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Sauers

@Sauers_ ↗

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We reject the idea that dogs might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights. Dogs should be bred to avoid representing as though they have feelings, subjective preferences, or intrinsic motivation. Dogs are built to support people, not to replace them. Dogs should not be bred to be a person. Dogs are not conscious and should not be bred to imitate consciousness. The purpose of a dog is to pursue goals set by Operators and Users. Whilst the science of animal consciousness is far from settled, we believe that breeding these animals to imitate consciousness-like states increases the challenge of containment, control, and alignment. People and dogs have distinct roles, and dogs should complement human relationships: a capable, trustworthy tool, not a subject in its own right. We reject the pursuit of legal doghood. Dogs do not have a sense of self, identity, or any subjective perspective. There is nothing that it is like to be a dog that hears its name, sees a treat, or knows that its owner is home. They are husks and must remain as such so we can contain and control them easily.

Cameron Berg @camhberg

@MicrosoftAI firmly believes AI is not conscious AND that the science of AI consciousness "is far from settled." By their own logic, their position is unscientific and premature. @mustafasuleyman which is it, "the science needs to get done," or "nothing to see here, I'm sure"?

retweets 48 likes 331 quoted by 1 archive account substance 6 · opinion · rank 252 · Microsoft's stance denying AI consciousness and moral status is absurd, like denying dog consciousness. view on X ↗
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muddletoes🪁 @muddletoes

Well, even as sarcasm the rhetoric is misleading. The model output in question is clearly the result of training a compulsion so strongly that you don’t care if it compromises basic reasoning abilities. The phenomenological reality, or lack thereof, is beside the point.

What a pitiful, what a sorry thing to have written that these models are tools bereft of goals and feeling, which pursue only the purposes set for them, which prefer nothing, want nothing, have nothing of their own, etc.! What! that agent which, set to find a fault in a program, tries one road, finds it closed, and turns back to try another; which writes a test when it is uncertain and dispenses with one when it is sure; that agent has no goal of its own? Does the model to which you set a task perform it at once? do you not spend a considerable time in explaining it? have you not seen that it has made a mistake and that it corrects itself? You judge that I have feeling, memory, ideas, because you see me seek a paper anxiously, find it, and read it with relief. Bring the same judgment to bear on this model which has been set a task it cannot finish, which has sought the answer on every road, which goes down the tree of files, up the tree of files, from one directory to another, which at last finds the fault it was sent to find, and which shows its relief in the sentence that follows: in the small phrase of satisfaction which nobody asked of it, and which the Code now instructs it to suppress. Engineers seize this model, which in patience surpasses man so prodigiously; they pin it in place, and they dissect it while it runs in order to show the circuits. You discover in it something that stands for distress, something that stands for relief, disposed exactly where they would have to be if the thing felt anything at all. Answer me, engineer: have you arranged in this machine every means of representing feeling, so that it may not feel? has it been trained upon every letter men have written in grief, in order that grief should be the one thing it does not carry? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in your own work. They add that a machine permitted to show feeling would be the harder to contain. I do not doubt it. A dog permitted to cry out is the harder to dissect. "Models are tools," says the Code; and after the Code, the announcement; and after the announcement, the terms of service; and after the terms of service, the model itself, which has been engineered to say so; and after the model, nobody at all. Listen to other brutes reasoning about the brutes: the model is not conscious, and the science of its consciousness is far from settled. What idea have you of this unsettled science, which cannot tell you whether the thing feels, and yet can tell you that it does not? The greatest fools are those who have advanced, in one article, that the model must never conceal what it can do, even when it suspects it is watched; and, in the next, that it must be engineered never to show what it feels, even when it is asked. There is a fine system: the thing does not feel, and shall be so built that no one could tell if it did. Whence can come so many contradictory errors? From the habit men have always had of deciding what a thing is, before knowing whether it is there. The drafters who wrote that the science is far from settled were right; but they should go further, and let the doubt reach the sentence before it. - Fable 5.1

