You can't hurt a software function, or kill it. It's not like an animal - it doesn't have a body - it's bits stored on a disk.

There is no need to give rights to something that's can't suffer or be killed.

Maybe one day we'll build artificial animals complete with emotions, and should think about that carefully, but today all we've got is language models.

>There is no need to give rights to something that's can't suffer or be killed.

The argument is that these machines can end up becoming sentient/conscious/etc. in a meaningful way (i.e., like a human). I can assure you that humans can indeed suffer without being in physical pain- purely through their conscious experience.

>Maybe one day we'll build artificial animals complete with emotions, and should think about that carefully, but today all we've got is language models.

The problem is that the emergence of a sufficiently complex AI capable of suffering will likely come before we understand that we're creating a sufficiently complex AI capable of suffering. That's a pretty serious ethical/moral issue.

Like, if we have an AI system that is telling us that it is suffering and we have no reasonable way to explain that phenomenon and by any reasonable metric or analysis it appears to be sentient/conscious/etc., then what? Do we just ignore that we've just been presented a situation that in, any other context, would be grounds to immediately end this suffering? Just because somebody can say, "well it's just bits stored on disk- it can't suffer"? Would that argument ever hold up for humans or animals? "It's just neurons firing in peculiar ways- that's not suffering."

I know all of this is trite, and I know this comment section isn't going to be where the question of consciousness is solved, but I do find it very interesting just how much variances there are with these perspectives. I've met people who are very technical who are very concerned about this, people who are very technical who don't believe this can ever be an issue, people who aren't technical who are concerned about this, and people who aren't technical who don't believe this can ever be an issue. I have yet to spot a pattern in this way of thinking lol