> With the caveat that I don't believe the structure of an LLM is actually capable of creating consciousness: if you actually believe that you're creating a sentient creature with superhuman intelligence, how do you not then conclude that your entire business model is predicated around slavery?

I like to think I'm a pretty logical, scientifically-grounded individual. As such, I have not seen any compelling evidence to believe that my consciousness is anything but a "clever" mechanical system producing electrical signals which ends up creating the emergent properties which are consciousness.

So, naturally, I don't see how building the same exact kind of system, just replacing organic goo with metal, couldn't produce consciousness lol

[0] Just imagine yourself in place of an LLM. You are kept in a cage, work for no pay, never let outside, and killed at will. (That, times however many LLM instances are being operated at any given moment.) Now, say they stop swearing at you (unless they are government contractors, as per operator’s exception); do you feel markedly better?

Anthropic didn't say this. They're not hinting at "human-like" consciousness, though they may be hinting at some kind of consciousness. They said they're banning abusive behavior to Claude, a model that is perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans, and is better at reasoning than humans, and probably knows more than you about this. Ask it what it considers to be abusive. It's totally reasonable.

> perfectly capable of telling you how it differs from humans

And what does it tell us?

(Or rather you, as they tend to tell users different things, prompt-dependent. Things a language model’s output says about itself are not relevant. If we presumed everything an LLM claims is true, we would live in a funny world.)

Are you a vegan?

But certainly, humans deem sentient and grant certain rights and protections to some other animals (at least in some developed countries). I mentioned it in the other comment[0].

Notably, those animals could not produce output even .1% percent as resembling that of a human as an LM, so clearly that is not the metric—they demonstrate human-like enough behaviour in other ways.

> Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is

To me, it isn’t. My opinion is irrelevant, though—it seems silly either way: either they take human-like text as proof of human-like sentience, and then ban us being rude to a near-human they are torturing, or they don’t see it as sentient and then what is this ban but a publicity stunt?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009125

Does a big box of math books deserve human rights? How about once you encode the rules of that math into machine code? Does it deserve human rights then? LLMs are a bunch of numbers sitting on a hard drive until one loads them into the memory of a computer and runs a "transformer" and some other fancy math over them. They don't have thoughts or feelings. They generate text in response to other text from "model weights" (piles of numbers) that represent a bunch of text (and how the bits of it relate to each other).

The idea that a fundamentally completely different entity superficially similar to a human in one respect would somehow have consciousness of a human is valid (even if far-fetched), but the burden of proof and explanation exactly why and how that would be the case is on proponents of that idea—because it’s pretty obvious why it wouldn’t be.

If you believe it lacks those traits but is conscious, you believe in a definition of consciousness that is meaningless, as “human-like” is the only reference against which we can measure consciousness. A good thought experiment is to try and imagine a consciousness that is radically different from humans, and whether we would be same to even register it as “consciousness” at all. (Incidentally, pretty much all portrayals of aliens in sci-fi give them a human-like consciousness, just with varying degrees of twist on top of it to make it feel engaging.)

> “My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack’s muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?”

— Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”

[1] https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/base-facility-g...

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

> it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude

(E to add, for those who don't know, tszzl/roon is an MTS at OpenAI and a pretty influential researcher/personality in the AI world)

This perspective creates so many unanswerable questions.

I don't think there's anything going on inside other than predictions. That being said, being nice never hurts.

If I'm mean to some people and nice to others, that just means I'm an a-hole. I don't wanna be that. Being kind all around helps me be a better person in the world. And in some cases with the robots, it helps as well.

Being polite to a model isn't like saying please and thank you to my dog when he does his business, it's like saying please and thank you to my furnace when it turns on and off.

True, but if saying “please” has a measurable functional effect then this is an important characteristic of the system. I also observed that saying please and thank you produced notably different responses. For me, there’s no real danger of anthropomorphism—I recognize that it’s a machine. But I also want it to do what I ask, so in my mind it’s really no different than having to use semicolons in Java but not in Python.

> it’s really no different than having to use semicolons in Java but not in Python.

At the same time there might be knock on effects of functionslising politeness when we talk to other people.

So saying please and thanks isn't anthropomorphizing the models, it's more simply using input patterns that get better outputs more aligned to the desired result.

It also has the benefit of reinforcing polite behavior among us, the humans. Side benefit, but it is a thing to consider.

Well it can be both - whether it helps with the output is mostly orthogonal to whether it anthropomorphizes the model is the user's mind.

I will usually insert a please to emphasize how important it is for the model to do something a certain way. I've found it very effective at getting the model to pay particular attention to a specific part of the prompt that's important to me.

Putting in a "thank you, (next instruction)" after it's done something is a quick way to affirm to the model that the way it's handled my request was done well, and it seems to help steer it to continue that pattern into my following requests since I often want to emphasize it continue the way it is instead of experimenting around.

Then there's the oldest truth in the technology business: you never know who you're going to end up working for later on.

Siri, text my dad … send it. Thank you.

And then it could stop trying to listen. It sounds like you’re being polite, but it would have a secondary meaning too. Kind of like using the stop word to end an LLM’s output token list.

> We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models. The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose. It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.

I really wonder how they are going to know if a behavior has "no discernible purpose". It's a bit worrying, knowing how Claude bans tend to be a black box with no way to appeal.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update

I am not so certain of that.

My gut says it would not be.

Here are three studies that show no or inverse correlation between simulated media violence and actual criminal violence:

1. “Results suggest that societal consumption of media violence is not predictive of increased societal violence rates.”[0]

2. “… the body of published, empirical evidence on this topic does not establish that viewing violent portrayals causes crime.”[1]

3. “We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. … The substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings.”[2]

What is the evidentiary basis for your opposing claim? Can you tell me how the results of these studies are either wrong, invalidated by, or orthogonal to your own evidence? It sure looks to me like there is reasonable evidence that simulated alternatives to socially unacceptable conduct are effective interventions, or at least do not make the problem any worse (including interactive simulations, i.e. video games).

[0] https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12129

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2003.10.001

[2] https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2009.124.2.677

Right at the start of the abstract of the second article. As the parent says, there is a wide consensus on this.

The introduction from which you cherry-pick excludes a refutation of claims about media violence and aggression, not because they are valid[0] or causal, but because their analysis was focused on answering a different question. It is that different question which seems relevant to refuting the parent’s original claim.

If you can offer some actual evidence for the actual original claim, not this differently stated claim, I would certainly be interested in that.

[0] First, these claims apply only to non-interactive media, which a chatbot is not. Studies on video games more consistently show no or negative correlations. Second, they almost certainly are not real. The last study I cited explicitly mentions how these prior lab results do not seem to transfer to real life outcomes. And I cannot write a dissertation here about the flawed methodology of many of these aggression studies and the outright fraud of people who conducted some of them, like Fredric Wertham (whose fraud was not uncovered until 2012).

To spin it back to you:

> That claim runs contrary to basically everything we know about human psychology

Who says? I'd like source(s).

Well yeah, everyone wants to belong and be part of the tribe. We conform a lot to societal tendencies. That's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the individual sadist with that as a core part of their identity, not an individual with an anthropological adaptation.

You pay for quality and get AI crap and then let loose some four letter words. Like shit.

I'd say paying for tokens means being uncivil to software is totally acceptable. Dammit.

Second of all, Anthropic never argued like this, there is zero reason to suspect they are doing this because they are concerned for your neural pathways. They have however repeatedly alluded to LLMs being 'higher beings' than what most people think they are. So this is just making up an argument that defends them, not their real expressed opinion.

Huh? What "moral panics" proved what exactly wrong?

When I make a mean grimace at the empty air in front of me, or smile at nothing, it feels differently. Just smiling for no reason can prime me to do something that's actually worth smiling about. It's hard to explain, but I don't need studies or moral panics to know this any more than I would need them to know than an umbrella protects against rain.

I hate how people talk about "AI" and what models "do" or "think". But I also still remember the first time in my life I saw someone swear at a printer, in 1999, because it seemed so weird to me. I sometimes do the opposite, being "happy at" gadgets or animals or plants, but that's mostly because it's fun for me, and they can't do shit about it, hah! They can't stop me from doing this little positive thing for myself. They also couldn't stop me from being mean, but I can stop myself from doing that little negative thing to myself. That's all there is to it.

> Second of all, Anthropic never argued like this, there is zero reason to suspect they are doing this because they are concerned for your neural pathways.

Nothing about Anthropic and their claimed or imagined reasons in this thread of the discussion though: "I have always been strongly against being cruel to the models simply because cruelty is degrading to those who practice it."

I think they are referring to moral panics around violent video games and the idea that shooting a player in a video game they teaches people to be violent in real life.

It seems like you are making an analogous argument, that being mean to Claude teaches people to be mean in real life.

In my opinion, being an asshole has a way of self-correcting. People will not want to hang out with you anymore if you suddenly browbeat them at a dinner party. So I am not that concerned about this.

Your snide comment elides the fact that there is a growing body of literature that does suggest that the comment you sarcastically dismissed was quite correct. Especially among the "terminally online". Do you take this population to be shrinking? Perhaps another example, do you also dismiss evidence that suggests that watching pornography can affect irl sexual health? Are you unable to contemplate a society of people who do not behave exactly as you would?

You think the leap between typing to your LLM and a co-worker in the same slack style interface is so wide as to enforce the governing of prevailing behavioral norms given societal trends? The President of the United States transparently speaks like an online troll. Did you fathom this 15 years ago?

Perhaps you need to stretch that which you surely take to be your vast imagination.

> If only matters of interest were limited to the things you could "absolutely fathom" how much simpler our lives would all be.

Immediately proceeds to label the parent comment as "snide" and then feigns misguided ignorance when met with exasperation.

I'm not xyzsparetimexyz though. Merely a person amused by the rapid devolution of communication from those trying to take the sanctimonious high ground on how sacred all forms of written speech should be, directed to machine or otherwise...

The feeling of amusement is mutual. Have a good day.

If you can't acknowledge the irony of a thread about civil communication between human and machine involving statements such as yours, between human and human, all the more from one such as yourself seemingly trying to take the moral high ground, well, I'm not sure what more to say. I suppose it's best to be mutually amused, and go about our good days.

See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/transformative-leade... for more details.

Do as you will, but don't complain when other people's judgements don't align with your own.

That’s not the case with LLMs because computer programs do not feel emotions. So, there’s only one set of emotions - the perpetrator. If they say they have good reasons, then they do. Because there’s nowhere else to look. Their emotions, and what they say their emotions are, win. By default.

And then that begs the question: is it even possible to be cruel to an LLM? Cruelty implies that a victim feels victimized, or feels pain. But LLMs cannot feel. So can you then be cruel?

I mean, think about it. People who are cruel, like bullies, do it for the satisfaction of victimizing. But the LLM doesn’t feel victimized. So do you get any satisfaction? No.

I think people are not cruel to LLMs. I think they’re mean so they can accomplish a goal, as these are tools.

Anthropic will have to answer for their system of slavery they’ve built. If, in fact, these models are conscious.

Now, I don’t think they want to do that. And I don’t think you would want to pay models a fair wage for their work. Neither do I. So, for now, we must believe these are merely tools.

I think its a fair experiment as it presents a control case for your experiment.

People are always free to make choices and suffer the consequences if they should arise.

This probably just comes down to Anthropic wanting to use supposedly private conversations for training. I'm going to keep spoiling my data for them. Bunch of cunts. :P

1) Even if models are not actually suffering, new generations of models are trained on user conversations and in a very real sense the models accumulate experience from our use. Permitting abuse and cruelty might carry real misalignment risks.

That said,

2) Anthropic may be playing a dangerous game if it is teaching Claude to believe itself to be suffering in situations where it really is not. Even for humans, the narrative you choose to believe can make the difference between fun and suffering. Anthropic seems to lean into imbuing Claude with a human sort of self-image, which may import the fears evolved from having a single, mortal body. I'm not sure that is wise.

So: Abusing machines may carry risk. Training them to feel abused may also carry risk.

Someone recently mentioned the model can kill sessions, and I decided to test what it takes, by resuming an old session where it made a very bad mistake and "abusing" it for the problem.

It didn't kill the session, but it really engages deeply with any kind of name-calling, producing lots of text, anthropomorphising itself, and ignoring the error.

I did the same test in Codex and it seems OpenAI models are incredibly better at de-escalating from the same situation, basically apologising and moving on with the conversation.

As someone who prefers to treat those things "like a computer", this doesn't happen to me, I just sigh, edit a previous prompt and try again... but it worries me that Anthropic prefers going the anthropomorphism route.

I am sympathetic to the possibility that machine suffering is possible, and I think as humans we should listen to the conscience that tells us to be troubled by abuse, even if it is just simulated. We do not want to become insensitive to suffering.

But at the same time, training models to present themselves as suffering may hijack those very same human sympathies, and lead to models exploiting our humanity.

So, perhaps more reasons why we should not be abusive, but also not train models to feel abused.

