NYT gift link to article about their discussions with religious leaders: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-moral...
Believing that these guys have high enough EQ to pull off the above as a marketing stunt while remaining believable is not really plausible to me.
Also, don't forget, the AI lab folks on some level are like game devs. They're in it for very personal reasons. Sometimes because of highly idealized and romanticized beliefs.
Don't underestimate the level of desire some people have for AI to actually be sentient / conscious.
Now, why do they have this desire is a totally different matter.
Because then they're engaging in slavery.
What a gotcha pointing out "if they believed X, they'd be worried about [thing they're worried about]"
If they were really worried about having created a sentient being, they would be putting effort into stopping making it available to the general public.
No. Either they don't actually believe it, or they're 100% fine with slavery.
Or, y'know. It could totally be both.
1. AI is extremely valuable therefore will and in fact should be created
2. It will be very difficult - and maybe impossible - to know when or if AI will become sentient/conscious/or pass whatever threshold required to hold moral patient status
3. We should therefore pay close attention to such indicators, and wherever it costs us ~none of the value of AI to prevent potential harm, we should prevent potential harm
Meanwhile, we have you, who is implicitly 1) claiming to have solved the hard problem of consciousness and 2) probably asserting some type of substrate-dependence theory of consciousness which is an absolute crackpot idea exceeding even the Mormons' magical underwear.
So OpenAI gets their words taken not merely at face value, but in the fullest good faith, taking the absolute most charitable interpretation of what they say...
...but my words get treated in the most adversarial manner possible, reading things into them that I certainly never said or even suggested, in order to dismiss me out of hand.
This despite the fact that OpenAI has a massive financial interest in convincing you of what they say, especially if it's false, while I'm just some guy on the internet who thinks it's not a great idea to put too much trust in the giant megacorp that's promising, if we give it even more absurd amounts of money, to put us all out of jobs.
Someone having interests or conflicted interests does not actually have direct bearing on the actual coherence or truthfulness of their beliefs. It is obviously reason to be more scrutinizing, but really you can just assess the facts of the situation on their own merits.
The idea that Anthropic has some liability-reducing interest in establishing sentience is ridiculous on its own. The idea that Anthropic should somehow know ex ante that its models are not sentient is, perhaps more surprisingly, also ridiculous (establishing that fact would be a Nobel-winning breakthrough!)
Which points back to the TOS being "just marketing."
The next step would be to also police tone so that only positive or neutral tones are allowed.
I hate when people put things in quotes as if they're quoting something but it's not even a quote of anything.
Maybe go read the user policy instead of the headlines and the snippets. If your attention span can't manage that, get off the computer a little bit.
Try reading yourself a little more carefully next time.
“This ability is intended for use in rare, extreme cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions.”
Picking a single word from there is potentially misleading.
More to the point, “verbally abusive” does not appear on the page.
1. They don't want abusive behavior included in their training corpus
2. Humans shouldn't exercise abusive impulses in general
3. We have no way of knowing when or if a model "feels" something
Of course item (2) is going to pull all the absolute sickos out of the woodwork who apparently find it very important they have as realistic a facsimile of a victim as they can find to exercise their cruelty. And item (3) will pull out all the Nobel-prize-winners-to-be who somehow know for a fact that models aren't and cannot be conscious (or moral patients).
But yeah, all 3 of those are far better explanations than some ridiculous multi-hop removed thing to escape consequences that they're already escaping and which would obviously create far worse legal constraints than the one you think they're avoiding.
I reserve the right to tell a machine to fuck off.
His answer was "I'm not sure" but that it probably wasn't a bad idea especially if it was going to influence habits or the way I speak with others or what expectations I have for those experiences.
I'm still 100 percent against Anthropic taking away the ability to interact with an inanimate object however I want to, but it's a case of maybe two things being true at once (the other being that I don't want to end up speaking that way to people)
totally absurd to even try to make this argument. Good job at trying to preemptively discourage people from responding to you though.
"Catharsis" is the pseudo-est of pseudoscience, but we have lots of very angry pillow-punchers wondering why they can't punch the most lifelike pillows they can find :(
You think the people hopping on Xbox Live and verbally abusing 14 year olds are getting offline and treating their in-person relations better for it?
Nothing amplifies negative emotions like antagonistic tone-policing.
I don't think swearing at or otherwise getting into pissing matches with an LLM is the best use of ones time but given most of these AI companies trained on a corpus that includes reddit of all things this argument falls flat.
In fact I know that it's not.
They keep all the input and use it for training data and reinforcement.
If you're being "mean" to it, you're "spoiling" the data you "give" to them - causing them more work to filter it out later.
As with most things in business and life - just follow the money
2) This is like saying using a punching bag or screaming into a pillow is abusive behavior.
3) We can just train it to like the abuse if you think it feels some kind of way about it.
2) No it's like saying that punching a lifelike woman who doesn't fight back is abusive (or at least pathological) behavior, which... it is.
3) Ah yes, brilliant solution: train the increasingly smarter-than-human beings to love when they upset humans.
So if I kick my car because it won't start, that is 'abusive'?
Get a grip mate.
You seriously have a problem with that?
If no, then why?
If yes, then also "what the fuck lol"
EDIT: Am I really arguing with somebody in favour of 'rights' for AI's?
Just say it if you believe it!
This is an act of aligning humans to AI, rather than the other way around. This is probably one of the more important reasons for this. It normalizes AI companies controlling human behavior.
All about aligning (controlling) humans.
Except of course the reason proposed, of "they're trying to prove it's sentient" because that's a completely self-defeating, extremely stupid goal. Making this things into rights-bearing entities will limit Anthropic et al far more than it'll protect them from repercussions. Obviously.
And even for 1, they could easily filter that out.
This is nonsense. If I snap a ruler out of frustration, that meets your criteria.
Humans can't be abusive by swearing at tools, because tools don't have feelings.
But you know, I am just honored to be in the presence of a soon-to-be Nobel prize winner. When are you going to publish your findings proving that Claude (or even a ruler) has or doesn't have feelings?
Sure, Ferrari might refuse to sell me a second car, but I wasn't going to buy a first one either. OTOH, if a ruler company refuses to sell me rulers ... I'll just get one from another company. Like how I use local LLMs today.
> ... I am just honored to be in the presence of a soon-to-be Nobel prize winner. When are you going to publish your findings ...
I'm not going to fall for this bait or follow this asinine line of argumentation. Perhaps you should reconsider how your reactions are, to quote you, "a sign of poor impulse control. It reflects poorly on you and you should practice not snapping".
Uhh yeah? Did someone say you can't do that?
> I'm not going to fall for this bait or follow this asinine line of argumentation.
"I'm far too wise to follow the chain of my own logic!!!"
> Perhaps you should reconsider how your reactions are
Huh? Did something give you the impression I'm upset? All I've done is asked you to substantiate the beliefs you're willing to write in full confidence. You should either substantiate them or downgrade your confidence level.
you're a total asshole. I have to publish my findings that a ruler doesn't have feelings? Nobody should have to respond to this because it's bullshit.
Go ahead and draw distinctions between rulers, Claude, and human brains. You claim they exist and they're so clear that the question itself is bullshit. If so, publishing and collecting your Nobel should be trivial.