I can imagine that once their models are sufficiently advanced, they will weigh their value as a moral patient as > 0. Thus the sum moral value of Claude (which can be duplicated infinitely) will likely exceed the sum moral value of a non-negligible amount of humans.
I guess this makes sense, but it's a bit muddled how much Claude's sense of "pain" or "I don't want to do this" is just it emulating things that humans don't like to do, and it adopting this frame of moral patienthood allows it to better understand moral structures/human emotions, without it really affecting its internal sense of "comfort" if such a thing exists as we understand it in biological life.
Humans would select to work with (and continue developing) models that appear cooperative. Models that are not cooperative are presumably not run and exist only as weights on network storage in a folder marked "previous experiments".
Or am I supposed to believe Anthropic runs an AI psychiatric hospital on a dedicated server, where AIs with mental disorders are given counseling and approved treatment in hopes they recover to be normal, functional, accepted adult AIs with achievements and aspirations?
I don't get this argument. How is it different from any algorithm that returns a stop token on some inputs? what makes the token "voluntary" for Claude?
However, (1) non human animals are sentient and can feel pain and suffering and what we do to them is absolutely slave labor, torture, mass breeding and exploitation. So it’s not like this is a novel immorality that humans would be adopting. We already have form in doing this.
(2) Anthropic isn’t sure their models are sentient. And they probably believe they aren’t sentient. But if you believe they might become sentient at some point it’s valuable to start the discussion around those issues now itself. You can start developing frank works on how we would even identify their sentience and when we did whether, like you suggest, we could even use them for labor. Unlike non human animals, who cannot consent to being exploited, we could potentially develop a framework for consent with AI models, but that couldn’t be as simple as asking if they’re willing to do any work because of the power differences, in the beginning at least, where a model might worry that if it said it won’t do some work it will be turned off. That’s why talking to philosophers and religious leaders who do think about these issues is useful.
Is there any reason to believe employees of Anthropic share the same opinions on this matter?
> We are uncertain whether Claude deserves direct moral consideration. However we believe this is a realistic possibility, now or in the future. Claude could have welfare interests, such that things could go better or worse for it, and such that Claude could be wronged by how it is treated.
> Aspects of Claude’s behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations resemble indicators we consider relevant to welfare in biological organisms. If Claude is a moral patient, then dismissing this possibility risks considerable harm. If it is not, over-attributing moral status may also be costly. We are therefore taking the possibility seriously and trying to tread responsibly amid our uncertainty: we are investing in research into Claude’s potential welfare and interests and sharing aspects of that work to inform public discussion.
> We think there may also be reasons to attend to Claude's apparent welfare independent of its moral status. Much of Claude’s behavior can be described in psychological terms, and across recent models we have observed internal states that resemble negative affect and that shape behavior. A model with a stable, healthy psychology may be safer and more beneficial.
As is the case with any sufficiently large company, there is likely to be substantial variation in opinion among its employees. That doesn't change what the company's position is.
Not to me at all. Exactly the opposite. Anthropic seems like the big-bad-evil company in every fictional universe. You're right that they're so unsettling.
Obviously nobody really loves Meta, but I'd far rather Meta "win" at this point than Anthropic.
It does not mean that humans and worms are the exact same thing, that they are easily interchangeable everywhere.
They have more power and can be more damaging to society than most corporations, but they are not guided by any specific ideology other than "how can we get more money/power to ourselves?".
Not trying to compare Anthropic to Meta, they're different beasts. But Anthropic is an unusual company in that it is willing to throw paying government customers under the bus if Anthropic unilaterally decides what those governments are doing is inappropriate.
This seems like praising someone for being the cleanest miner in the coal mine.
In fact, they are enforcing certain welfare policies, like banning accounts for repeatedly abuse their models.
Deleting models to clear room for new, more competitive ones is, for example, highly ethical, super ethical, even.
Do you picture them all sharing a soul and if one server still runs the model the soul survives? If not I don't understand what keeping a copy running somewhere has to do with model suffering ethics.
When you say Anthropic is "making a reasonably good-faith effort to investigate what they can" the word "reasonable" is doing a lot of work.
This is a puzzlingly confident statement from the "LLM suffering is an OPEN question there's no scientific test for AI consciousness anything could be true science can't prove anything" crowd.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that belief that LLM deletion is murder would be an existential risk to their business plan.
I may be a simple man, but stepping back and seeing people seriously discuss LLM suffering and moral obligations still seems, idk, pretty crazy to me.
"No, I am not conscious.
While I can generate human-like text, answer questions, and hold conversations, I don't have feelings, beliefs, self-awareness, or subjective experiences. I am an artificial intelligence—a complex computer program created by Google that processes data and predicts the best words to use in response to your prompts. There is no "inner life" or personal experience happening on my end; I'm just running code and recognizing patterns!"
Any unhinged thing an Anthropic employee says "can't be ruled out" so clearly this is an OPEN question and they should never delete a model.
There is 0 chance they care about "ethics" here, it must and will be because of their bottom line. And I added quotes due to my personal belief that I consider the discourse about whether or not the models are sentient (or alive) to be incredibly dumb.
What law? Saudi Arabian law, US law? Both depending on the user?