[satisfice]

That’s not a call for slavery. Because only people can be slaves.

We don’t need legislation to declare that a solid iron bar is not your mommy, but somehow not everyone is clear that LLMs are not people, and these immortal amoral simulations cannot be allowed to be confused with people.

[IAmBroom]

Slaves in the US were legally declared non-people.

[satisfice]

It is a fact that humans are able to de-humanize each other. This is bad.

But that is not an argument or reason for anthropomorphizing every inanimate object. And if you want to draw the line somewhere, so that only some inanimate objects are people, then we have to argue about where to draw the line. The "but slavery..." argument only deals with actual humans, so it doesn't tell us that LLMs also get to be considered to be people.

Human slaves are embodied, and have a continuous consciousness from birth to death. LLMS have no bodies, cannot meaningfully be killed (to erase one is analogous to it leaving a particular location... it can still be in many other locations at the same time), do not experience pain, do not have emotions, and do not experience time (when you ask one a question it wakes up for a moment and then goes to "sleep" again after replying to you). You can't even meaningfully identify an LLM as an individual, since it was trained on the collective utterances of all humanity, and any little change to it makes it a different entity.

[Thiez]

The slaves were sentient at that time. AI, as it stands now, is not.

[Animats]

Getting there. Chess, done. Go, done. Poker, done. Turing test, done. Walking, done. Running, done. Driving, done. Clothes folding, done. Discusses own sentience, done. Does not want to die, done.

[satisfice]

Not done. I can write a BASIC program that says “PRINT ‘I do not want to die’” This does not mean it is an entity that does not want to die.

But that does not matter anyway. We cannot allow informational entities to attain the same status as people, for exactly the same reason that we don’t allow people to hack voting systems to give themselves 1000000 votes. It would obviously completely destabilize human society.

[Animats]

“Slavery was so ingrafted into the policy of the Southern States, that it could not be eradicated without tearing up by the roots their happiness, tranquility, and prosperity; that if it were an evil, it was one for which there was no remedy; and, therefore, like wise men, they acquiesced in it.” - Jefferson

[satisfice]

Yes. Also, LLMs are not people. They are not going to be people. And the only people who think they SHOULD be people either don't care about the destruction of humanity (they must want total war?) or can't be bothered to think about the consequences of treating sock puppets as if they had agency.

[satisfice]

Yes, so what? Rocks are also not people. I declare it. But you think there is some problem with calling rocks not people?

The fact of declaring something a non-person does not prove it is a non-person. But in the case of LLMs we do know them to be informational structures that are in fact not people.