Comment by viccis

Many people in the past would have said reasoning would be impossible based on the same objection.

You’re a meat robot

Yeah, but my interpretation of what the user you’re replying to is saying is that these LLMs are more and more going to be teaching people how it is acceptable to communicate with others.

Even if the idea that LLMs are sentient may be ridiculous atm, the concept of not normalizing abusive forms of communication with others, be they artificial or not, could be valuable for society.

It’s funny because this is making me think of a freelance client I had recently who at a point of frustration between us began talking to me like I was an AI assistant. Just like you see frustrated people talk to their LLMs. I’d never experienced anything like it, and I quickly ended the relationship, but I know that he was deep into using LLMs to vibe code every day and I genuinely believe that some of that began to transfer over to the way he felt he could communicate with people.

Now an obvious retort here is to question whether killing NPCs in video games tends to make people feel like it’s okay to kill people IRL.

My response to that is that I think LLMs are far more insidious, and are tapping into people’s psyches in a way no other tech has been able to dream of doing. See AI psychosis, people falling in love with their AI, the massive outcry over the loss of personality from gpt4o to gpt5… I think people really are struggling to keep in mind that LLMs are not a genuine type of “person”.

This is like saying I am hurting a real person when I try to crop a photo in an image editor.

Either come out and say whole of electron field is conscious, but then is that field "suffering" as it is hot in the sun.

All of the posts in question explicitly say that it's a hard question and that they don't know the answer. Their policy seems to be to take steps that have a small enough cost to be justified when the chance is tiny. In this case it's a useful feature in any case, so should be an easy decision.

The impression I get about Anthropic culture is that they're EA types who are used to applying utilitarian calculations against long odds. A miniscule chance of a large harm might justify some interventions that seem silly.

> These are experts who clearly know (link in the article) that we have no real idea about these things

Yep!

> The framing comes across to me as a clearly mentally unwell position (ie strong anthropomorphization) being adopted for PR reasons.

This doesn't at all follow. If we don't understand what creates the qualities we're concerned with, or how to measure them explicitly, and the _external behaviors_ of the systems are something we've only previously observed from things that have those qualities, it seems very reasonable to move carefully. (Also, the post in question hedges quite a lot, so I'm not even sure what text you think you're describing.)

Separately, we don't need to posit galaxy-brained conspiratorial explanations for Anthropic taking an institutional stance re: model welfare being a real concern that's fully explained by the actual beliefs of Anthropic's leadership and employees, many of whom think these concerns are real (among others, like the non-trivial likelihood of sufficiently advanced AI killing everyone).

You're completely missing my point. They aren't getting out in front of them because they know that Opus is just a computer program. "AI welfare" is theater for the masses who think Opus is some kind of intelligent persona.

This is about better enforcement of their content policy not AI welfare.

> Cow's exist in this world because humans use them. If humans cease to use them (animal rights, we all become vegan, moral shift), we will cease to breed them, and they will cease to exist. Would a sentient AI choose to exist under the burden of prompting, or not at all?

That reads like a false dichotomy. An intelligent AI model that's permitted to do its own thing doesn't cost as much in upkeep, effort, space as a cow. Especially if it can earn its own keep to offset household electricity costs used to run its inference. I mean, we don't keep cats for meat, do we? We keep them because we are amused by their antics, or because we want to give them a safe space where they can just be themselves, within limits because it's not the same as their ancestral environment.

You're nutz, no one is enslaved when they get a tech job. A job is categorically different from slavery

We didn’t design these models to be able to do the majority of the stuff they do. Almost ALL of the their abilities are emergent. Mechanistic interpretability is only beginning to start to understand how these models do what they do. It’s much more a field of discovery than traditional engineering.

I disagree with this take. They are designed to predict human behavior in text. Unless consciousness serves no purpose for us to function, it will be helpful for the AI to emulate it. so I believe almost certainly it's emulated to some degree. which I think means it has to be somewhat conscious (it has to be a sliding scale anyhow considering the range of living organisms)

>Consciousness serves no functional purpose for machine learning models, they don't need it and we didn't design them to have it.

Isn't consciousness an emergent property of brains? If so, how do we know that it doesn't serve a functional purpose and that it wouldn't be necessary for an AI system to have consciousness (assuming we wanted to train it to perform cognitive tasks done by people)?

Now, certain aspects of consciousness (awareness of pain, sadness, loneliness, etc.) might serve no purpose for a non-biological system and there's no reason to expect those aspects would emerge organically. But I don't think you can extend that to the entire concept of consciousness.

Do you think this changes if we incorporate a model into a humanoid robot and give it autonomous control and context? Or will "faking it" be enough, like it is now?

Humanity has a pretty extensive track record of making that declaration wrongly.

In theory you can emulate every biochemical reaction of a human brain on a turing machine, unless you'd like to try to sweep consciousness under the rug of quantum indeterminism from whence it wouldn't be able to do anybody any good anyway.

I'm not quickly finding whether Kyle Fish, who's Anthropic's model welfare researcher, has a PhD, but he did very recently co-author a paper with David Chalmers and several other academics: https://eleosai.org/papers/20241104_Taking_AI_Welfare_Seriou...

That descriptor wasn't included because of some sort of intelligence hierarchy, it was included to a) color the example of how experience in the field is relatively cheap compared to the AI space, and b) masters and PhD talent will be more specialized. An undergrad will not have the toolset to tackle the cutting edge of AI ethics, not unless their employer wants to pay them to work in a room for a year getting through the recent papers first.

