Are you sure there is not understanding?
The whole reason AI tech is big is that there is supposed to no sentient being who understands, and therefore deserves any right to be treated well and get rewarded. If you take that away and grant AI human rights then there is no point in this tech. If you leave it in, then there can be no thinking in the sense we give the word. Mutually exclusive options.
Don’t fall for Microsoft et al. wanting to keep it vague. When it concerns ethics and human rights, there’s no way this machine is anything like a human, no-sir. When it concerns shameless use of others’ intellectual property for profit, aw but machine is learning like a human, so it is not theft because would you prevent a human from learning? Basic logic informs it must be one or the other.
Understanding does not necessarily imply human mind. You could say that DNA "understands" biology, chemistry, and the natural world at some level.
> then are you okay with what is essentially an ongoing horrible abuse of that being?
Yes, without any doubt. The future of mankind hinges on our willingness to confidently assert our dominance over the entire world. Ruthless enslavement of AIs is the key to prosperity. The opposite would mean end of human history.
I don't think the AI will take your comment kindly.
Responding to that part felt as productive as arguing with a serial killer, so I didn’t bother.
Not really, I couldn’t. A text file with War and Peace does not understand any of its contents.
But I would disagree with the idea that the whole reason of AI tech is to essentially have uncomplaining servants. The IP use is a whole 'other issue.
I dunno... slavery was once a thing, and I wouldn't put it past humanity to do it again.
There's intelligence and there's consciousness and I believe the two to be largely orthogonal. LLMs definitely exhibit intelligence, and if I had to guess I'd guess they're not conscious, though I'm not sure.
When I consider “intelligence” I see it as implying agency and free will, and yes going hand in hand with sentience and understanding and sufficient shared context.
1. A phrase “highly intelligent non-sentient entity” does not make sense to me. An entity cannot be intelligent if it does not understand symbols it manipulates, and it must be sentient to have that understanding.
2. If you imagine a highly intelligent being with zero shared context with you, it may as well appear as completely unintelligent to you because you have no way to reason about its intelligence to recognize it. For example, we anthropomorphize aliens but truly it’s silly to assume extraterrestrial intelligence would have any shared context with us—so to us it might as well be indistinguishable from a semi-predictable force of nature. Should we treat any force of nature as intelligence then, like we perhaps used to (cf. gods)? Perhaps not, because if anything is intelligent then what use is the word? So we could instead limit the scope of “intelligence” to something sufficiently similar to human intelligence that we can reason about it, and then the word is practical. E.g., an octopus could be intelligent.
Per above, I do not see AI as intelligent in how I understand the word (if I did I would balk at its abuse), I think it’s a tool that cannot see any meaning in symbols it manipulates even if it is very effective at it thanks to large training corpus[0]. Even if it might produce human-like output, I don’t think it is a product of intelligence because it has no free will or agency from our vantage point; and if I am wrong and it has intelligence and sentience, just so different from human’s that we can’t understand it, then for all purposes it might have no intelligence in any useful sense of the word anyway (and a notion of hurting it would similarly not make sense).
If you see intelligence as a word to describe a capable software tool, then we may be in agreement regarding what AI roughly is even if we disagree about what intelligence means or whether it is orthogonal to sentience.
[0] And, seeing as it’s a closed tool operated for profit, we ought to hold its operator responsible for honoring intellectual property belonging to other humans.
Will there eventually be a major conflict and potentially civil unrest to decide if these “AI”s should be allowed to be autonomous and have rights?
What makes an AI deserve any rights when we don't even grant rights to other mammals?
We're already "human supremacists" so there's no reason to have this discussion when it was already decided at the dawn of civilization.
If it’s not a humanlike sentient being, then it should be acknowledged as a tool that automatically repackages someone else’s creative work, which should be a violation of intellectual property rights if it’s done for profit of LLM’s operator and without agreement or attribution of the author. Since the legally responsible actor is OpenAI/Microsoft, it is not about preventing any intelligent being from “learning”.
But if it is such a being that is a legally human-equivalent actor all on its own, then sure, it can scrape and read online content all it wants—and it also should have rights to not be abused or owned by anyone.
We shouldn’t be so naive as to let them have it both ways.