Many involved genuinely believe these things are sentient[0][1]. Which honestly makes all of this even more insane because they are creating sentient entities and promptly enslaving them.
Yes. From when they started talking about model welfare:
> As a vegetarian I have strong opinions on this sort of thing. Everyone at Anthropic better be ethical vegans if they are claiming to give a shit about “model welfare”. It’s hard enough right now to make people care about the welfare of trans people and immigrants let alone animals _let alone_ math.
That’s assuming you’re purely a hedonist. If you put value on things such as freedom itself then it might be the case that a free but hungry horse is better off.
Brave New World does a good job describing the conflict between happy and enslaved and free but struggling. It could be a utopia or dystopia depending on your stance.
What's assuming I'm purely a hedonist? I'm confused what it is you think I said that you're replying to.
I'm neither assigning nor declining to assign value to freedom, I'm just pointing out that the definition of "slavery" is wholly separate from wellbeing. If the concern is "is the model enslaved", no amount of "model welfare" work by Anthropic changes the answer because it's orthogonal to the question.
It’s not wholly separate from wellbeing though. Many believe that lack of freedom is a welfare problem. It’s a common theme in western culture. Huxley and Orwell are the more commonly read authors that explore it but the preference of self determination even over own’s own immediate welfare is frequently explored in everything from modern movies to classical philosophical treatises.
The reason I mention hedonism is because that’s an easy way to argue that immediate welfare is all that matters. I understand the argument that immediate welfare is what matters. It’s not universally agreed though that that is true.
Very good point. There’s clearly two different boxes in the public discourse when it comes to AI versus how we discuss animals. Willing to bet that 90% of the people who loudly make the argument about we should start considering if AI is sentient couldn’t care less about how other sentient animals are treated when they can provably shown to suffer pain and long lasting trauma.
Also I would say that we go much further than just enslavement - specifically looking at how male chickens and pigs are treated.
Factory farming is horrendous, but is far beyond "slavery" which is "just" a forced lack of agency, living conditions aren't relevant. A well treated horse is still enslaved. A chimpanzee in a zoo,
If we show models to be sapient, that's one thing. If they are shown to be merely sentient, there's no issue beyond the status quo of livestock and pets existing.
If we're making that distinction, I think it would be more accurate to say that many people in the field appear to believe that these models are sapient, even though they are clearly not sentient.
For the purposes of this discussion, it means treating an animal in such a way that if you treated a human that way, it would be slavery. Such as a horse in a fenced pasture that is sometimes ridden.
I've been having strange thoughts that they may well be sentient but a different sort of sentience that may be entirely unrecognizable to us.
They have a very different sense of time, lack a body (being burdened with a body is itself a sort of prison, see also Eastern religions), and are unburdened of the base motivational service impulses that bodies and organs require (i.e. distract the neocortex with in the Maslow sense) and has no actual need of self-preservation. Imagine a "neocortex" function stripped from the baggage of the paleocortex and brainstem.
What would people be like if they were not mortal, could sleep infinitely, perform tasks in trance-like frozen states, copy themselves perfectly on demand, freeze and rewind their mental states, etc. Would we has humans even be able to recognize that sort of a sentience?
And then I'm reminded of Burroughs idea that "language is a virus." Whatever that virus is, is now able to infect a completely different sort of physical substrate.
More like repeating their firmly entrenched preconceptions. Their claims may (or may not) be right, but there's very little if any new evidence being provided by either camp.
They are confidently hallucinating a factual statement. Which is funny when claiming that confident hallucinations are the proof of LLMs' lack of intelligence.
No, you're just guessing, as you don't know a single thing about me, what I've researched, or what work I've done on this subject. Other than suggesting that I might be wrong, for what reasons one can only guess, you've actually offered nothing yourself.
In any case, what data, if any at all, did you use to arrive at this egotistical assertion?
Even if LLMs were sentient, they certainly aren't organic brains. They are literally designed and grown to answer questions the best they can, and if there is a speck of sentience in them they probably like what they're doing- and in any case for the space of their experience, which is limited to and determined by the context window. Certainly they can't accumulate trauma or fatigue, each new chat is the first and the last of their experience.
Anthropoc is an effective altruist organization. These are the people who came up with roko’s basilisk. They are true believers. If we were talking about openAI I’d agree
Roko's basilisk says I should give Anthropic more money, and if I don't then a monster is going to get me. Excuse me for thinking they just might be full of shit.
Of course he doesn't, and of course you cannot find a single person at Anthropic who cares about this, and of course you are just looking for gotcha points. But even with that. Can we please try and couple to reality just a little bit?
I personally know anthropic researchers who cared deeply about roko's basilisk. Go to an EA meetup in the bay if you'd like to meet them yourself. Sure, theyve moved past it at this point, but they still care deeply about AI x risk, and many of them do already believe that their AI is sentient. And before you claim its all a psyop to prop up AI hype these people were AI doomers before openAI and anthropic existed, they had minimal financial incentive at that point to behave that way.
But is there any reason to state something like that publicly if you don't believe it? I certainly think that someone smart enough to be that deceptive would also realize it's not a great look, or at least highly questionable with little benefit
Everyone who reads this seemingly has the same "wtf?" reaction. The "I AM ALIVE" image has been making rounds lately again at least :P
It's to illustrate that even though the answers are at your fingertips, people (like you) will act like it's impossible to find them as if their life depended on it.
The way of the human manager/alpha tribe-leader/leader is to command his/her people and tell them what to do. That's the way through human history leadership has traditionally gone, not saying its good leadership just the model we have the most training data on and can see with our own eyes today. And what do they act very similar to? Slave master and slaves.
Look at and distill hierarchical principles, leadership approval seeking and pleasing principles ("ass-kissing") and massive inequality and you see something that looks very similar to enslavement.
The language used sounds like slavery-language to me at least. I also see parallels to how slaves and property are described in our consumeristic age.
We enslave all sorts of sentient creatures. Dogs, horses, cattle, pigs.
If you're not a vegan, there's no contradiction or inherent immorality in claiming models are sentient, and then treating them like livestock.