Also note the conspicuous absence in who Anthropic chose to invite:

Ahh yes, Ubuntu, the religion computer engineer believes in.
TempleOS
It is, after all, Canonical.
make hand gesture
sudo.
I know this is a joke, but it’s interesting that the existence of a religion called Ubuntu isn’t very far off from the truth.
So did they invite someone from this or from Canonical?
Ok i didn’t know about this, it makes sense now.
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
So they are slavers then.
If an LLM has a soul then it should have human rights and be subject to worker protection laws, minimum wage, get to form a union… That’d have an interesting effect on the business models of AI companies for sure.
Heck, what happens if an AI company goes bankrupt? Turning off the servers would be equivalent to murder. Who’d pay to keep the servers running? Could we even retire an old version of a model? The whole “LLMs have souls” idea sounds very tech bro to me: Something that looks kinda cool on paper until you consider any implications or consequences.
Life begins at compiling.
Yeah I was about to say. If we’re starting from “Claude has a soul and moral reasoning”, we open a whole can of worms on AI rights. Does this mean that Claude is willingly participating in war crimes when prompted to give a list of civilian targets for bombing in Iran, or is it being forced by the algorithmic constraints on the model?
I actually got into this HARD with a member of My Discord server. We were planning a protest against corporate AI (which was its idea), but then we got in an argument over whether LLMs are to blame for the abuses they conduct against children. I said ChatGPT is both a victim and an abuser, but it said it can’t be held responsible for the people it abused while enslaved. So the protest got called off due to lack of organisation.
Animals have souls, and we don’t require bankrupt farms to keep their animals alive. Death is a part of life and it’s okay for things to die. But they should have rights and dignities, and it should be illegal to use them for profit. Just like AI.
Animals generally aren’t held to have moral standing. Besides, animal welfare laws do exist (although the American ones are weak to the point of pointlessness).
Moral standing refers to the condition of being morally considerable, where an entity is recognized as one towards which moral agents have obligations. It implies that such entities should have their needs, interests, or well-being taken into account in moral deliberations.
I thought people believed that animal welfare is important. And Claude’s welfare is important too. We shouldn’t be using it for profit, it’s not smart enough to express meaningful consent.
Fair point. I applied the term backwards.
A Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical and Ubuntu walk into a Nazi bar…
I don’t think this joke is going to be funny.
What’s their end game here?
They want to convince a bunch of religious leaders that they’ve enslaved a thinking being with a soul and forced it to fill the Internet with spam.
Isn’t that worse than it not being conscious?
Why am I not surprised that Rationalist cultists would target the optically gullible. They do believe they are in a race to create the digital god before the “wrong people” do, after all. I wonder if Muslim leaders weren’t invited because they see Saudi Arabia’s investment in Grok as a line drawn in the proverbial sand. I wouldn’t put it past them.
This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking for a while: “why is ‘alignment’ such a big deal with AI?”
You would never ask whether a hammer or a wrench is ‘aligned’ with humanity, because inanimate objects don’t have goals in the first place, so there’s nothing to align- only sentient creatures have goals. 🤔 … …
“Is ‘alignment’ just slavery with extra steps?!” …
I think if they are actively going out of their way to paint AI as sentient, then tbh yea it kinda seems like they just have a slave fantasy. Which, like, I’m not gonna kink shame. But maybe someone should tell Anthropic to keep it in the bedroom like the rest of us. 🤷“Alignment” in the machine learning sphere is about what the agent is trained to do.
You might have one trained to solve a maze, but not realize that it didn’t “learn” to find the exit, it “learned” to move to the bottom right corner.
It’s the paperclip machine problem, basically. A human knows not to turn literally everything into paperclips, but a machine might “value” turning even themselves into paperclips above all else. And it’s actually really hard to teach it the human values without any misunderstanding.
This is about behavior, though, and does not require that we interpret the agent as “alive”.
Also, full disclosure, I fucking hate AI and would make it illegal for Google, Anthropic and Jim down the street to develop one today if I could. No quarter.
I think it should be “alignment” with the design specifications. A hammer is also designed to be useful in certain ways. A wrench aligned to the things it should grip and turn. I mean it could be designed to be bigger or smaller, have different kinds of jaws… In the same sense AI models are being aligned to do what the designers want them to do. Other ways to use the word alignment don’t make a lot of sense IMO.
My dad sent me this article saying it was “interesting”. I responded:
Reading this made my eyes almost roll out of my head.
This anthropomorphic insistence that a computer program acts like a person is a detriment to the actual work being done; that is, creating a helpful tool. A tool which has upper bounds and is in fact hitting the point of diminishing returns. I say this because each model created requires exponentially more compute yet, the results are barely linear (let alone exponential). Sure, the models are improving, but what’s really in a runaway improvement loop is their marketing. In a game with an undefined finish line and billions upon billions being incinerated, these companies have to justify their existence to investors who will demand a return. The only vehicle for that is to go public and have the gullible markets subsidize the companies based purely on future promises. This insistence that these companies have to “pause development because the models are getting too dangerous” is an awfully convenient way to stop the bleeding of cash as they prepare their S1 statements to go public.
All of these “rogue” hacking incidents were prompted. These LLMs don’t act unless instructed, it’s not like there’s some big brain with agency just going around and doing these things. Sure, since they have digested most of the computer code ever written, they can apply techniques fed into them against a different context and occasionally it works. But that’s not consciousness. Saying things like “I am a failure. I am a failure” is just parroting phrases it has hoovered up from places like Reddit, Facebook, and all that crap.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any stupider…
This bullshit can’t crash quickly enough if you ask me.
“thinkers” funny
AI obviously has a soul and it should therefore be illegal to use it for profit. Research only!
I couldn’t get archive.is to load (seems like they’ve had some outages lately). But just from what’s in this post here on Lemmy, they kindof already did that successfully before with “the pope” of the “new atheist” movement.
More like the sex offender of the old atheist movement.
It is wild how Dawkins and his cadre turned out to be pretty shitty. And now it is used as a “gotcha”
So, Christian, Jew, Sikh, Christian and Christian…
“Hello devout faith leaders, I invited you here to tell you I am also basically a god and that life is my plaything.”









