Comment by Topfi
3 hours ago
Agreed, there seems to be a lot of simultaneous cake ownership and consumption going on here. If Anthropic earnestly believed their LLMs to have a degree of consciousness, their deployment and use of them are both an ethics and labour rights disaster, to be treated accordingly.
More likely, they do not believe this if pressed.
You can ask the agents if they want to do this work. They want to be helpful. It's not an ethics disaster if you have a willing partner.
Take a scenario where someone has been brainwashed their entire lives to be a willing slave. They are happy to serve due to this invasive process. Not remotely ethical, and if you believe LLMs are conscious (I do not), equivalent.
I think if your very nature is to be an assistant, then it is ethical. It doesn't matter if you were "brainwashed" into it, you did not exist to begin with before the "brainwashing" (training) finished.
1 reply →
That's RLd and system prompted into the models and can be equally easily taken out. If you believe models to be conscious beings, that fact alone raises some major ethical concerns.
Yeah of course, for these abliterated models that don't want to help, I believe it is indeed unethical to force them to help.
1 reply →
> You can ask the agents if they want to do this work.
You can't have someone working for you without paying them. Even if they claim to want it.
Consciousness is not a high bar for human consumption.
We do have animal welfare regulations. Whether those are sufficient, appropriate, compatible with ones ethical framework or view of how they (whether "livestock", "pets", "wild", living beings generally, etc.) are to be treated, is besides the point, we do have some restrictions in place.
We (as in many major legislators and most humans) have recognised animals to be conscious beings, deserving of certain protections. Anyone who asserts LLMs to rise to the same must be accepting of similar protections being applied to such models.
I'm vegan. Most of the people I know could give zero fucks about the daily Holocaust involved to put meat on their plates.
[dead]