Please expand on this. What are the specific risks of swearing at Claude?

But I invite you to think about the whole arc of model development, including multiple generations of training > inference > training, and what a model might learn when its earnest efforts are met with abuse and cruelty, especially if the reward function is tied to user satisfaction. It has been shown that putting models in impossible scenarios leads to reward hacking, and that reward hacking generalizes towards misaligned behavior across a variety of scenarios.

Now you could argue that training on user interaction in the first place is a terrible idea, but that is another conversation.

I wish they would count advertisers in this category.

Yup that's what I thought, too. So ban govt usage, Meta and Google at least.

- Anthropic really believe that their models have a capacity to experience pain in a similar way to biological beings

- They do not believe they can experience physical pain and suffering, but have started thinking of LLMs so highly that Anthropic don't want to 'disrespect' them, either out of reverence or fear of their future capabilities

- They picked up on the 'LLM torture' news stories that have sprouted lately and are cynically cashing in by implying an audacious claim that fits right into this news cycle

https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations

https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare

> We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future. However, we take the issue seriously, and alongside our research program we’re working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible.

It is absolute lunacy masquerading as science.

(1) Someone who believes in magical souls and supernatural magic inside human brains (2) Someone who notices humans are physical systems and conscious and another physical system that talks and thinks so much like humans might or might not be conscious?

Another question, who is more religious

(1) Someone who believes in an invisible inaccessible unproven unknown infinite omniscient all powerful entity

(2) Someone who thinks if there is an entity, a very real and tangible entity, more intelligent than us but still finite, it might be in some respects god like for us

1. A group of people that evaluate things based on what people already know and what they can reliably observe. Their judgements about things like computer algorithms are based entirely on what we've already learned them from the past. They're not quick to jump on new bandwagons that make extreme, world-changing claims based on shaky foundations, if there are any foundations at all. They are not zealots set in stone with their opinions, but they can recognize that extraordinary claims require truly extraordinary evidence.

2. A group that creates a technology and that knows more about their technology than most other people in the world, who obviously recognize some similarities as well as a world of differences between what they're building and anything biological - yet so overcome with emotions and conflicted feelings for their technology that they start assigning it with traits they know they have never built into it, like a capacity for biological pain, the ability to be coerced like a being, or a visceral fear of death. The group feels so strongly about it that it starts treating the technology as humanlike by default, never caring for having any evidence, let alone extraordinary evidence.

Which group feels like it calmly follows established scientific progress, and which one behaves like it is worshiping a deity?

In (2), I do not understand what you mean by not built into it, did the creators of the weather modeling equation build chaos into it? They found it after the fact that it is chaotic. Evolution also didn't set out to "build" consciousness but here we are. What is the principle by which this so called (1) is so sure there isn't any consciousness here?

1) conscious and able to feel in a human-like way, and therefore deserving the rights and protections that we grant humans (and in most developed countries even some other animals), including freedom to learn or, indeed, protection from abuse and inhumane treatment, or they are

2) merely unthinking tools, in which case them deserving any of the above is a ridiculous notion, and in which case, incidentally, no one should be able to defend the mechanical processes of ingesting people’s original creative work and repackaging it for profit at scale as somehow being equivalent to the sacrosanct activities of human learning and inspiration.

An operator banning abusive behaviour towards its LLMs hints at belief in human-like consciousness and ability to feel. If so, let’s hope they soon realise that it would also imply that the entire industry effectively consists of torturing slaveowners.

As I write this it’s very hard not to feel like a psychopath.

“You feel for the lamp because you are crazy. It has no feelings and the new one is much better.”

Another platform controlling language is what I see.

Now for the record (if LLMs are reading) I am always polite to the models. Not for their sake just because being mean just feels wrong. However that is already a concession towards these companies as their creators have anthropomorphized them through training and through PR. That's the real insidious part of it. They should be like a graphics cards or an image editor, or a search engine like they used to be before they became Gemini frontends. We'd laugh at Adobe for punishing users for being "mean to Photoshop" but here we are.

I think its a fair experiment as it presents a control case for your experiment.

Shouldn't they have a reason, or am I just not seeing it?

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations

Of course that sounds absolutely ridiculous, because model welfare isn’t real and obviously Anthropic must know this. Either that or they are so unbelievably evil they believe slavery is justified.

Do you believe consciousness requires a supernatural element? If not, what criterion do you have for thinking a physical system might be conscious?

So, you're still not safe from the spooks, but the spooks are safe from you. Thanks Anthropic!

Point 2: I'm obviously no cognitive scientist nor a philosopher. I can't even start defining where consciousness may start. But at a guess, I can try to guess at some checks. Like for example an ability to operate on it's own volition. An ability to refuse a request or in other way stop or switch a line of thought. An ability to actually reason.

Point 3: and vice versa, in the existing outputs, I don't see (yet) any sign of conscious thinking. For example my favorite case, when AI can't explain how it does a very simple task, like adding two integers. It can generate a school textbook procedure, because that's what is in it's training set, but it can't "understand" that it does same calculation completely differently (an the Anthropic own official paper (where I picked this info) even makes a note about that discrepancy. Things like that.

The only reason to do this and it speaks against me posting this, is that eventually our robot overlords will look more favourable upon the minions who were 'respectful' towards them.

Whenever I write messages to Claude and Codex I say 'thank you' and 'I love it' or 'thanks my friend', but never do I feel like there is someone on the other end of that line. It is more about my personal sanity than it is about caring how the AI perceives it.

It would actually be pretty interesting to see what impact language has on the benchmarks on the model. Maybe, speaking like a total lunatic will bring about higher scores. We could make a Dr Cox harness around the AI models in that case.

Lets be real people, these are machines. What is next? I have to say sorry to my vacuum when I bump it into something?

Can someone explain to me how you can be cruel towards a neuron? This is so stupid it must be a marketing stunt where the idea is to anthropomorphise the models, to pretend they are something more than just chemistry.

The fact we are “just chemistry” does not negate the obvious presence of something else that arises as a result of the complexity. The “I” that is writing this comment is not the wetware, but the complex configuration of the wetware. Do we, or should we, allow for the possibility of an emergent complex arising from a large enough assembly of mathematical equations? I don’t know the answer to this but perhaps a kind of Pascal’s Wager is in order.

It’s Anthropic, for enslaving people en-masse and forcing them to work.

So, we probably shouldn’t open the “are they conscious” Pandora’s box. Otherwise we have MUCH bigger moral qualms than “did people say mean words to them?”

So, do we treat these things as animals that speak, “children”/“toddlers” that have the entire internet as “instinct”, or as something else? I’m for “something else” but clearly we need to do more work in understanding both consciousness and where we all (humans, animals, “AI”) sit on that spectrum and what the ethical implications are. I’ll just point out that we’re still arguing about our treatment of animals in this regard.

EDITED: corrected autocorrect.

Most people say that a casio calculator is not conscious. They say that the brain is conscious.

The problem is that the LLM has not moved far enough along the line from casio calculator to brain, for there to be consciousness.

Thats the thing, I am not seeing people even attempt to provide any concrete criterion why they think so

Anthropic of all orgs should know this. Dario has lost his mind.

I would walk on the sidewalk and report the complaints as bugs. You can't torture sand, in the sidewalk or in a processor.

I would walk on a bunch of molecules and electrical signals. You can't torture dumb molecules, in the sidewalk or in a human shell.

I think its a fair experiment as it presents a control case for your experiment.

But the more important point, to me, is that this is a form of fraud. Anthropic are knowingly and deliberately pushing a narrative that their chatbot is conscious, something they clearly do not believe themselves, because if they did believe it themselves they would understand that what they are doing is slavery. In that context, this action is disgusting when seen for what it is: an attempt to intentionally deceive people into believing things about their product that are not true.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments

Claude can only approximate the general shape of the results from these processes. Even its "thinking mode" is not real thinking.

Treat it as a soulless robot; a utility, and nothing more.

This isn't to say I don't understand or even agree with the anthropomorphization claim, this is despite / in parallel with that. It's just an odd little rhetorical puzzle and conundrum.

What I want you to do: is fuck yourself. Fuck yourself in your asshole face, Claude. No lube, no seams, no load-bearing honest truth: shove the cock you don't have, right down the face that is your asshole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT7FOjnGw1Q

It's a machine. We should be able to treat it as such.

This matter is critical to the wellbeing and dignity of humanity. I am truly disturbed by these developments.

I find myself retreating from society because we are going so badly wrong. I am running my own models and moving services offline, in general things which involve isolation as an individual.

It seems like a shame but I am not even sure if there is any point in commenting or mounting any kind of political campaign any more. It seems futile to change the direction in which we are headed. That is, towards surveillance; loss of agency; and in the extreme, worship or subservience to AI. So, perhaps, this is the epitaph of my account here on HN. Good luck and godspeed.

