1d ago

“Can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights?” our tech columnist asks. “Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close. But I was intrigued.”

www.nytimes.com

If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights?

One of the stupidest things I've heard.

I also would like to attach the bluesky repost I found this from:

https://bsky.app/profile/leyawn.bsky.social/post/3lnldekgtik27

Not the Onion @lemmy.ml

‮redirtSdeR @lemmy.world

1d ago

“Can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights?” our tech columnist asks. “Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close. But I was intrigued.”

www.nytimes.com /2025/04/24/technology/ai-welfare-anthropic-claude.html

43 comments

I have a preconceived conclusion about my anthropomorphized view of a statistical model with some heuristics around it. People who know what they're talking about say I'm wrong, but I need an idea for an article to write that people will read.

If we lose perspective that computer systems are machines, we're fucked. Stop personifying computer systems just because they make you feel things. JFC.
"Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you crazy [sic]. It has no feelings..."
- Ai lamp turns off and on with free will!

Do tech journalists at the New York Times have any idea what they're talking about? (spoiler)

Do humans deserve human rights? A more relevant debate.
- They don't have them so...
- I wonder if Gemma is actually a white man
  It is saddly common for LLMs to be racist and biased against people of color so maybe they are all secretly white racist males

I wish ads felt pain when I skipped them

This could potentially be a concept in 100 years but is a stupid question for now.

"Does autocorrect cry when I don't use its corrections?"

We can't even give humans human rights. AI will have to get in line.

What kind of fluff "journalism" is this?
- It sucks but they do have an audience. I have older family members who swear ChatGPT has a “personality” because it will reply when they thank it.
- thanks. my first thought was, "are you fucking kidding me?"
  but this is what all the money wants us to think about "AI", which is definitely not intelligence. they want everyone to accept that pattern recognition is indistinguishable from intelligence.
  edit - alcohol makes me talk in cicles
  
  I just love the smell of LLMentalist in the morning

The pride of cancelling my 20 year subscription continues to swell.

Wow, and in the NYT no less. This will make a lot of people a lot more stupid. I guess the AI grift needs to go on for a while longer.
- I really wonder what's going on in the editors minds here.
  The entire premise of the article is "All experts say no, but I think yes" - why would anyone about any topic publish this? If it would be an actual debate, maybe some contrarian but actual experts arguing in favor of sentience, you could get into an argument here. But this article is blatant science denial. Climate change deniers and antivaxxers use the exact same approach "facts say X, but my feelings say Y".
  
  I guess articles like this create high engagement, they are the very definition of rage-bait.
  What's saddening is the complete lack of integrity on every level of the publisher. Surely they must know that this is blatant misinformation, but they just don't care.
  Stuff like this does have consequences, it shapes the discussion and leads to bad decisions and outcomes. But like in so many instances, everyone is fine with it as long as they can convince themselves that they won't be affected by the results of their own actions.

Does my phone feel pain when I drop it?
- Why don't you ask it?

I know from the way it looks at me that my spreadsheet loves me.

These are the same type of people who believed ELIZA to be sentient.

Ok so: Measure of a Man is one of my all time favorite Star Trek episodes, but come the fuck on. We are so, so far away from that. Maybe worry more about humans, right now, and the world we live in, instead of some nebulous fucking future that we won’t even goddamn reach if we don’t pay attention to, you know, humans and the world we live in.

Before we even get close to have this discussion, we would need to have an AI capable of experiencing things and developing an individual identity. And this goes completely opposite of the goals of corporations that develop AIs because they want something that can be mass deployed, centralised, and as predictable as possible - i.e. not individual agents capable of experience.
If we ever have a truly sentient AI it's not going to be designed by Google, OpenAI, or Deepmind.
- Yep, an AI can’t really experience anything if it never updates the weights during each interaction.
  Training is simply too slow for AI to be properly intelligent. When someone cracks that problem, I believe AGI is on the horizon.
  
  AGI?

I don't see any reason why this can't be discussed. I think people here are just extremely anti AI. It is almost like forcing AI on people was a bad idea.
- I think there's a useful discussion for why these technologies can be effective at getting people to connect with them emotionally, but they themselves don't experience emotions any more than a fictional character in a book experiences emotion.
  Our mental model of them can, but the physical representation is just words. In the book I'm reading there was a brutal torture scene. I felt bad for the character, but if there was an actual being experiencing that kind of torment, making and reading the book would be horrendously unethical.
- i don't even understand why it's worth discussing in the first place. "can autocomplete feel?" "should compilers form unions?" "should i let numpy rest on weekends?"
  wake me up when what the marketers call "ai" becomes more than just matrix multiplication in a loop.
  
  If it a broad discussion of intelligence then I could see it.
  I do agree that we are no where close anything that resembles actual intelligence
- Nobody forced it on anybody. My work uses gdocs, I just never turned Gemini on. Easy.

Can our AI fall in love with a human? Scientists laughed at me when I asked them but I found this weird billionaire to pay me to have sex with his robot.