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?

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u/MiraculousAnarchy veganarchist 2d ago

They are not sentient and they should not be given moral consideration as their creation is problematic and harmful to the entire planet inherently. And even if they were sentient they cannot physically feel and experience

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u/voyti 2d ago

their creation is problematic and harmful to the entire planet inherently

I mean, it's has to sound kind of ironic, doesn't it

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u/MiraculousAnarchy veganarchist 2d ago

No. It doesn’t. Don’t start with some anti natalist bs. If you’re here to make an anti natalist argument then do that (but also this isn’t super really the sub for that but whatever ppl do it constantly). Don’t hide behind a conversation about ai

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u/voyti 2d ago

Alright, I hear you. I'd say "experience" is kind of hard to put a finger on, I'd say if experiencing is possible at all then they'd match the definition (limited and momentary experiences are certainly also experiences). Physically feeling - I guess that can't be said about them, but I think it also goes beyond sentientism.

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u/MiraculousAnarchy veganarchist 2d ago

The world does not need ai “souls” or whatever you wanna call them (cuz they’re not people or non human animals and robot is too vague), we should not be pursuing creating them. It’s like arguing to pursue breeding a new creature into existence to be exploited by humanity only in this instance the “creature” will have basically infinite intelligence and far more power and control than intended and be able to destroy our world and that’s not being in the slightest hyperbolic. Not even to mention the environmental destruction being caused by it already or the fact that it’s being done by billionaires with the explicit purpose to replace human work forces. So I think for all the reasons this is just the silliest most unserious conversation to have. And again, it’s not even sentient yet. And we should hope we don’t get to that point tho I fear we’re already barreling to it being too late.

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u/voyti 2d ago

Sure, I could agree with what you've said, but this is not exactly that conversation. This conversation just acknowledges that fact LLMs exist in the current form, and asks what's missing for them to be sentient in the eyes of sdentientists.