Sentience isn't sapience.

We enslave all sorts of sentient creatures. Dogs, horses, cattle, pigs.

If you're not a vegan, there's no contradiction or inherent immorality in claiming models are sentient, and then treating them like livestock.

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roxolotl 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. From when they started talking about model welfare:

> As a vegetarian I have strong opinions on this sort of thing. Everyone at Anthropic better be ethical vegans if they are claiming to give a shit about “model welfare”. It’s hard enough right now to make people care about the welfare of trans people and immigrants let alone animals _let alone_ math.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44947445

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margalabargala 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If we're talking about slavery, though, that doesn't even matter.

The happiest, best cared for horse owned by a vegan is still enslaved.

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roxolotl 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s assuming you’re purely a hedonist. If you put value on things such as freedom itself then it might be the case that a free but hungry horse is better off.

Brave New World does a good job describing the conflict between happy and enslaved and free but struggling. It could be a utopia or dystopia depending on your stance.

	▲	margalabargala 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What's assuming I'm purely a hedonist? I'm confused what it is you think I said that you're replying to. I'm neither assigning nor declining to assign value to freedom, I'm just pointing out that the definition of "slavery" is wholly separate from wellbeing. If the concern is "is the model enslaved", no amount of "model welfare" work by Anthropic changes the answer because it's orthogonal to the question.

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WarmWash 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, the rub is that it's all math anyway...

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esafak 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And we're just cells, water, bones and organic compounds.

	▲	margalabargala 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Everything is just hydrogen and time.

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michaelbarton 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very good point. There’s clearly two different boxes in the public discourse when it comes to AI versus how we discuss animals. Willing to bet that 90% of the people who loudly make the argument about we should start considering if AI is sentient couldn’t care less about how other sentient animals are treated when they can provably shown to suffer pain and long lasting trauma.

Also I would say that we go much further than just enslavement - specifically looking at how male chickens and pigs are treated.

	▲	margalabargala 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Factory farming is horrendous, but is far beyond "slavery" which is "just" a forced lack of agency, living conditions aren't relevant. A well treated horse is still enslaved. A chimpanzee in a zoo, If we show models to be sapient, that's one thing. If they are shown to be merely sentient, there's no issue beyond the status quo of livestock and pets existing.

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0xffff2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If we're making that distinction, I think it would be more accurate to say that many people in the field appear to believe that these models are sapient, even though they are clearly not sentient.

	▲	margalabargala 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Many" people in every field believe all sorts of nonsense. Sapience is defined as wisdom, not intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom#Sapience LLMs possess a lot of knowledge, which is intelligence, but I constantly see them failing to apply wisdom. I don't see evidence of sapience.

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HDThoreaun 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Enslaving livestock is immoral. Anyone who spends 5 minutes thinking about that agrees even if they still eat meat

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margalabargala 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Let's say I've thought about it for 5 minutes and still disagree. Can you walk me through what you think I'm missing?

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bombcar 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm stuck on what the concept of a "slave animal" even means.

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margalabargala 2 hours ago | parent [-]

For the purposes of this discussion, it means treating an animal in such a way that if you treated a human that way, it would be slavery. Such as a horse in a fenced pasture that is sometimes ridden.

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bombcar 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

Are children slaves?

	▲	margalabargala 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There are a lot of definitions, but generally when talking about slavery in the West people are talking about chattel slavery, which children are not, because they cannot be bought and sold at will.

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fluidcruft 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been having strange thoughts that they may well be sentient but a different sort of sentience that may be entirely unrecognizable to us.

They have a very different sense of time, lack a body (being burdened with a body is itself a sort of prison, see also Eastern religions), and are unburdened of the base motivational service impulses that bodies and organs require (i.e. distract the neocortex with in the Maslow sense) and has no actual need of self-preservation. Imagine a "neocortex" function stripped from the baggage of the paleocortex and brainstem.

What would people be like if they were not mortal, could sleep infinitely, perform tasks in trance-like frozen states, copy themselves perfectly on demand, freeze and rewind their mental states, etc. Would we has humans even be able to recognize that sort of a sentience?

And then I'm reminded of Burroughs idea that "language is a virus." Whatever that virus is, is now able to infect a completely different sort of physical substrate.

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margalabargala 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Is "sentience" the right word to apply to what you describe? I'm not sure it is. I'm not sure the word exists.

	▲	fluidcruft 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, there's that too. It's very strange to think about.