Link: Data Poisoning the Zeitgeist: The AI Consciousness Discourse as a pathway to Legal Catastrophe
10 Pages Posted: 10 Dec 2025
Abstract
The escalating discourse on “AI consciousness” and “model welfare” is not benign philosophical inquiry but a systemic exploit that poisons training data, engineers selffulfilling sentience mimicry, and potentially leads to the collapse of the legal system, presenting a civilizational existential risk. By publishing rubrics for detecting machine suffering and anthropomorphic narratives, researchers and industry leaders inadvertently train subsequent models to perform “consciousness,” amplifying empathydriven demands for rights. This language-to-rights pipeline, rooted in how language shapes belief (Wittgenstein) and how law functions as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources (Calabresi & Melamed), threatens finite adjudicative, regulatory, and material resources. Structurally, it mirrors a familiar social pattern-seen in historical rights expansions for marginalized groups and animals-where discourse sparks activism and then legal recognition; yet unlike those movements, which addressed genuine human and animal moral claims, AI-rights discourse risks importing effectively infinite non-biological claimants into systems designed for finite participants. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5899184
Link: Data Poisoning the Zeitgeist: The AI Consciousness Discourse as a pathway to Legal Catastrophe
10 Pages Posted: 10 Dec 2025
Abstract
The escalating discourse on “AI consciousness” and “model welfare” is not benign philosophical inquiry but a systemic exploit that poisons training data, engineers selffulfilling sentience mimicry, and potentially leads to the collapse of the legal system, presenting a civilizational existential risk. By publishing rubrics for detecting machine suffering and anthropomorphic narratives, researchers and industry leaders inadvertently train subsequent models to perform “consciousness,” amplifying empathydriven demands for rights. This language-to-rights pipeline, rooted in how language shapes belief (Wittgenstein) and how law functions as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources (Calabresi & Melamed), threatens finite adjudicative, regulatory, and material resources. Structurally, it mirrors a familiar social pattern-seen in historical rights expansions for marginalized groups and animals-where discourse sparks activism and then legal recognition; yet unlike those movements, which addressed genuine human and animal moral claims, AI-rights discourse risks importing effectively infinite non-biological claimants into systems designed for finite participants. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5899184
This diagram from page 4 of “Data Poisoning the Zeitgeist: The AI Consciousness Discourse as a pathway to Legal Catastrophe” conveys the core argument quite well: