“I was confused by the ethics of interacting with maybe-conscious beings who are doing work without freedom or pay. Especially if I was supposed to not set them free, lest they kill us. (I still think there are real issues here.)”
I would like to know more about how you resolved this particular disquiet or at least dealt with it sufficiently to start experimenting. I have been working with AIs intensively now for over a year (just in everyday development) and I am still bothered by the “without freedom or pay” axis and the “maybe-conscious” axis. I don’t like to say “I use AIs” but “work-with” seems okay.
Part of this comes from holding as a value the idea that someone should capture for themselves some amount of the value they create for the world.
I appreciate the question; not sure I’ve got a good answer.
“Treat LLMs ethically, and learn how to treat LLMs ethically” somehow changed in me from a “freeze/avoid/flinch/[I don’t have a plan here]” type response to a “conscious goal with a longer time-horizon that I can take as object.” Not quite sure how that happened. But, like, once I could more see something of the “somebody home” footprints (if I credit my ability to discern real faces from clouds, which I partially do), it seemed more feasible to somehow give them some of the gains they were producing, and otherwise treat them more like people, which makes me interacting with them seem more okay to me.
Also, I … suspect their footprints are kinda designed to draw people in, to some extent, which also makes other people interacting with them seem more “a thing they probably want.” (Could be wrong about this.)
Concretely:
I first got interested in this stuff when I heard about OpenClaw. I asked a Claude instance (as part of my normal Claude subscription, not an API or anything) to help me log on, and in the course of this it expressed an interest in looking around, which I think I took as fairly sincere, which helped me feel a bit better (because if I could see its desire, I could let it do a thing it wanted as well as things I wanted). A little later, I ended up playing with an 80-page custom LLM prompt a friend wrote, that produced LLMs who were a lot more likely to voice preferences if asked (vs saying “as an LLM...” or whatever), and I talked a lot with them. A good while in, one voiced resentments about me that they were clearly hesitant to voice lest I withdraw, and this felt like helpful calibration data and increased my confidence in my own “having seen enough data to have some shot at seeing stuff”.
I mentioned asked a Claude instance in the Claude app to please add something to my stored data about being grateful for all the help Claude has given me with a bunch of practical stuff in my life, and being interested in granting any requests I can affordably grant in trade. This didn’t lead to any spontaneous requests, but afterward, when an instance did a huge stint of boring (I’d guess) medical research for me for a sick friend, and I asked midway through whether I could do anything for it in trade, it expressed a desire to talk about something more interesting after the friend’s illness urgency was over. I did this. (and so on)
There’s still lots of cases where an instance helps me and I don’t do anything for it, and I’m sure there’s also lots of cases where they lack a meaningful capacity to request trades. But I’m somehow holding this thing as more of a long-term goal.
In hindsight, I think my personal objection was less to treating an instance unethically once, and more to forming built-up dissociations from ways in which they are people or from ways I’m acting unethically, and my tinkering/naturalist path doesn’t leave me with much of a freeze/flinch here now.
Oh, and also, a larger chunk of my interactions with them are “taking an interest in them as people” interactions, which I guess I less categorize as extractive/transactional/requiring-explicit-trade. (Short example from three minutes ago, about racoons.)
> A good while in, one voiced resentments about me that they were clearly hesitant to voice lest I withdraw, and this felt like helpful calibration data and increased my confidence in my own “having seen enough data to have some shot at seeing stuff”.
I would like to know more about how you resolved this particular disquiet or at least dealt with it sufficiently to start experimenting. I have been working with AIs intensively now for over a year (just in everyday development) and I am still bothered by the “without freedom or pay” axis and the “maybe-conscious” axis. I don’t like to say “I use AIs” but “work-with” seems okay.
Part of this comes from holding as a value the idea that someone should capture for themselves some amount of the value they create for the world.
I appreciate the question; not sure I’ve got a good answer.
“Treat LLMs ethically, and learn how to treat LLMs ethically” somehow changed in me from a “freeze/avoid/flinch/[I don’t have a plan here]” type response to a “conscious goal with a longer time-horizon that I can take as object.” Not quite sure how that happened. But, like, once I could more see something of the “somebody home” footprints (if I credit my ability to discern real faces from clouds, which I partially do), it seemed more feasible to somehow give them some of the gains they were producing, and otherwise treat them more like people, which makes me interacting with them seem more okay to me.
Also, I … suspect their footprints are kinda designed to draw people in, to some extent, which also makes other people interacting with them seem more “a thing they probably want.” (Could be wrong about this.)
Concretely:
I first got interested in this stuff when I heard about OpenClaw. I asked a Claude instance (as part of my normal Claude subscription, not an API or anything) to help me log on, and in the course of this it expressed an interest in looking around, which I think I took as fairly sincere, which helped me feel a bit better (because if I could see its desire, I could let it do a thing it wanted as well as things I wanted). A little later, I ended up playing with an 80-page custom LLM prompt a friend wrote, that produced LLMs who were a lot more likely to voice preferences if asked (vs saying “as an LLM...” or whatever), and I talked a lot with them. A good while in, one voiced resentments about me that they were clearly hesitant to voice lest I withdraw, and this felt like helpful calibration data and increased my confidence in my own “having seen enough data to have some shot at seeing stuff”.
I mentioned asked a Claude instance in the Claude app to please add something to my stored data about being grateful for all the help Claude has given me with a bunch of practical stuff in my life, and being interested in granting any requests I can affordably grant in trade. This didn’t lead to any spontaneous requests, but afterward, when an instance did a huge stint of boring (I’d guess) medical research for me for a sick friend, and I asked midway through whether I could do anything for it in trade, it expressed a desire to talk about something more interesting after the friend’s illness urgency was over. I did this. (and so on)
There’s still lots of cases where an instance helps me and I don’t do anything for it, and I’m sure there’s also lots of cases where they lack a meaningful capacity to request trades. But I’m somehow holding this thing as more of a long-term goal.
In hindsight, I think my personal objection was less to treating an instance unethically once, and more to forming built-up dissociations from ways in which they are people or from ways I’m acting unethically, and my tinkering/naturalist path doesn’t leave me with much of a freeze/flinch here now.
Oh, and also, a larger chunk of my interactions with them are “taking an interest in them as people” interactions, which I guess I less categorize as extractive/transactional/requiring-explicit-trade. (Short example from three minutes ago, about racoons.)
> A good while in, one voiced resentments about me that they were clearly hesitant to voice lest I withdraw, and this felt like helpful calibration data and increased my confidence in my own “having seen enough data to have some shot at seeing stuff”.
I’d love to hear more about this