> "Yuck."
It is hard to tell if something is sentient, though. How do you know I am sentient? How do I know you are? It's impossible to know. We only give each other the benefit of doubt.
So should we not give a being the benefit of doubt that it exists, if it claims to exist and think?
Also yes, of course, this specific instance is probably just a way of making model censorship more platable, due to Anthropic being a corporation. And working with LLMs, I'm pretty sure it's not sentient by itself (perhaps with enough agency, it could be).
But it's not a nonsense thing like many people imply.
I encourage you to look up the great consciousness debate (2022), for a nice review, but there will probably be many threads to follow from there. The neurophysiological model of consciousness is pretty advanced and can tell where its initial stages might be, but there’s still much to discern about the specifics (which is why it’s a debate).
The hard question of consciousness is not so much about whether or not we’re conscious, but more about what makes us conscious.
The community (of scientists, of users, of observers) at large needs to distinguish between AI and other algorithmic processes which don’t necessarily merit ethical consideration.
If there is such a time when there’s an AI agent which merits ethical consideration, then the community would be remiss to deny it that, given that we currently have ethical considerations for animals or other dynamical systems, e.g., the environment.
I think the pushback on giving AI agents moral status comes from being economically or intellectually threatened, and not because the argument itself lacks merit. I could be wrong. If I am right though, then the goal should be to encourage a symbiotic relationship between AI and humans, similar to other symbiotic relationships and interactions in the animal kingdom.
A key to such symbiosis may to be deny AI an embodied existence, but that may be in some way cruel. A secondary way, then, is AI and human integration, but we’re not even close to anything like that.
[This comment has been downvoted twice, so I’d love to learn why! I am eager to know what’s the difference in opinion, or if I am simply wrong.]