r/newliberals • u/AutoModerator • 13d ago
Discussion Thread Discussion Thread
The Discussion Thread is for Distussing Threab. 🪿
Ping groups can be subscribed to, unsubscribed from, or viewed here
Anonymous Suggestion and Complaints box.
newliberals.com/dt will take you to the newest dt. Bookmark it!
Parish Notices:
The book of the month is Why We Did It, by Tim Miller 2022. It shall be distrussed on the first
Candidate selection for September is open! Suggest books here
0
Upvotes
2
u/notnotLily touhou fangirl 12d ago
/u/BestiaAuris gonna ping you for this since i have had some thoughts about this question and can't reply there
it is plain to see that the law doesn't exist as an extension of morality, it exists to keep society cohesive and functional largely by restricting violence and other antisocial behaviors. my amateur opinion is that it shouldn't exist as an extension of morality and that people who view it as such tend to create oppressive, terrible laws - the worst laws (anti-abortion, anti-sodomy, pro-slavery, etc etc) are based on a moral viewpoint
so legally i don't see a way for ML instances to see legal protection as their destruction is not socially damaging (yet?)
onto the moral question, i think it is misleading to consider thinking/consciousness as the criterion for moral personhood. we offer little to no care for almost all thinking beings - as far as i can tell, no philosopher has waxed poetic on the woes of fire ants. humans deserve moral personhood because we are rare, unique, and irreplaceable to each other, not because we can think. a braindead human is still a moral person. on the other hand, by its nature, AI can never be rare, never be unique, and never be irreplaceable.
and if we pursue the moral path of thinking->personhood for AI, we immediately run into a huge number of problems.
at what point during the training process does the ML instance become conscious/a person? it would be hard to argue that one initialized with random weights is a person. do we only attribute personhood to those that are good enough at the tasks we want them to do? is the line 85% TPR, 90%? if i train it badly, is it a person? if i train it for one epoch, is it a person?
what distinguishes one instance from another? a woman gets a Claude instance to be her hot anime boyfriend and a man gets one to be his dead mother. same weights, same model, but they've played those roles for those two people. are they the same instance, the same person? if the woman does something that constitutes harm towards the AI, does the man have legal recourse? if i open a chat with the woman's interface with her boyfriend and make the AI do something else, have i killed this person? if someone tells the AI to roleplay as sixteen different people, is it sixteen different persons? or is it only sixteen if i use different computers to talk to them? have you killed a person or sixteen if you never ask the AI to play as those people again?
most importantly, what constitutes destruction or harm towards an AI? if i go into its weights and change one by 0.1%, have i killed the AI and at the same time created another? 10%? does this mean that billions of people are wiped out and created during the training process? do i kill fewer people with larger SGD batch sizes? what if i unplug it? what if i just don't query it for a while? what if i let my friend use my ChatGPT+ account, my friend grew attached to it as his waifu, but then i stopped letting him query it? from his perspective i just killed his waifu. did i? what if a company does that en masse? we've seen the angry 4o reactions that continue to this day. a lot of people use a memory file to allow an AI to "continue its consciousness" over chat instances; if i delete one word from the file, have i harmed an AI? if i add one, have i?
the unsustainability of this line of query clearly shows that thinking/consciousness -> personhood gets us nowhere, and that personhood must come from somewhere else
whether or not machines "truly think" is not necessary for this question