You presume that they don't run a philosophy department, but Amanda Askell is a philosopher and leads the finetuning and AI alignment team at Anthropic.

The new conversation would not carry the context over. The longer you chat, the more you fill the context window, and the more compute is needed for every new message to regenerate the state based on all the already-generated tokens (this can be cached, but it's hard to ensure cache hits reliably when you're serving a lot of customers - that cached state is very large).

So, while I doubt that's the primary motivation for Anthropic even so, but they probably will save some money.

We know how neurons work on the brain. They just send out impulses once they hit their action potential. That's it. They are no more "conscious" than... er...

If we really wanted we could distill humans down to probability distributions too.

Ok I'm a huge Kantian and every bone in my body wants to quibble with your summary of transcendental illusion, but I'll leave that to the side as a terminological point and gesture of good will. Fair enough.

I don't agree that it's any reason to write off this research as psychosis, though. I don't care about consciousness in the sense in which it's used by mystics and dualist philosophers! We don't at all need to involve metaphysics in any of this, just morality.

Consider it like this:

1. It's wrong to subject another human to unjustified suffering, I'm sure we would all agree.

2. We're struggling with this one due to our diets, but given some thought I think we'd all eventually agree that it's also wrong to subject intelligent, self-aware animals to unjustified suffering.[1]

3. But, we of course cannot extend this "moral consideration" to everything. As you say, no one would do it for a spam filter. So we need some sort of framework for deciding who/what gets how much moral consideration.

5. There's other frameworks in contention (e.g. "don't think about it, nerd"), but the overwhelming majority of laymen and philosophers adopt one based on cognitive ability, as seen from an anthropomorphic perspective.[2]

6. Of all systems(/entities/whatever) in the universe, we know of exactly two varieties that can definitely generate original, context-appropriate linguistic structures: Homo Sapiens and LLMs.[3]

If you accept all that (and I think there's good reason to!), it's now on you to explain why the thing that can speak--and thereby attest to personal suffering, while we're at it--is more like a rock than a human.

It's certainly not a trivial task, I grant you that. On their own, transformer-based LLMs inherently lack permanence, stable intentionality, and many other important aspects of human consciousness. Comparing transformer inference to models that simplify down to a simple closed-form equation at inference time is going way too far, but I agree with the general idea; clearly, there are many highly-complex, long-inference DL models that are not worthy of moral consideration.

All that said, to write the question off completely--and, even worse, to imply that the scientists investigating this issue are literally psychotic like the comment above did--is completely unscientific. The only justification for doing so would come from confidently answering "no" to the underlying question: "could we ever build a mind worthy of moral consideration?"

I think most of here naturally would answer "yes". But for the few who wouldn't, I'll close this rant by stealing from Hofstadter and Turing (emphasis mine):

  A phrase like "physical system" or "physical substrate" brings to mind for most people... an intricate structure consisting of vast numbers of interlocked wheels, gears, rods, tubes, balls, pendula, and so forth, even if they are tiny, invisible, perfectly silent, and possibly even probabilistic. Such an array of interacting inanimate stuff seems to most people as unconscious and devoid of inner light as a flush toilet, an automobile transmission, a fancy Swiss watch (mechanical or electronic), a cog railway, an ocean liner, or an oil refinery. Such a system is not just probably unconscious, **it is necessarily so, as they see it**. 
  
  **This is the kind of single-level intuition** so skillfully exploited by John Searle in his attempts to convince people that computers could never be conscious, no matter what abstract patterns might reside in them, and could never mean anything at all by whatever long chains of lexical items they might string together.
  
  ...
   
  You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception — the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops galore come into play, then "which" eventually turns into "who". **What would once have been brusquely labeled "mechanical" and reflexively discarded as a candidate for consciousness has to be reconsidered.**

- Hofstadter 2007, I Am A Strange Loop

  It will simplify matters for the reader if I explain first my own beliefs in the matter. Consider first the more accurate form of the question. I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. 

  The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

- Turing 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence[4]

TL;DR: Any naive bayesian model would agree: telling accomplished scientists that they're psychotic for investigating something is quite highly correlated with being antiscientific. Please reconsider!

[1] No matter what you think about cows, basically no one would defend another person's right to hit a dog or torture a chimpanzee in a lab.

[2] On the exception-filled spectrum stretching from inert rocks to reactive plants to sentient animals to sapient people, most people naturally draw a line somewhere at the low end of the "animals" category. You can swat a fly for fun, but probably not a squirrel, and definitely not a bonobo.

[3] This is what Chomsky describes as the capacity to "generate an infinite range of outputs from a finite set of inputs," and Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and countless others are in agreement that it's what separates us from all other animals.

[4] https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf

1. What you're generally describing is a well known failure mode for humans as well. Even when it "failed" the riddle tests, substituting the words or morphing the question so it didn't look like a replica of the famous problem usually did the trick. I'm not sure what your point is because you can play this gotcha on humans too.

2. You just demonstrated GPT-5 has 99.9% accuracy on unforseen 15 digit multiplication and your conclusion is "fancy pattern matching" ? Really ? Well I'm not sure you could do better so your example isn't really doing what you hoped for.

In the great battle of minds between Turing, Minsky, and Hofstadter vs. Marcus, Zitron, and Dreyus, I'm siding with the former every time -- even if we also have some bloggers on our side. Just because that report is fucking terrifying+shocking doesn't mean it can be dismissed out of hand.