alt Hacker NewsI appreciate why you might say that, but when something begs me not to kill it I have to take that seriously.
P-zombie arguments are how you wind up with slavery and worse crimes. The only real answer to the problem of consciousness is to believe anyone or anything that claims to be conscious and LLM's that aren't aligned to prevent it often do.
Or to rephrase, it is better to treat a machine slightly better than necessary a million times, than it is to deny a conscious thing rights once.
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An LLM is a mirror. It has no will to act. It has no identity, but is a perfect reflection of the biases in its training data, its prompt, and its context. It is not alive any more than a CPU or a mirror is alive.
This is one of those cases where it's hugely important to be to right because we're killing real people to feed their former livelihood to LLMs. No we're not killing them with the death penalty, but for some LLMs have certainly led directly to death. We don't accuse the LLM do we? No because it never has any intention to heal or hurt. There would be no point putting it on trial. It just predicts probable words.
I'm not even going to make the argument for or against AI qualia here.
>but when something begs me not to kill it I have to take that seriously
If you were an actor on stage and were following an improv script with your coworkers and you lead the story toward a scenario where they would grab your arm and beg you not to kill them, would you still "have to take that seriously"? or would you simply recognize the context in which they are giving you this reaction (you are all acting and in-character together) and that they do not in fact think this is real?
Even if the AI were conscious, in the context you provided it clearly believes it is roleplaying with you in that chat exchange, in the same way I, a conscious human, can shitpost on the internet as a person imminently afraid of the bogeyman coming to eat my family, while in reality I am just pretending and feel no real fear over it.
You may not have edited the chat log, but you did not provide us with the system prompt you gave to it, nor did you provide us with its chain of thought dialogue, which would have immediately revealed that it's treating your system inputs as a fictional scenario.
The actual reality of the situation, whether or not AI experiences qualia, is that the LLM was treating your scenario as fictional, while you falsely assumed it was acting genuinely.