Comment by itsalotoffun
1 day ago
While I'm certain you'll find plenty of people who believe in the principle of model welfare (or aliens, or the tooth fairy), it'd be surprising to me if the brain-trust behind Anthropic truly _believed_ in model "welfare" (the concept alone is ludicrous). It makes for great cover though to do things that would be difficult to explain otherwise, per OP's comments.
The concept is not ludicrous if you believe models might be sentient or might soon be sentient in a manner where the newly emerged sentience is not immediately obvious.
Do I think that or think even they think that? No. But if "soon" is stretched to "within 50 years", then it's much more reasonable. So their current actions seem to be really jumping the gun, but the overall concept feels credible.
It's lazy to believe that humanity's collective decision-making would, in the future, protect AI's merely for being conscious beings. The tech economy *today* runs on the slave labor of humans, in foreign, third-world countries. All humanity needs to do is draw a line, push the conscious AI's outside that line, and declare, "not our problem anymore!" That's what we do today, with humans. That is the human condition.
Show me a tech company that lobbies for "model welfare" for conscious human models enslaved in Xinjiang labor camps, building their tech parts. You know what—actually most of them lobby against that[0]. The talk hurts their profits. Does anyone really think, that any of them would blink about enslaving a billion conscious AI's to work for free? That faced with so much profit, the humans in charge would pause, and contemplate abstract morals?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u... ("Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China")
Maybe humanity will be in a nicer place in the future—but, we won't get there by letting (of all people!) tech-industry CEO's lead us there: delegating our moral reason to these people who demand to position themselves as our moral leaders.
We also have no problem (I include myself in this) eating mammals, which certainly appear to be conscious. Thank God they can't talk.
Why would they post a whole blog post about it then? They even say they aren't certain as to the moral status of LLMs, implying this is a topic of live debate inside the company.
None of this is in any way surprising, in fact I wrote an essay predicting this direction back in 2022:
https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w...
Model welfare is a section in every Anthropic safety score card.