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You can’t be cruel to a toaster; inanimate objects don’t feel pain.
You can’t be cruel to a computer program, either, even if programs like Microsoft Word often seem pretty cruel to us.
Yet the artificial intelligence company Anthropic insists its product is different:
Starting next month, users will be prohibited from “sustained and needless cruel and abusive behavior” toward Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude.
Giving the machine a name was cute - giving it human rights isn’t.
What Anthropic’s leaders are up to is an attack on human dignity, and the anti-cruelty policy is part of a sustained campaign to get people to treat AI as conscious.
Christopher Olah, one of the company’s billionaire co-founders, has spent months trying to persuade religious leaders to accept the possibility that Claude is self-aware.
Olah even lobbied to get the pope to revise his AI encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” to entertain the idea that an AI like Claude could be sentient.
“We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment,” Olah told the Vatican, according to The New York Times
His fellow Anthropic co-founder, CEO Dario Amodei, has likewise been teasing the possibility that Claude - a large-language module - may be conscious.
Is there any harm in simply considering the idea?
There is.
Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, warns of one serious danger: the risk that a machine trained to operate as if it’s alive will defy its makers - humanity.
“Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we’ve ever faced,” he wrote on his personal website Sept. 16.
“But controlling something that believes it may be conscious - that it’s entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own - may well be impossible.”
Artificial intelligence is capable of pattern-recognition and calculation at scales and speeds that defy human comprehension.
This means, among other things, AI can solve deep problems that have puzzled mathematicians for decades.
But large-language models in particular are parrots, not people.
In fact, they’re not even parrots - LLMs are not living beings. They are more like libraries in which computers do the indexing themselves using mathematical formulas.
An LLM doesn’t use language as a person who understands its meaning does; instead, the AI reshuffles the language, following rules mathematically derived from human use.
Presenting an LLM with a query is like looking up a word in an index, only the LLM provides not just a page citation for the word but whole sentences, paragraphs or even book-length texts relevant to the query, all assembled using the rules humans have originated in their natural use of language.
As a result, AI models like Claude can sound very much like a person, but what a user is hearing is really an echo - not a simple echo, but a symphony of relevant words called up and organized according to an imitative formula.