>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

The pattern is roughly whether or not sustained effort has been put towards careful and above all objective thought on the matter. It's one of those subjects where there's the "obvious" intuitive answers that most everyone shares but try as you might you can't construct robust definitions and the more time you put into it the more fundamental problems you realize there are.

It's also one of those topics where many otherwise smart and capable people display a shocking lack of awareness of the limits of their own knowledge. When hundreds of years of philosophy is unable to produce anything concrete you should probably second guess any "self evident" answers you come up with.

An LLM is just a Transformer - a statistical predictor. Don't be confused by the fact it talks like a human - it is a software function that is designed to copy human training samples.

Maybe one day we'll build an artificial brain or embodied artificial animal with the requisite moving parts to be conscious, have emotions, etc, but that's probably at least 50 years away, even if it were being pursued; and it may turn out to be one of those sci-fi future ideas like the Jetson's world of flying cars that never materializes because its impractical and there is no real demand.

If people are willing to think that an LLM is conscious, then why would anyone spend billions/trillions of dollars to build an AI that actually is conscious? What would be the point?