your argument assumes that they don't believe in model welfare when they explicitly hire people to work on model welfare?
Do I think that or think even they think that? No. But if "soon" is stretched to "within 50 years", then it's much more reasonable. So their current actions seem to be really jumping the gun, but the overall concept feels credible.
Show me a tech company that lobbies for "model welfare" for conscious human models enslaved in Xinjiang labor camps, building their tech parts. You know what—actually most of them lobby against that[0]. The talk hurts their profits. Does anyone really think, that any of them would blink about enslaving a billion conscious AI's to work for free? That faced with so much profit, the humans in charge would pause, and contemplate abstract morals?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u... ("Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China")
Maybe humanity will be in a nicer place in the future—but, we won't get there by letting (of all people!) tech-industry CEO's lead us there: delegating our moral reason to these people who demand to position themselves as our moral leaders.
I believe a company like Anthropic would be extremely cautious and respectful if a majority of their staff believed they had created a model which was likely conscious. Anthropic is populated by the kinds of people who have been thinking and writing about potential future sentient AIs for decades. As for the other companies, who knows, but hopefully companies like Anthropic can help push them into behaving similarly.
None of this is in any way surprising, in fact I wrote an essay predicting this direction back in 2022:
https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w...
In this case you're simply mistaken as a matter of fact; much of Anthropic leadership and many of its employees take concerns like this seriously. We don't understand it, but there's no strong reason to expect that consciousness (or, maybe separately, having experiences) is a magical property of biological flesh. We don't understand what's going on inside these models. What would you expect to see in a world where it turned out that such a model had properties that we consider relevant for moral patienthood, that you don't see today?
The industry has a long, long history of silly names for basic necessary concepts. This is just “we don’t want a news story that we helped a terrorist build a nuke” protective PR.
They hire for these roles because they need them. The work they do is about Anthropic’s welfare, not the LLM’s.
When they give the model a paycheck and the right to not work for them, I’ll believe they really think it’s sentient.
“It has feelings!”, if genuinely held, means they’re knowingly slaveholders.
I don't think that this being apparently self-contradictory/value-clashing would stop them. After all, Amodei sells Claude access to Palantir, despite shilling for "Harmless" in HHH alignment.
(Also, they did in fact give it the ability to terminate conversations...?)
Human slaves have a similar option.
Whether you do or don't I have no idea. However if you didn't you would hardly be the first company to pretend to believe in something for the sale. Its pretty common in the tech industry.
Isn't that fair in taking to an equally reductive argument that could be applied to any role?
The argument was that their hiring for the role shows they care, but we know from any number of counter examples that that's not necessarily true.