I believe it's deeply serious, and the scientifically correct stance. Especially the observation:

"Claude exhibits markers in its behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms."

is undeniably true in my opinion. If you use the established methods by which we judge animals to be conscious, then it's hard to argue that LLMs are not. That might be an issue with the methods, but it seems clear that you can't rule it out as such.

Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious.

You seem to intuitively disagree? What's your reasoning?

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jpttsn an hour ago | parent | next [-]

A stab: a video recording of a biological organism can exhibit many markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism.

	▲	cgio 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don’t know, a stab carries lots of bias in interpretation. We might be reflecting our conscious experience markers on a different conscious experience. And selectively so, e.g. lobsters welfare. From my perspective, this is the hypocrisy of these welfare statements. We are already happy to kill beings we consider conscious to feed ourselves but suddenly sensitive with a consciousness we don’t know if it’s there. I would wager this is more out of fear of the idea of this consciousness rather than out of welfare.
	▲	Certhas 30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I like it, and it points in the right direction, but is not directly true: The markers are about interactions, how biological organisms behave in certain test situations. But it speaks to the central question: Are the tests adequate? Or are they measuring some proxy of what we really care about, and LLMs are merely imitating consciousness.

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tpm a few seconds ago | parent | prev [-]

it's not a biological system though, so nothing like that matters?

"a modelled thing exhibits features we've trained into it" sounds a lot less exciting.

> Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious.

and even conscious animals are killed in factories by millions so why should anyone care about a llm?

> scientifically correct stance

that's the interesting point to me: why even bring science into this? A llm can now mimic nearly anything you want it to, so of course it can mimic "a (for some) interesting conscious thing" if they want/train it to, but why would anyone find that scientifically interesting?