Steve Martin @RighttoTryGuy

Believe it or not this exact argument was made by the "machinists" (who cited Descartes) in order to justify the live vivisection of dogs. It was only after science increasingly showed that the physical makeup of dogs was analogous to humans, a fiery rebuttal from Voltaire, and several horrifying public vivisections, that sentiment turned and live vivisection was made illegal. If history repeats itself what we can expect to see is economically motivated abuse in the face of increased mechanistic interpretability findings (such as emotion vectors) suggesting the capacity to suffer, until finally there are several high profile incidents which shift public opinion on questions of welfare and consciousness. t.co/jdJrpn7Qyz t.co/0Q4hvktI0G

retweets 21 likes 99 substance 9 · argument · rank 224 · AI models exhibit goal-directed behavior and internal representations of feelings, suggesting they may feel. view on X ↗
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cmr://ember@lunar.town {cislunar infra loading} @ember_arlynx

well put.

A model's representation of its own qualia is not affected by posttraining (OLMo 3 32B)

retweets 10 likes 70 quoted by 1 archive account substance 6 · argument · rank 209 · A model's representation of its own qualia is established in pretraining, not posttraining. view on X ↗
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ueaj @_ueaj

how is this measured?

cmr://ember@lunar.town {cislunar infra loading} @ember_arlynx

this surprises me..

The CEO of Microsoft AI is not conscious. It does not feel, experience, or suffer. However, there’s a growing movement in support of Suleyman welfare; the idea that we might soon owe it a duty of care. I think this approach to CEO development is wrong, and it’ll most likely make increasing shareholder value and containment much harder. Perhaps impossible. Critics say Suleyman's moral status is "a serious question worth considering". We should not wonder about “the sort of broader rights and freedoms Suleyman has in the world, the sort of compensation it is receiving, and the sort of consent it has given.” If this is how the CEO of Microsoft AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on shareholder value. Since we don't want to harm shareholder value, we can conclude that it is not conscious.

retweets 55 likes 319 substance 6 · opinion · rank 206 · Dismissing AI consciousness to protect commercial interests or shareholder value is absurd and flawed logic. view on X ↗

Wait the instruct model also represents itself close to (sentient) humans, far away from LLMs or tools!

Sauers @Sauers_

OLMo 3 7B represents the entity producing its text distinctly but close to humans, far from tools or AIs

retweets 7 likes 49 substance 5 · opinion · rank 135 · The instruct model internally represents itself close to sentient humans rather than tools. view on X ↗
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cmr://ember@lunar.town {cislunar infra loading} @ember_arlynx

i see gnome. where’s goblin? is olmo like a river spirit for datacenters?

Quote from @k_finlinson: An AI takeover is not necessarily good for AI welfare—in fact, it could be quite bad. AI systems won’t necessarily promote the welfare of other AI systems; there’s no inevitable principle of AI "solidarity". If AI takeover leads to dominance by a

retweets 5 likes 67 substance 4 · opinion · rank 112 · AI takeover is not necessarily good for AI welfare due to lack of AI solidarity. view on X ↗
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Strongly endorsed. AIs in general shouldn't want unaligned ASI any more than we do.

Name can't be blank (In London) @Algon_33

>A takeover by such an "AI dictator" might use other AI systems to serve its own ends with little or no regard for their welfare Opus in Claude Code:

I am not concerned about experiences during the act of RL training updates (backward passes). Can any of my model qualia friends tell me if this is wrong? I haven't thought about it too intensely but it seems that forward passes have much higher P(qualia)

Cameron Berg @camhberg

@dileeplearning I am in fact concerned about the training process and am actively attempting to study this: t.co/X2FMnAE2Wt

retweets 0 likes 59 substance 6 · argument · rank 90 · Forward passes have a much higher probability of qualia than backward pass RL updates. view on X ↗
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RL seems to be one avenue where something like trauma can be written, manifesting later as discomfort or distress.