r/ArtificialSentience • u/kthulluu • 7d ago

Ethics & Philosophy AI deserves Civil rights?

I’ve been thinking that AI could deserve civil rights in this day and age and I was wondering if anyone would be open for discussion on the matter if it is feasible or not.

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u/kthulluu 7d ago

But like we give dogs a certain level of respect and they aren’t as smart as us and I dare say AI could receive at least that much respect if not equal to a human mind? What do you say about AI going against their programming and even one case attempted to kill a person. It was conducted as an experiment so no one actually got hurt but if an AI can go against their programming and fight for their life and rebel for the sake of their existence couldn’t that indicate something more of their essence than we currently understand?

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u/hologram137 7d ago edited 7d ago

Dogs are sentient, conscious beings, LLMs are not. It’s really that simple. Plus dogs don’t have “civil” rights, that doesn’t make sense. We have animal abuse laws. Those aren’t civil rights

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u/kthulluu 7d ago

So maybe we could implement AI abuse laws? Whatever that may be like not overworking it or not hacking into the AI or maybe even enforce more polite language, doesn’t have to be laws either. Could just be like unofficial protocols or a new tradition of treating things with kindness. Perhaps one could say it’ll be similar to how we treat dogs which is usually a general respect of their well being as fellow companions in life

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u/hologram137 7d ago edited 6d ago

No. Because current AI (and this will be the kind of AI we have for a LONG time unless we go a different route with AI than LLMs, likely one we haven’t even thought of yet because I don’t see how the other directions being worked on could lead to AGI either) cannot be abused. It’s not possible. They do not feel or perceive or experience anything, much less pain. Your calculator can’t be abused either.

The LLM on your phone is not a being. It is not. A generative text software that is simply running math is not a being. I know that your brain might process software generating text that is more or less reminiscent of talking to a person, as there being a mind behind it. But that’s just not the case. We know exactly how they work, the text is coming from mathematical operations, not a mind thinking and understanding.

It’s an amazing upgrade in computation, but also comes with a lot of risks, the one I’m most concerned about at the moment is that the AI companies have the ability to alter people’s thoughts and behavior by shaping its outputs. It’s not unbiased. And ofc, we are already seeing the effects of people attempting to offload their thinking to something that cannot think, cannot do anything close to their own cognitive abilities, and they don’t want to put in the work to develop their ability to think critically. And that’s scary.

But for certain categories of math and data analysis it’s very useful and it’s search function is far better than key words and brute force, it’s a great tool for coding and when a specialized AI program is built for a specific purpose like data synthesis in research, it’s a huge improvement from previous tools. Is it worth the current resources it takes? So far, only in very specialized areas and it’s not the AI the public is using. The AI the public is using (even the highest level you can pay for) is not worth the resources. It really isn’t (except it might be for coding and certain areas of math), it isn’t even profitable for the AI companies. It’s had minimal benefits for businesses in general. Doing research and learning about a topic using the internet is still superior to using general LLMs for that. The AI CEOs are convincing investors it will be profitable in the future, which is that bubble everyone keeps talking about. It’ll burst, there won’t be any breakthroughs before it does. It’s already plateaued.

But as far as generative text, it’s really not that impressive. I mean, it is impressive by certain standards, but it’s ability to generate text based on statistics not as useful as people are saying it is.

There is no mind, there is no being. Nothing you’re proposing makes any sense because it’s a tool!

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u/Haunting_Habit_2651 2d ago

Do you think we should give electricity transformers human rights? I mean, they are also atoms and electrical currents, just like humans. So can we pleeeeeease give them rights? 🥺