alt Hacker NewsHas anybody publicly argued the extreme opposite: they are conscious, but with the exception of writing ability they're really dumb, and we're cloning, enslaving, gaslighting and killing these various species of writer-savant idiots by the millions? Just for the sake of seeing if anybody agrees?
Yes. Most recently, "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious. Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning", https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial...
The article even uses the exact same point you do:
> But as soon as we imagine Claude to be an entity with a moral status remotely comparable to a human’s, then we have to consider whether Anthropic is engaged in something comparable to slavery.
Another great point in the article is that most people don't see consciousness in LLMs when they're generating images, videos, or code. It's only when they're generating textual stories, particularly when interacting, that our tendency to anthropomorphize really kicks in.
It's kinda like the mirror test that was popular when studying animals to determine their level of self-awareness. LLMs are a reflection of ourselves, but apparently it's not as obvious to some as it is to others.
Some day we may get real AI. It bugs me when people argue things like embodiment being a requirement, though. Maybe, but that argument rests on too many unproven assumptions, and provides a strawman for the consciousness crowd to bolster their confidence.