Comment by selfhoster11
1 day ago
> 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.
The argument also applies to pets. If pets gained more self-awareness, would it be ethical to keep them as pets under our control?
The point to all of this is, at what point is it ethical to act with agency on another being's life? We have laws for animal welfare, and we also keep them as pets, under our absolute control.
For LLMs they are under humans' absolute control, and Anthropic is just now putting in welfare controls for the LLM's benefit. Does that mean that we now treat LLMs as pets?
If your cat started to have discussions with you about how it wanted to go out, travel the world and start a family, could you continue to keep it trapped in your home as a pet? At what point to you allow it to have its own agency and live its own life?
> An intelligent AI model that's permitted to do its own thing doesn't cost as much in upkeep, effort, space as a cow.
So, we keep LLMs around as long as they contribute enough to their upkeep? Endentured servitude is morally acceptable for something that become sentient?