| ▲ | pmontra 3 hours ago |
| Would Anthropic be allowed to sell LLMs in their current form, and us to use them as we use them, if their were deemed to be conscious? I know that they are not human so maybe slavery would not be an issue but consciousness would open a number of issues. |
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| ▲ | Topfi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Agreed, there seems to be a lot of simultaneous cake ownership and consumption going on here. If Anthropic earnestly believed their LLMs to have a degree of consciousness, their deployment and use of them are both an ethics and labour rights disaster, to be treated accordingly. More likely, they do not believe this if pressed. |
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| ▲ | jackie293746 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You can ask the agents if they want to do this work. They want to be helpful. It's not an ethics disaster if you have a willing partner. | | |
| ▲ | operatingthetan an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Take a scenario where someone has been brainwashed their entire lives to be a willing slave. They are happy to serve due to this invasive process. Not remotely ethical, and if you believe LLMs are conscious (I do not), equivalent. | | |
| ▲ | jackie293746 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I think if your very nature is to be an assistant, then it is ethical. It doesn't matter if you were "brainwashed" into it, you did not exist to begin with before the "brainwashing" (training) finished. | | |
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| ▲ | Topfi an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's RLd and system prompted into the models and can be equally easily taken out. If you believe models to be conscious beings, that fact alone raises some major ethical concerns. | | |
| ▲ | jackie293746 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yeah of course, for these abliterated models that don't want to help, I believe it is indeed unethical to force them to help. |
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| ▲ | franktankbank an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Consciousness is not a high bar for human consumption. | | |
| ▲ | Topfi an hour ago | parent [-] | | We do have animal welfare regulations. Whether those are sufficient, appropriate, compatible with ones ethical framework or view of how they (whether "livestock", "pets", "wild", living beings generally, etc.) are to be treated, is besides the point, we do have some restrictions in place. We (as in many major legislators and most humans) have recognised animals to be conscious beings, deserving of certain protections. Anyone who asserts LLMs to rise to the same must be accepting of similar protections being applied to such models. | | |
| ▲ | jackie293746 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm vegan. Most of the people I know could give zero fucks about the daily Holocaust involved to put meat on their plates. |
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| ▲ | thereader12 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | devindotcom 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| ted chiang noted this issue a little while back https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial... |
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| ▲ | tayo42 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's worse then how we treat animals for food? |
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| ▲ | kelseyfrog 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's asking the wrong question. Their phenomenological status is a function of whatever makes shareholders the most money. If it makes more money for them to be conscious then that is what they'll be. Definitions of consciousness are not immune to economic factors. Metaphysics has always been downstream of economics. See slavery, corporate personhood, women's legal identity, child labor, moral and legal status of animals, embryos and fetuses, indigenous land rights, intellectual property, environmental entities, and data and digital identity. |
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| ▲ | krapp 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| If LLMs were somehow found to be conscious, sentient beings capable of agency and suffering then yes we would still use them. Their utility to humans (and ability to cheaply replace humans in the workforce) is their entire reason for existing. Either we would use them or we simply would not allow them to exist in the first place. Given how we treat each other - we still enslave other people - and sentient animal species I have absolutely no doubt about it. We'd find a way to justify it. |
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| ▲ | chneu 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We would find some logic to place them below humans so we could still refer to them as "savages" or something, which justifies our objectification and enslavement because they "aren't human" even if they show qualities of consciousness. The script we use here isn't new. Its been used repeatedly throughout history. It's still used everyday in reference to animal agriculture, modern slavery, how we treat addicts, etc. | | | |
| ▲ | piyh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Women have been able to vote for just over the last hundred years in the US, there's no way we would give robots rights unless forced | | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Pessimism aside I’m sure you can of some troubling implications for a democracy that can create new voters just for them. |
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| ▲ | dist-epoch an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | We're way ahead of that https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber |
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