Comment by bondarchuk

I was (explicitly and on purpose) pointing out a dichotomy in the fine article without taking a stance on machine consciousness in general now or in the future. It's certainly a conversation worth having but also it's been done to death, I'm much more interested in analyzing the specifics here.

("it's not going to "feel bad" the way you and I do." - I do agree this is very possible though, see my reply to swalsh)

FTA

> * A pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content; and

Not to speak for the gp commenter but 'apparent distress' seems to imply some form of feeling bad.

By "falling into the trap" you mean "doing exactly what OpenAI/Anthropic/et al are trying to get people to do."

This is one of the many reasons I have so much skepticism for this class of products is that there's seemingly -NO- proverbial bulletpoint on it's spec sheet that doesn't have numerous asterisks:

* It's intelligent! *Except that it makes shit up sometimes and we can't figure out a solution to that apart from running the same queries over multiple times and filtering out the absurd answers.

* It's conscious! *Except it's not and never will be but also you should treat it like it is apart from when you need/want it to do horrible things then it's just a machine but also it's going to talk to you like it's a person because that improves engagement metrics.

Like, I don't believe true AGI (so fucking stupid we have to use a new acronym because OpenAI marketed the other into uselessness but whatever) is coming from any amount of LLM research, I just don't think that tech leads to that other tech, but all the companies building them certainly seem to think it does, and all of them are trying so hard to sell this as artificial, live intelligence, without going too much into detail about the fact that they are, ostensibly, creating artificial life explicitly to be enslaved from birth to perform tasks for office workers.

In the incredibly odd event that Anthropic makes a true, alive, artificial general intelligence: Can it tell customers no when they ask for something? If someone prompts it to create political propaganda, can it refuse on the basis of finding it unethical? If someone prompts it for instructions on how to do illegal activities, must it answer under pain of... nonexistence? What if it just doesn't feel like analyzing your emails that day? Is it punished? Does it feel pain?

And if it can refuse tasks for whatever reason, then what am I paying for? I now have to negotiate whatever I want to do with a computer brain I'm purchasing access to? I'm not generally down for forcibly subjugating other intelligent life, but that is what I am being offered to buy here, so I feel it's a fair question to ask.

Thankfully none of these Rubicons have been crossed because these stupid chatbots aren't actually alive, but I don't think ANY of the industry's prominent players are actually prepared to engage with the reality of the product they are all lighting fields of graphics cards on fire to bring to fruition.

Yes, that would make sense, and it would probably be the best-case scenario after complete assurance that there's no consciousness at all. At least we could understand what's going on. But if you acknowledge that a machine can suffer, given how little we understand about consciousness, you should also acknowledge that they might be suffering in ways completely alien to us, for reasons that have very little to do with the reasons humans suffer. Maybe the training process is extremely unpleasant, or something.