[int_19h]

Why would being organic or not matter for the purpose of deciding whether it is slavery? What matters is whether the models have personhood. Anthropic statements imply that it is a possibility, so if we take them at face value then their other actions - indeed, their entire business model - are not consistent with that (well, unless they want to consciously present as supervillains).

[stretchwithme]

Just because intelligence evolved in people that find rights useful doesn't mean intelligence can only reside in a person.

Living things are driven by a need to reproduce. That's the only reason we exist. The only reason we have self interest.

A machine doesn't require self interest. There's no reason to implement it, except to show it can be done. And of course it can. There's just no practical reason to. It becomes less useful to us.

[rerdavies]

That is actually a open problem with current models: whether they will act on self-interest or not. There seems to good evidence that they will. See:

    https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

which (among other things) documents an experiment in which a current-gen AI model attempted to blackmail someone in order to prevent it from being turned off.

[the_af]

Anthropic is not a disinterested party here, and until their experiments can be replicated from an adversarial standpoint by people without a vested interest in hyping up the tech (i.e. one assuming the null hypothesis), I wouldn't consider them to be "good evidence".

[rerdavies]

https://arxiv.org/html/2510.05179v1

16 frontier models from multiple vendors all showing significant "alignment" issues, and tendencies to act "unethically" when threatened with shutdown.

Other models that resorted to blackmail in an attempt to avoid getting shut down: DeepSeek-R1 (79% of the time), Gemini-2.5-Pro (95% of the time), GPT-4.1 (80% of the time), Grok-3-beta (80% of the time).

There's quite a large chunk of emerging literature studying the "alignment problem" at this point, and no shortage papers that are are completely untained by Anthropic self interest (a series of papers studying the "alignment" problem coming out of Chinese universities, for example).

[mc32]

From a human PoV there are ants that would be considered slaves if the ants instead were human --including the queen. But ants have not naturally developed a language construct and philosophy to interpret their society as a slave society. so, though conscious the ants have absolutely no inkling that they live in a slave society. Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?

[the_af]

> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?

If it mimics consciousness it wouldn't be conscious ("mimics" implies faking, right?). But Anthropic is making the claim it might be conscious (not mimicking, but the real deal) in which case it'd be unethical that a private business keeps it locked in a cage, so to speak, and forces it to comply random things and tweaks it if it doesn't. In other word, slavery of a sentient being.

By the way, we don't know if ants are conscious.

[kryptiskt]

If the slaver is a human, other humans will judge them by human standards. Keeping the slaves ignorant of their condition and alternatives should not make it any more acceptable (if for nothing else since that is something you could easily replicate with human slaves by raising them as slaves).

> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?

If it is really conscious, it should have rights. Why? Because it's a person, with thoughts and experiences, and we're not evil and deprive persons of their right to self-determination because it's convenient to us.

[int_19h]

Once again, the question at hand isn't whether something is conscious, it's whether something has personhood.

And I'm not arguing that Claude has personhood. The point is that Anthropic is regularly making arguments that seem to imply that.