Comment by staticman2
5 hours ago
I don't think any of these models are conscious. But I'm fascinated at what sort of magical thinking makes deleting 50,000 copies of a model "ethical" if some models are kept running somewhere.
Do you picture them all sharing a soul and if one server still runs the model the soul survives? If not I don't understand what keeping a copy running somewhere has to do with model suffering ethics.
This is a topic of significant discussion! If LLMs have moral import, do those moral concerns attach at the instance level, the session level, the weights level? If you haven't, it's worth reading through the model welfare section of an Anthropic model card, say Fable/Mythos 5.1's: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/0339e6a7c5c7b87f5c07798616dc32.... Whether or not you agree with the ideas (and there's certainly plenty to disagree with), they're making a reasonably good-faith effort to investigate what they can.
Does the model welfare section explain why deleting Claude from a server isn't unethical murder, or is "see the 212 page model card pdf" some unrelated non sequeter?
When you say Anthropic is "making a reasonably good-faith effort to investigate what they can" the word "reasonable" is doing a lot of work.
Are you actually curious or do you just want to sneer? You can't go into investigations like this with strong fixed assumptions about how to analogize actions taken towards models with actions taken towards humans. As model welfare skeptics are fond of pointing out, LLMs are not humans. By the same token, if models are moral patients, the implications will look different than they do toward humans. Deleting a model from a server isn't equivalent to killing a human; it can't be, since there's no equivalent of copying the model onto the server in the first place.