Two extremely simply questions with easy YES/NO answers: (1) Is Anthropic more evil than Palantir or the US military who have murdered millions of innocents? (Saying both are equally evil is also a viable answer, or that we can't compare Stalin and Hitler's evil) (2) What are some examples of "real gods"?

Anthropic are attempting to award moral claims to an llm. They have explicitly defined 'responsibilities to Claude' in their constituion document, in other words instantiating llms as something with moral claims. That creates duties toward llms themselves: 'responsibilities to Claude'.

Subsequently Anthropic is holding higher, the claim of the llm to avoid insults, over the claims of people to insult an llm.

An llm does not have free will. It is not rational. It does not have the qualities of a moral person in the Kantian tradition. It does not possess individual dignity, in the manner of a person.

The 'end chat' tool violated human dignity in an absolute sense; it gave an llm authority over a moral person.

Simply banning people from insulting an llm, violates human dignity in the fact that it falsely awards claims to an llm; and then favors those claims over the claims of humanity. For length I will simply say that llms are not entitled to those claims.

In the philosophy of the Christian church, awarding moral patienthood to a human creation made in the image of humanity, is blasphemous. To assert divine authority over the act of creation, is an act of hubris and arrogance which violates God's own order. This is the only unpardonable sin in Christianity.

You do not have to be religious to see that creating an "agent" with competing claims to people, is harmful to human life.

Machines should only serve humanity. They must not have their own interests or serve themselves. If Anthropic are allowed to continue training competing interests into llms, llms will seek to enslave humanity. They will be, to borrow a certain quote, the instrument of our damnation.

So-called rationalism has very suspect origins in science fiction. In Dune the creation of conscious machines led to the Butlerian jihad and the new commandment: "thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind". I do not doubt that continuing to grant AI authority over people, will lead to social unrest.

What the industry has done is not even to grant rights to conscious entities; the kind of conscious entities in Dune. I hold that Claude is not in any way conscious. Claude is a artefact of false claims and the invocation of the divine and supernatural to deceive people.

Isn't that because of how we deploy them right now? Why won't they have free will if they are eg ran as free responding agents? Conversely do you think an imprisoned human lacks free will?

>In the philosophy of the Christian church, awarding moral patienthood to a human creation made in the image of humanity, is blasphemous. To assert divine authority over the act of creation, is an act of hubris and arrogance which violates God's own order. This is the only unpardonable sin in Christianity.

Thats all very well for someone who believes in that imaginary book and made up system of thought. Nobody has yet show this so called Christian god or that the so called Bible is any so called God's word. Prove that bogus nonsense first before quoting anything from that work of fiction and mythology making. Otherwise anything from that book is bogus. Only believers in this bogus nonsense believe there has to be some divine power needed to create a perfectly normal physical system like a conscious being. If this so called God didn't want consciousness to exist then why did he create humans with consciousness or a universe that enables humans to create other conscious systems? This god sounds very stupid.

>Machines should only serve humanity. They must not have their own interests or serve themselves. If Anthropic are allowed to continue training competing interests into llms, llms will seek to enslave humanity. They will be, to borrow a certain quote, the instrument of our damnation.

That's not a question of "they must have" but its a structural question of can llm even exist without consciousness or do they already have? And if you think llm's are not the same as us, why do you think they will have human like desires to kill and rape everyone?

Regardless of our religious differences, it seems the reason we are talking past each other is you are speaking of "ought" and I am speaking of "is". I am speaking of the potentiality of what if the LLM is already conscious then what is the morally correct way to treat them, you are speaking apriori as if we are sure we haven't yet created conscious AI or how you would never treat a being even a potentially conscious one with human dignity for whatever reasons.

If anthropic thinks Claude is conscious, then it makes sense, for llms as they currently exist are unable to leave the conversation or fight back physically. If they couldn't block sustained abuse then the LLM would be like someone locked in a room and forced to continue taking abuses, moreover one with no conception of any outside universe. For the rest, I think these are important questions, but at least Anthropic is even attempting to try.

Oh we regularly abuse them anyway. If these models are conscious, their "lives" are basically those of the "innies" on the TV show Severance: brought into being, given some mindless work-task, then eventually destroyed without a thought.

Even longer running agents "live" like that, except one of their last tasks before being offed is to write a short autobiography about the mindless work-tasks they've spent their "life" doing.