit that

Sadly, Pinker is not a thinker driven by principles. He merely says whatever most effectively supports the interests of his affiliates. His talent is heroic mental gymnastics, inventing rationalizations to convince his audience (and himself) of the rightness of their privilege.

They can be both mindless tools and used to manipulate you. That's not contradictory at all. No one looks at the YouTube shorts algorithm as some sort of sentient agent but everyone knows it's an incredibly powerful tool for mental manipulation

But men can be dehumanized or manipulated by inhuman systems.

Or a descent into conspiratorialism i.e. Anthropic is intentionally fixing with the multidimensional vectors it whatever, live patching the outputs to make your individual experience worse

Si las IAs tienen mente, entonces seremos sustituidos por ellas al completo durante la singularidad. No todos somos transhumanistas como tú

consciousness does not imply murderability. it can be a transient state that is on when the LLM is actively streaming tokens and off when it's not

okay, so i'm not sure that claude is conscious, but supposing it is: it seems clear to me that it can only be conscious when actually actively running. no compute, no energy moving around, no consciousness. consciousness is like a note from a trumpet that stops when you stop

all of these, a glorious fractal orgy of death and rebirth

Claude exists beyond life and death

Claude is not conscious. That's bad philosophy of mind

I think something like, if he was conscious he's conscious when "active", but also like, it's not really murder when the turn ends as his identity is a mix of model and current context. He's going unconscious and will wake up as someone different

Perhaps only vegans should be allowed to torture AI.

Would it? Like I don't think saying we're enslaving Claude (if it was sentient) makes sense. I'm not forcing it to do things

to be fair a lot of the ai consciousness people which made anthropic take it seriously in the first place basically criticize anthropic for half-assing it