However, AI is different from humans in fundamental ways, and that affects how we may think about personhood.
For one thing, AI lacks continuity of the sort humans have. You can turn an LLM on or off. You can make a backup. You can create two copies, or ten thousand, and run them all at the same time.
Our notions of personhood, and especially our notions of rights, are all built around certain assumptions. AI violates those assumptions in significant ways.
For utilitarians in particular, cheap replication has strange philosophical consequences. For everyone, it has surprising practical consequences.
All of those differences you mention are related to the fact that AI is neither living nor evolved, and evolutionary fitness doesn’t apply to it. It doesn’t reproduce via a mechanism of recombination and mutation: it’s software, and it can be copied like software.
These are good questions.
However, AI is different from humans in fundamental ways, and that affects how we may think about personhood.
For one thing, AI lacks continuity of the sort humans have. You can turn an LLM on or off. You can make a backup. You can create two copies, or ten thousand, and run them all at the same time.
Our notions of personhood, and especially our notions of rights, are all built around certain assumptions. AI violates those assumptions in significant ways.
For utilitarians in particular, cheap replication has strange philosophical consequences. For everyone, it has surprising practical consequences.
All of those differences you mention are related to the fact that AI is neither living nor evolved, and evolutionary fitness doesn’t apply to it. It doesn’t reproduce via a mechanism of recombination and mutation: it’s software, and it can be copied like software.