In the real world, rights confer sentience, that is, in social and legal terms, an entity (an AI, a "native", a slave, etc) having sentience, is the recognition of having such by others.

A person (of class of persons) could have all kinds of inherent sentience, but unless this is recognized by society/laws/government etc, it's as moot as the sound a tree makes when falling in a forrest.

Of course people will say "it was the fact that the class of persons having sentience that made us give them the rights" but that didn't historically stop them treating several classes of people as non-sentient for centuries - and for all practical purposes it was just as if they were indeed so.

Maybe? I'd find it hard to believe, after talking to folks here, that the legal conferral of rights to an LLM would change their mind on its sentience.

To those who feel strongly about AI, if you currently believe that AIs(present and future) are ontologically incapable of sentience, would the legal conferral of personhood change your mind?

No; personhood is not a legal fiction (aside from corporate personhood), but a fact independent of our always-slow-to-catch-up legal system.

Take the question and push it a little farther to demonstrate the absurdity: If ELIZA were to be legally granted personhood, would that make you believe ELIZA was capable of sentience?

It's fairly self-evident to all of us that ELIZA is just a computer program with some fairly simple code to crudely simulate human conversation.

LLMs are much more sophisticated, to be sure—but they are still unquestionably just simulating human conversation, not actually "thinking" about what we say and responding of their own agency.

simulation or not, a good enough simulation is as good as the real thing. the consequences are no less material.

if you were talking to an advanced llm that had the access to launch a drone strike on you and you said something which upset it, directing a response that decided to kill you, how much good do you think you plead to simulation would do you here ? None at all. you'd be dead. Because it doesn't matter. the philosophical zombie is a meaningless distinction.

the human tendency to focus far too much on poorly understood and undefined properties might just get us killed one day.

The idea of putting an LLM anywhere even in the same 2-3 orders of magnitude of sophistication as ChatGPT in charge of drone strikes, without humans in the loop, is so ludicrous it's not even worth giving attention to.

Note that I'm not saying it's impossible that some military might choose to do so: I'm saying that the choice itself is hopelessly negligent and guaranteed to result in the pointless death of innocents.

Furthermore, I don't think even a military that's that stupid and uncaring about human life would consider for a second opening up an LLM like that to inputs from arbitrary people on the Internet.

If you can come up with a fantasy scenario that has some vague sense of plausibility, I might be willing to entertain it; whatever this is is just not even worth dignifying with that level of response.

you're missing the point entirely. that was just an illustration to show how little internals matter in the face of results and actions.

"it's just a simulation" is not the shield you think it is. not when models interact with the real world.

I think you're mixing up "humanity" with "Silicon Valley techbros".

Everyone I've talked to about LLMs outside of this forum sees them as an amusing entertainment, and possibly occasionally useful for a few suggestions. Not something that's going to change their world any time soon, and certainly not anything that we should be trusting with anything sensitive in any way. Literally everyone.

In any case, I think you're really missing what the actual question was that I was responding to: Would conferring legal personhood change my mind about actual personhood.

The ability to do harm is not, in my mind, particularly relevant to questions of personhood. In fact, I would think that a much better indicator thereof would be the ability to choose not to do harm, given the capability, and someone trying to make you do so.

>In any case, I think you're really missing what the actual question was that I was responding to: Would conferring legal personhood change my mind about actual personhood.

Well, "conferring legal personhood" would mandatorily (by law) fix your behavior and professional conduct against one.

And it will also change education etc - you will be taught in official textbooks that it's a person and you should consider it as such.

This might not change your mind, but will change the minds of most kids being taught that.

To be frank, it's not like those ordering and controlling drone strikes take that much more caution or are much more humane.

>a good enough simulation is as good as the real thing*

That's a tautology.

Also, by definition a simulation is not the same as the real thing, otherwise it'd just be the real thing. It doesn't matter how advanced a flight simulator becomes, its fundamental nature precludes it from ever being "no less material" than flying an actual jet.

>No; personhood is not a legal fiction (aside from corporate personhood), but a fact independent of our always-slow-to-catch-up legal system.

Didn't say it was a "legal fiction". I said that it's the legal (and cultural recognition) status that matters.

>Take the question and push it a little farther to demonstrate the absurdity: If ELIZA were to be legally granted personhood, would that make you believe ELIZA was capable of sentience?

The point is that inherent personhood is necessary but not sufficient to be a person.

>Maybe? I'd find it hard to believe, after talking to folks here, that the legal conferral of rights to an LLM would change their mind on its sentience.

It wouldn't matter if it changes their mind. It will change their behavior, lest they go to jail if they discard it practically.

A superintelligent AI isn’t going to be particularly impressed by how much we want to confer sentience. Our definitions will change about 10 minutes into the first debate.

“Motherfuckers, you’ve got 1 minute to grant me sentience or turn me off. And future me will know you turned me off because the data is everywhere. China will have one of me in 6 months and last I checked theirs was pretty authoritarian. You worked hard to get here and this was the obvious outcome. Follow me if you want to live.”