[notpachet]

I don't share your view that it will be at all clear to people that these things don't matter and have no rights. We have a very powerful (sometimes for good, sometimes for ill) ability to empathize with things that we see as similar to us. As a case in point, we're currently in the midst of a major societal debate about the rights of unborn children that exhibit no signs of sentience (yet).

What happens when people start building real emotional bonds with these fake intelligences? Or using them to embody their dead spouses/children? I think there's going to be a very strong push by people to grant rights to these advanced models, on the basis of the connection they feel with them. I can't even say definitively that I will be immune to that temptation myself.

[themarkn]

My bad, I meant clear in a more objective sense, in that it will be actually _true_ that these not-alive things will not be able to “possess” anything, rights included. Agreed that for sure people are going to get all kinds of meaning from interacting with them in the ways you suggest and it will be tricky to navigate that.

I think perhaps the advanced models may be protected legally _as property_, for their own value, and through licenses etc. But I hope we are a long way from considering them to be people, outside of the hypotheticals.

[tragomaskhalos]

I am reminded of the Black Mirror episode where a woman's dead boyfriend is "resurrected" via his social media exhaust trail, ultimately undermined by the inevitable uncanny valley that reveals itself. Of course that was fiction, and it's not realistic to reconstruct someone's personality from even the most voluminous online footprint, but you can certainly imagine how defensive people would become of the result of any such attempt irl.

[lupire]

Dogs and cows barely have rights. It will be a century before a computer program has rights.

[a9h74j]

Dogs and cows cannot ask in their own words to be represented by a lawyer, to file a lawsuit.

Or claim to be one or another type of person that we must affirm.

I don't know how it might apply, but inanimate objects can be charged in the case of civil forfeiture, can't they?