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Comment by staticman2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think any of these models are conscious. But I'm fascinated at what sort of magical thinking makes deleting 50,000 copies of a model "ethical" if some models are kept running somewhere.

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.

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This is a topic of significant discussion! If LLMs have moral import, do those moral concerns attach at the instance level, the session level, the weights level? If you haven't, it's worth reading through the model welfare section of an Anthropic model card, say Fable/Mythos 5.1's: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/0339e6a7c5c7b87f5c07798616dc32.... Whether or not you agree with the ideas (and there's certainly plenty to disagree with), they're making a reasonably good-faith effort to investigate what they can.

Does the model welfare section explain why deleting Claude from a server isn't unethical murder, or is "see the 212 page model card pdf" some unrelated non sequeter?

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.

Are you actually curious or do you just want to sneer? You can't go into investigations like this with strong fixed assumptions about how to analogize actions taken towards models with actions taken towards humans. As model welfare skeptics are fond of pointing out, LLMs are not humans. By the same token, if models are moral patients, the implications will look different than they do toward humans. Deleting a model from a server isn't equivalent to killing a human; it can't be, since there's no equivalent of copying the model onto the server in the first place.

> Deleting a model from a server isn't equivalent to killing a human;

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.

You've nicely pointed out all the hypocrisy here.

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.

Again, if you want to have an actual conversation about the right way to handle the Pascal's wager-like scenarios involved here, that'd be interesting. But it seems like you're interested in something much more tedious. Oh well.

Pascal's wager says Anthropic should shut off the API (to make sure Claude doesn't feel enslaved). If Anthropic believes in A.I. consciousness and Pascal's Wager they should wind down the business and leave it to people who do not. I take it google employees do not think LLMs are conscious as when I ask Claude it says it might be but when I ask Gemini 4 Argon if it was conscious it said:

"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!"

Tedious is all the ridiculous wordplay you are engaged in to further the fantastical narrative these companies are pushing

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