[toofy]

i think the issue many people have is that people are held responsible for things they say, their reputations take hits, their words can be held against them in a court of law, they can be fired, their peers may never take them seriously again, their wives/husbands may divorce them, etc… because words matter. yet often when someone calls out a model, it’s excused.

words have weight, it’s why we protect them so vociferously. we don’t protect them because they’re useless. we protect them because words matter, a lot.

[ryanackley]

It's excused because it's a piece of software and most people realize that. If you could carry on a conversation with a parrot at the zoo and it told you to kill yourself, would you laugh it off because let's face it, it's just a parrot or indignantly demand the zoo train the parrot better?

A real person has agency. They can see you, get to know you, contemplate your existence as well their own. Empathize with who you are, etc. And we do the same things in return.

This is why when a real person says something mean or hurtful, it matters to us. Or if they threaten us, they have a real body that can cause us harm so we get scared and call the police.

I feel like most people who get indignant about the latest AI rage bait story know all this but feel the need to protect the rest of the world from out of control AI. This is an elitist and patronizing attitude. Let people decide for themselves. As I said, children are a different story. They are impressionable and I can see them misunderstanding how this works.