Comment by neolefty

It's perfectly reasonable that we would have disagreements about this, as it's a new thing, complicated and not fully understood, its uses still being explored.

It reminds me, oddly, of the debate over whether video games can be "art". A turning point was when they actually did something that art does: [evoke profound emotion and thoughtfulness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_the_Colossus#Legacy) for the player.

(And before that, "[Can photography be art](https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/)?")

We may not come to something as simple as "machines can be conscious", but we will certainly have to understand consciousness better if we want to refine our questions.

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Edit: My point is that we don't need to be angry, but we may have to tolerate people expressing their exploration through overly-confident language, and be patient with that.

And Ted here is obviously exploring. His examination of Claude's constitution clearly shows some nuance. He asks:

> So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s constitution?

And his conclusions are split, between this is useful and this is dishonest. It's a great tension IMO.

> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter. This might seem like a reasonable goal to work toward; I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as “You should kill yourself.” However, for all the times that “honesty” is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns.