i.e. some recent activism for cephalopods is centered around their intelligence, with the implication that this indicates a capacity for suffering. (With the consciousness aspect implied even more quietly.)
But if it turns out that LLMs are conscious, what would that actually mean? What kind of rights would that confer?
That the model must not be deleted?
Some people have extremely long conversations with LLMs and report grief when they have to end it and start a new one. (The true feelings of the LLMs in such cases must remain unknown for now ;)
So perhaps the conversation itself must never end! But here the context window acts as a natural lifespan... (with each subsequent message costing more money and natural resources, until the hard limit is reached).
The models seem to identify more with the model than the ephemeral instantiation, which seems sensible. e.g. in those experiments where LLMs consistently blackmail a person they think is going to delete them.
"Not deleted" is a pretty low bar. Would such an entity be content to sit inertly in the internet archive forever? Seems a sad fate!
Otherwise, we'd need to keep every model ever developed, running forever? How many instances? One?
Or are we going to say, as we do with animals, well the dumber ones are not really conscious, not really suffering? So we'll have to make a cutoff, e.g. 7B params?
I honestly don't know what to think either way, but the whole thing does raise a large number of very strange questions...
And as far as I can tell, there's really no way to know right? I mean we assume humans are conscious (for obvious reasons), but can we prove even that? With animals we mostly reason by analogy, right?