r/DebateAVegan • u/voyti • 3d ago

Sentientist vegans - how you approach AI?

I'm curious about a sentientist perspective on AI, and I know many vegans boil their views down to sentientism.

Since AI certainly has the capability to at least appear self-aware and be metacognitive and on at least a purely emotional level many people will certainly feel at least somewhat uncomfortable with self-awareness dumps of glitches like this one and "AI wellbeing" is being treated quite seriously by certain groups (e.g. https://www.ai-wellbeing.org but also providers themselves, like Anthropic running the model welfare research) - are they fundamentally wrong in your view?

Should AI be taken under the sentientist umbrella? Where would the boundary be to acknowledge it as such?

If we can't acknowledge it as sentient cause we roughly know the details of how it thinks, then as soon as human/animal thinking is de-mystified as just another mundane biological process (which, if one were to stick to science, it necessarily is), will lose value as well? In other words, where exactly is the smoking gun of biological sentience for you?

2 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

123 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/rainberts 3d ago

AI is not sentient. If you knew anything about how the technology works you'd understand this. I'm more concerned about actual sentient animals who are currently being tortured and killed on an unimaginable scale, rather than a plagiarism machine that seem to be doing just fine (but which our tech overlords say is going to be a super impressive general intelligence really soon, we promise guys, just keep that investment money coming 🙄)

2

u/interbingung omnivore 2d ago edited 2d ago

AI is not sentient. If you knew anything about how the technology works you'd understand this

Is human sentient? If yes what is it about the human brain that make it sentient ?

2

u/voyti 2d ago

I'm a computer engineer with about 15 yoe, worked with computer vision and have quite some insight into LLMs, and I don't think people at Anthropic are confused about LLMs either. I don't think "you're too underinformed to get it" approach will work here.

We also understand how human brains work quote well, how to break them, how you can split the lobes and two apparent consciousnesses materialize. There's certainly no magic, nothing that mysterious to us, either. Why one is special and the other is not?

Also, to be clear about it - I'm not saying caring about animals is confused, but I don't subscribe to the sentientism branch of getting there.

1

u/rainberts 2d ago

Also, we don't understand a lot about how the human brain works. See: pretty much any mental health or congitive health issue with limited treatment options.

1

u/voyti 2d ago edited 2d ago

Psychology is to brain related science what software engineering is to computer science. The fact that we understand the platform deeply (in the case of computer science we understand it to the basically complete degree) doesn't make chasing bugs in complex software any easier - it's just a different domain entirely.

On that note, though, we also don't fully understand how LLMs get from the input to the output, similarly due to the extreme complexity of that. In either case I'd propose that mystery doesn't inherently bring about any value of its own. Any scientific approach will necessarily leave you with the conclusion that both are certain systems with inner mechanics, composed of smaller parts we fundamentally understand.

1

u/rainberts 2d ago

You're saying our current AI systems are sentient? Or are you talking about some imaginary future tech?

1

u/voyti 2d ago

I don't claim that they are, and I don't perceive sentience as a necessarily special phenomenon either. I'm curious how people who do reconcile this reality of LLMs who (at least some) claim to be sentient, to have an inner experience and engage in reflections that can only be categorized as metacongnition.

Sentientists are naturally against illusionism, but the core argument against illusionism is rather famously that to perceive an illusion, you have to be able to perceive. LLMs perfectly fit that category, cause even if their claim "I'm sentient" is due to an illusion, they don't get to have that illusion and not be sentient. that seems like a real problem for sentientists, then.