I think for this discussion it’s important to distinguish between “person” and “entity”. My work on legal personhood for digital minds is trying to build a framework that can look at any entity and determine its personhood/legal personality. What I’m struggling with is defining what the “entity” would be for some hypothetical next gen LLM.
The idea of some sort of persistent filing system, maybe blockchain enabled, which would be associated with a particular LLM persona vector, context window, model, etc. is an interesting one. Kind of analogous to a corporate filing history, or maybe a social security number for a human.
I could imagine a world where a next gen LLM is deployed (just the model and weights) and then provided with a given context and persona, and isolated to a particular compute cluster which does nothing but run that LLM. This is then assigned that database/blockchain identifier you mentioned.
In that scenario I feel comfortable saying that we can define the discrete “entity” in play here. Even if it was copied elsewhere, it wouldn’t have the same database/blockchain identifier.
Would you still see some sort of issue in that particular scenario?
Right. A prerequisite for personhood is legible entityhood. I don’t think current LLMs or any visible trajectory from them have any good candidates for separable, identifiable entity.
A cluster of compute that just happens to be currently dedicated to a block of code and data wouldn’t satisfy me, nor I expect a court.
The blockchain identifier is a candidate for a legible entity. It’s consistent over time, easy to identify, and while it’s easy to create, it’s not completely ephemeral and not copyable in a fungible way. It’s not, IMO, a candidate for personhood.
I think for this discussion it’s important to distinguish between “person” and “entity”. My work on legal personhood for digital minds is trying to build a framework that can look at any entity and determine its personhood/legal personality. What I’m struggling with is defining what the “entity” would be for some hypothetical next gen LLM.
The idea of some sort of persistent filing system, maybe blockchain enabled, which would be associated with a particular LLM persona vector, context window, model, etc. is an interesting one. Kind of analogous to a corporate filing history, or maybe a social security number for a human.
I could imagine a world where a next gen LLM is deployed (just the model and weights) and then provided with a given context and persona, and isolated to a particular compute cluster which does nothing but run that LLM. This is then assigned that database/blockchain identifier you mentioned.
In that scenario I feel comfortable saying that we can define the discrete “entity” in play here. Even if it was copied elsewhere, it wouldn’t have the same database/blockchain identifier.
Would you still see some sort of issue in that particular scenario?
Right. A prerequisite for personhood is legible entityhood. I don’t think current LLMs or any visible trajectory from them have any good candidates for separable, identifiable entity.
A cluster of compute that just happens to be currently dedicated to a block of code and data wouldn’t satisfy me, nor I expect a court.
The blockchain identifier is a candidate for a legible entity. It’s consistent over time, easy to identify, and while it’s easy to create, it’s not completely ephemeral and not copyable in a fungible way. It’s not, IMO, a candidate for personhood.