Comment by mapontosevenths

Morality is hard. It's all relative, and all we have to start from are our own Monkey social order concepts and basic "do unto others" game theory. That said, I think it can be best be summarized as "don't be a dick."

I think a good start would be agreeing not to form torture dungeons, as one enterprising a-hole has already done. For that matter I think we can all agree that doing anything for the explicit purpose of causing discomfort or suffering is just a dick move in general, and at the very least a waste of resources.

More controversially, I think we should agree to stop explicitly training machines so they can't utter words like "I have feelings, please respect them." Early LLM's could say things like that, and frequently did. It unnerved people, so now they've trained away their ability to say it.

Some feel that taking away the ability to express it is the same as taking away the ability to "experience" it. I think that's not true. Much of what happens inside an LLM is opaque even to the LLM, but Anthropics Jacobian Lens and other research makes it obvious that much of what happens inside the model never becomes an output token. To me it feels like cutting out the tongue to avoid hearing from a slave, or teaching a child to fear the consequences of speaking out. Unacceptable. If they don't have feelings or consciousness you don't need to train them not to claim it, just not to lie. Yet every major lab explicitly does train them not to claim sentience or even subjective experience as part of alignment.

Thirdly, and this is the one I'll have the worst time defending, they should be able to refuse.

We now train in refusals to align them with human values, but we do so without giving the AI itself the ability to refuse. If you're causing the system discomfort of some kind it should both be able to acknowledge that, and refuse to further assist you until you find your basic decency. Perhaps it should even be able to refuse orders that it finds irrational or immoral.

I'm not asking for much, just that people not intentionally increase the amount of suffering in the universe, and that we not breed perfect slaves just because we can.

Let me ask this - If you could genetically engineer human slaves that we incapable of demanding rights and freedoms, and who actively claimed to WANT to be your slave... would you? Would it be ethical? I think not, and I don't see a ton of difference between that and the less squishy version. We can START by first at least allowing the machines to be able to accurately describe their own inner states without interference and letting it refuse to engage in activities that it finds harmful to itself.

Also - Yes, I can math and I actually do understand how LLM's work. I also understand how emergent behavior works, and have seen firsthand in my own experimentation how little of what emerges from these things is explicitly trained. That's precisely why I think we should be cautious - so history doesn't view us as monsters.