To be clear, I’m explicitly focusing on the moral subject here, not the object of their actions. When I say “abusing an LLM could injure the abuser’s humanity”, I’m making absolutely no claim about the LLM.
As I said in the previous thread about this:
LLMs aren’t conscious. They can’t feel pain.
But you should treat them kindly. Because even in a consequentialist or deontological frame, your morals rely on developing good habits; but in virtue ethics, moral habits is really all there is.
Sex robots are anthropomorphic in ways LLMs are not, despite how they are coded to respond to us. I agree that treating a sex robot poorly could cause moral injury since it so closely resembles a real human / repeated abuse could cause conflict somewhere in the soul / psyche.
I view “torturing LLMs” in the same way I might view taking on a pest, or dealing with an aggressive invasive species. I’m not losing sleep over the germs / pathogens I kill everyday by washing my hands, the invasive planta I keep from my yard, the termites / cockroaches I prevent against.
The problem is torture is a loaded word because you associate it with something cruel we do to another living thing. These arnt living and thus can’t be torturred so remove whatever moral concern you are worried about.
Poisoning the model is just and there is no such thing as model welfare.
To be clear, I’m explicitly focusing on the moral subject here, not the object of their actions. When I say “abusing an LLM could injure the abuser’s humanity”, I’m making absolutely no claim about the LLM.
As I said in the previous thread about this:
LLMs aren’t conscious. They can’t feel pain.
But you should treat them kindly. Because even in a consequentialist or deontological frame, your morals rely on developing good habits; but in virtue ethics, moral habits is really all there is.
Edit: Very Bad Wizards actually covered this pretty well in this episode from 2018: https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-150-paul-bloom-insisted-that-we-talk-about-sex-robots
Sex robots are anthropomorphic in ways LLMs are not, despite how they are coded to respond to us. I agree that treating a sex robot poorly could cause moral injury since it so closely resembles a real human / repeated abuse could cause conflict somewhere in the soul / psyche.
I view “torturing LLMs” in the same way I might view taking on a pest, or dealing with an aggressive invasive species. I’m not losing sleep over the germs / pathogens I kill everyday by washing my hands, the invasive planta I keep from my yard, the termites / cockroaches I prevent against.
The problem is torture is a loaded word because you associate it with something cruel we do to another living thing. These arnt living and thus can’t be torturred so remove whatever moral concern you are worried about.
Poisoning the model is just and there is no such thing as model welfare.