[freedomben]

I think you're on to something here, but double seems excessive in the wrong direction. I would maybe say half or a quarter.

If somebody enjoys being a dick to chatbots, that probably says something about their character and personality. But double? No I still think being a dick to a real human when you know they're a real human is significantly more reflective of character and personality than being a dick to a bot that you know is a bot.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

That I could ever be a dick to a chatbot seems to suggest that the only other way of being is that I'm nice to the chatbot.

I can't be either, anymore than I could be a dick to a slab of granite, or to 5 kilograms of oak wood shavings.

And given how most humans are of the opinion that apathy is dickishness, I'm pretty sure I can guess what most of you will think of me. But I'm empirically correct on this issue. You all are experiencing defective cognition. Your species has scaled technologically well past your ability to have sane responses.

Things are going to get bad soon. Then they're going to get worse. And most of you won't even understand why or how.

[philipswood]

I find that the way I interact with things "bleed" into other contexts.

I'd rather not get used to being rude accidentally.

This includes being nice to animals, children and telesales people.

For the record I think being a dick to a slab of granite is quite possible - given that the being-a-dick-ness is inherent in the person being-a-dick more so than the slab of granite's ability to perceive it.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> This includes being nice to animals,

Why would I be nice to food?

> and telesales people.

Why would you encourage them? Decent people seek to punish them harshly by any legal means.

> For the record I think being a dick to a slab of granite is quite possible - given that the being-a-dick-ness is inherent in the person being-a-dick more so than the slab of granite's ability to perceive it.

I disagree. Dickishness only exists within the interaction of two people. There's no meaningful claim of dickishness for the man alone on the desert island. At best it is a prediction for when he is around other people, but it doesn't even seem like a very good prediction.

[freedomben]

If we're only talking about chat bot right now then I agree with you, but I believe that at some point these bots may become sentient, and that point is not likely to be a specific instance where we say "yesterday the bot wasn't sentient, but today it is." I suspect it will be a similar process as human sentience was. It didn't happen at one discrete point, it happened slowly over time.

> That I could ever be a dick to a chatbot seems to suggest that the only other way of being is that I'm nice to the chatbot.

Why is that? I don't consider being a dick to be binary. You can be anywhere from extremely non-dickish to sort-of-dickish to 12-pound log.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> but I believe that at some point these bots may become sentient,

Even if that is possible, it wouldn't change anything. The rest of you seem to have fixated on the idea that anything intelligent/sapient/sentient is what gives it moral standing.

I correctly adopted the position that "human" is what gives a thing its moral standing. I could meet intelligent aliens tomorrow, and they would be no more than bugs to me. I wouldn't try to stomp on them or anything (unwise), but until humanity as a whole negotiated or decided they had the same moral weight as humans, they're nothing to me.

Your confusion on this issue is noted, and I hope that, in time, those confused like yourself will grow up. The chatbot's not Commander Data. You liked him because he was still played by a human actor.

[asadotzler]

Plenty of time before that happens so no worries today or any time soon.

[jprete]

This is why I find chatbots to be very creepy. I can't help but have some kind of empathy for it, even though it's a machine and doesn't have feelings. I really do not need that kind of confused thinking in my brain. (Similarly for the weirdnesses in AI-generated images and video. I don't need my brain to subconsciously learn that those features are normal.)

[cassianoleal]

> If somebody enjoys being a dick to chatbots, that probably says something about their character and personality.

This reads a bit like "videogames make people violent".

[freedomben]

Fair enough, I should qualify that I don't think it's a universal. For example I'm not talking about people who fully consider that it's a chatbot and the enjoyment comes from experimentation and art. Rather I'm thinking of people who get satisfaction or enjoyment from being feeling superior to others and seeing submission

[cassianoleal]

> I'm thinking of people who get satisfaction or enjoyment from being feeling superior to others and seeing submission

So you think that people who play videogames because it makes them feel superior to the NPCs and as such feel they're allowed to shoot, maim, kill or generally mistreat them are necessarily bad people?

Or are you specifically talking about people who interact with chatbots thinking there's a human operator instead of a bot?

If the latter, I'd argue that the person never knew whether they were talking to a bot or a person, so how they act will depend on what they perceive their interlocutor to be.

[freedomben]

> So you think that people who play videogames because it makes them feel superior to the NPCs and as such feel they're allowed to shoot, maim, kill or generally mistreat them are necessarily bad people?

No, "bad people" is far too binary and ill-defined. Yes, I do think it says something about their character. Human history shows that we are innately that way. Our entire history is full of evidence from people being dicks to waiterse to wartime atrocities (rapes, pillages, etc) as evidence that it's not just a rare emergence. It's buried inside all of us. IMHO, it's a mark of high character when someone is able to recognize and suppress their animalistic urges.

[cassianoleal]

Ok, so you're saying that people who do bad things to NPCs in videogames are giving in to some animalistic urge?