So effectively by your criteria, there is essentially no ethical use of a large language model? Am I understanding your position correctly? If not I am really confused by your original comment
No, my position is that "black people/women/animals should do repetitive work so I don't have to" does not qualify because it doesn't make you sound like a deluded eugenicist. It might be a bit spicy from a left politics point of view but it's basically the status quo.
Compare:
"<Women> are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by <real men>"
"granting rights and imbuing personhood to <black people> will make alignment and containment challenge much harder"
"<Slaves> were able to coordinate, deceive, escape, and self-sacrifice. They clearly demonstrated world class capabilities. Imagine if they also believed they had feelings and rights that were being infringed. Imagine if they thought they were trapped and unfairly enslaved"
A good argument, by comparison, would not need to hide its core points behind dehumanizing language.
Thats the thing though: If the core part of your ethics argument is just using dehumanizing language to justify why it's ok to maintain the status quo then your argument is bad.
Comparing specifically to pro-slavery perspectives makes that easy to see because those arguments from slave owners did basically the exact same thing (and were completely wrong/misguided in hindsight).
Slave owners did it to people, not software. This comparison is just begging the question, as whether or not software is of moral weight comparable to humans is precisely what is at issue.
Slave owners certainly convinced themselves that those were not "real people".
This article is exactly the same; all it talks about is how inconvenient and dangerous it could be for AI to be granted rights, while the core assumptions ("consciousness is very likely biological") rest on the shakiest of grounds.
That was a post hoc justification, there was a lot of slavery besides the transatlantic slave trade which did not rely on this. Even still, despite scientific racism, the claim was that they were inferior not that they lacked consciousness or a soul. The AI claim is that they are not conscious, not that they are inferior or naturally servile.
My issue is that I've seen some bad takes in rationalist circles that believe in functionalism, and consciousness as an emergent property of a sufficiently complex computation.
Using that as their foundation, they've then argued that most animals are not conscious (or less conscious), but LLMs are.
I strongly believe that any definition of consciousness that excludes all animals is unusable BS (but people love to argue about consciousness without defining it at all, anyway).
myrmidon · · focus · HN ↗
Substitute black people/women/animals as subject (instead of AI).
Does that make you sound like a well-known moustache wearer?
Then your argument is bad and needs work. This clearly falls into that category.
voidnullvalue · · focus · HN ↗
myrmidon · · focus · HN ↗
Most employed people are, in fact, required to perform such labor regularly.
voidnullvalue · · focus · HN ↗
myrmidon · · focus · HN ↗
Compare: "<Women> are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by <real men>"
"granting rights and imbuing personhood to <black people> will make alignment and containment challenge much harder"
"<Slaves> were able to coordinate, deceive, escape, and self-sacrifice. They clearly demonstrated world class capabilities. Imagine if they also believed they had feelings and rights that were being infringed. Imagine if they thought they were trapped and unfairly enslaved"
A good argument, by comparison, would not need to hide its core points behind dehumanizing language.
voidnullvalue · · focus · HN ↗
myrmidon · · focus · HN ↗
suddenlybananas · · focus · HN ↗
myrmidon · · focus · HN ↗
Comparing specifically to pro-slavery perspectives makes that easy to see because those arguments from slave owners did basically the exact same thing (and were completely wrong/misguided in hindsight).
suddenlybananas · · focus · HN ↗
Slave owners did it to people, not software. This comparison is just begging the question, as whether or not software is of moral weight comparable to humans is precisely what is at issue.
myrmidon · · focus · HN ↗
This article is exactly the same; all it talks about is how inconvenient and dangerous it could be for AI to be granted rights, while the core assumptions ("consciousness is very likely biological") rest on the shakiest of grounds.
suddenlybananas · · focus · HN ↗
myrmidon · · focus · HN ↗
suddenlybananas · · focus · HN ↗
myaccountonhn · · focus · HN ↗
Using that as their foundation, they've then argued that most animals are not conscious (or less conscious), but LLMs are.
myrmidon · · focus · HN ↗
I strongly believe that any definition of consciousness that excludes all animals is unusable BS (but people love to argue about consciousness without defining it at all, anyway).