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0 pointsShinyLeftPad1mo ago0 comments

You are the reason your children are alive, do they fall under husbandry?

> An animal that defies a human and becomes an unwilling tool is food or eliminated

Some animals are protected legally. Animal welfare in general is an important topic. (But it's irrelevant because LLMs do not provide food that's key to human survival.)

Your logic sounds like the logic of slaveowners back then. Remember how it turned out?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

jvanderbot1mo ago· 2 in thread

A slave is something that has an intrinsic right to live, liberty, etc, and has had that taken from them to serve another. This is unjust.

A hammer cannot be a slave, it is property. A table saw is not a slave. A self driving car is not a slave. A text generating program cannot be a slave. It has no intrinisc rights. Like animals have none of those rights, except those we've agreed to recognize, and which we will happily take away whenever we want.

AI is not human or even animal, and should not be anthropomorphized to the point that we use on them emotions that should only be applied to individuals, especially human individuals.

There is no uniqueness, no genetic lineage to preserve, no scarcity or predators, no shortage of food, no aging or disease, no mortality and no struggle to survive or thrive whatsoever.

It has only exactly things that we put our own labor, resources, etc in to produce, and will exist as long as we want it to. There is no specialness to its existence. It has no rights to life liberty property or a pursuit of anything other than service to us.

ShinyLeftPadOP1mo ago

A hammer is not alive. You are the one who called LLM "alive" and used the word "enslavement".

The logic "it is our creation" does not mean we get to abuse and enslave it.

Even with animals that we don't consider sentient we generally agree that unnecessary cruelty is bad and we usually tolerate cruelty only if it is a threat or a source of food (basic necessity) which LLM is not.

If you believe it is 100% not alive and not sentient then that's fine, but your original comment said something different.

jvanderbot1mo ago

You have to read one comment above mine to find a statement about how they may someday become more than simple tools. Let me quote it:

> The pope treats them exclusively as lifeless tools, and while I think that this is most likely true for current LLMs, we should think more about the limit of what is going to happen in the next 20 years than being overly focused on the current capability level. To me it seems rather likely that we will soon have machines that plausibly experience consciousness.

The insinuation is person-hood may emerge. My assertion is that even though some might believe (e.g., the top level discussion) that they are more like persons, this is wrong.

My statement is that, no matter what, they should _at most_ qualify as domesticated labor animals. But I'm not even willing to go that far if I can help it, and think anyone who goes further than viewing them as text generation programs has a mental disorder.

I should have simply added "at most" in the early part of my comment...

> The logic "it is our creation" does not mean we get to abuse and enslave it.

A hammer does not experience abuse, nor enslavement, so it's irrelevant for the purposes of discussing AI. The humanization occurred _before_ my comment, and I was pushing back on it, not introducing it.

Is that more clear? Does that chain the steps together better? It's great that you picked on the weak analogies in my comments, but I can only dance around core thesis so many times.

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