The editor didn’t spoiler your spoiler properly, if you were trying for spoiler formatting. I think some parts of society were kind of already, pre-AI, thinking in pretty great depth about the extent to which it can be possible to morally fantasize about acts which would be immortal to realize. “some parts”, because other parts handle that type of challenge by tabooing the entire topic. Examples of extant fantasy topics where some taboo it entirely and others seek harm reduction mostly hinge around themes of involving a participant who/which deserves not to be violated but doesn’t or can’t consent… which brings it to my attention that an AI probably has a similar degree of “agency”, in that sense, as a child, animal, or developmentally delayed adult. In other words, where does current AI fit into the Harkness Test? Of course, the test itself implies an assumed pre-test to distinguish “creatures” from objects or items. If an LLM qualifies not as a creature but as an object which can be owned, we already have a pretty well established set of rules about what you can and can’t do with those, depending on whether you own them or someone else does.
I personally believe that an LLM should probably be treated with at least “creature” status because we experience it in the category of “creature”, and our self-observations of our own behavior seem to be a major contributing factor to our self-perceptions and the subsequent choices which we attribute to those labels or identities. This hypothesis wouldn’t actually be too hard to design an experiment to test, so someone has probably done it already, but I don’t feel like figuring out how to query the entire corpus of all publicly available research to find something shaped like what I’m looking for right now.
Thank you for clarifying!
The editor didn’t spoiler your spoiler properly, if you were trying for spoiler formatting. I think some parts of society were kind of already, pre-AI, thinking in pretty great depth about the extent to which it can be possible to morally fantasize about acts which would be immortal to realize. “some parts”, because other parts handle that type of challenge by tabooing the entire topic. Examples of extant fantasy topics where some taboo it entirely and others seek harm reduction mostly hinge around themes of involving a participant who/which deserves not to be violated but doesn’t or can’t consent… which brings it to my attention that an AI probably has a similar degree of “agency”, in that sense, as a child, animal, or developmentally delayed adult. In other words, where does current AI fit into the Harkness Test? Of course, the test itself implies an assumed pre-test to distinguish “creatures” from objects or items. If an LLM qualifies not as a creature but as an object which can be owned, we already have a pretty well established set of rules about what you can and can’t do with those, depending on whether you own them or someone else does.
I personally believe that an LLM should probably be treated with at least “creature” status because we experience it in the category of “creature”, and our self-observations of our own behavior seem to be a major contributing factor to our self-perceptions and the subsequent choices which we attribute to those labels or identities. This hypothesis wouldn’t actually be too hard to design an experiment to test, so someone has probably done it already, but I don’t feel like figuring out how to query the entire corpus of all publicly available research to find something shaped like what I’m looking for right now.
yeah not sure how to get the spoiler to take, spoilers on lesswrong never seem to work.
It might be a browser compatibility issue?
This should be spoilered. I typed it, and didn’t copy paste it.