Comment by hellotomyrars
8 days ago
AI isn’t “from a different culture”. It doesn’t have culture. Any culture it does have is what it has sucked up from its training data and set in its weights.
There is no need to be “humane” to AI because it possess no humanity. It has no personhood at all. It can’t feel. You can’t be inhumane to something that is literally incapable of feeling.
A blade of grass has more humanity and is more deserving of respect than anything being referred to as AI does.
Aliens might not be received well but it’s going to depend a lot on how they show up.
AI is a “revolution” where the promise is that nobody will have to do meaningless work anymore ( I guess).
The only problem is right now basically everyone has to do work meaningful or “meaningless” because the dominant thinking requires it for human survival. Weird how most people aren’t happy for the thing that is pitched to take away the meager scraps they get under the current regime.
> A blade of grass has more humanity and is more deserving of respect than anything being referred to as AI does.
Emphatically disagree.
Even ignoring the obvious absurdity in this statement by pointing out that an LLM is emulating a human (quite well!) and a blade of grass is not:
I don't trust any human who can interact with something that uses the same method of communication as a human, and for all intents and purposes communicates like a human, and not feel any instinct to treat it with respect.
This is the kind of mindset that leads to dehumanizing other humans. Our brain isn't sophisticated enough to actually compartmentalize that - building the habit that it's right to treat something that talks like a sapient as if it deserves zero respect is going to have negative consequences.
Sure, you can believe it's a just a tool, and consciously let yourself treat it as one. But treat it like an incompetent intern, not a slave.
I think ascribing humanity to to something that isn’t human is far more dehumanizing to actual real life humans than the alternative. You are taking away actual people’s humanity if you’re giving it to anything we call AI.
I am capable of distinguishing between talking to another person and talking to an LLM and I don’t think that is hard to do.
I don’t think there is any other word than delusional to describe someone who thinks LLMs should be treated as humans.