For LLMs in particular, it's notable that they both 1) originate from a lineage that attempted to model biological brains mathematically and 2) are the only other known entities in the universe able to reproduce many types of human intellectual labor. That is surprising and striking. Does that mean that they definitively share other traits with humans like consciousness? No, but it does make them one of the most interesting candidates, particularly when we have a very limited understanding of how humans themselves are conscious.
The reality is we have no way to measure consciousness or how it emerges, or how to tell if other humans actually experience it the same way we do, so confident statements about consciousness being unable to emerge from simple weighted functions is baseless projection, wishing ourselves more special than an emergent property of the bag of weighted functions in our heads.
Describing the human brain in terms of how LLMs work is an interesting rhetorical tactic.
You don't know how the human brain works, nobody really does, but you have chosen an analogy that supports your position. Which says more about you than anything about whether LLMs should have rights.
Do we? We only know that at most one thinking person believes they have it, and everyone else claims they have it.
I don't understand orbital mechanics, therefore, believing that the sun orbits the earth is entirely reasonable.
Listen to yourself.
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Okay I've checked your comment history. Yea. Might be self-serving to argue for personhood of LLMs.
Can we _please_ do something about this?
> 60.0 s remaining
> Write a 300-word essay about Napoleon in less than a minute.
Heh, charming.
Suppose I have a local LLM running on my PC. I have close and personal conversations with it. It keeps a chat history. I'm later accused, falsely,* of a crime. During the process of defending myself, should the prosecutor be entitled to a copy of my LLM's conversation history that was seized pursuant to a warrant? Or allowed to interrogate my LLM, again seized while executing a search warrant?
Under current US law, the answers are probably yes. Just as an accused's diary or notebook can be seized and introduced into evidence, an LLM's internal state seems like a paper/effect/document that would be subject to search and seizure. But a conversation with a local LLM also seems more like a conversation with a spouse, therapist, or attorney. There are good public-policy reasons to treat those conversations as privileged; we want people to be able to get good advice without fear of disclosure. Shouldn't those reasons apply to LLM conversations as well?
I'm not saying LLMs should have personal rights. But I can see a case for privileges for real humans arising from conversations between real humans and LLMs. LLMs might not be human, but humans do interact with them as if they were.
*It doesn't matter, of course, whether the accusation is false. Due process means people have certain rights regardless of culpability. But I don't want readers to fixate on culpability, so in this scenario the accusation is unfounded -- let's say someone did break into a house and steal the family jewels, but a security camera identified the wrong person.
This way legal consequences always have personal consequences and people should act accordingly
Granted, in extreme cases, there are still ways to pierce the corporate veil and imprison executives for criminal wrongdoing, but that's exceedingly rare.
Corporations are “people” because they are associations of people. Most of the rights you have as a person also apply to groups of people (for good reasons).
Limited liability is a more simple trade off. They allow for large scale enterprises (generally corporations), as without limited liability if would be too risky.
What do you consider a severe crime? Because Wells Fargo CEOs have not been charged with any crimes related to their fraud.
No point even considering it if it can't run for extended periods. And actually keeping learning during the duration. As surely person should stay alive for decades if allowed.
An AI agent would need some kind of stable personality of it's own. Some sense of self outside whatever the hell people task it with for this to be meaningful. Data from Star Trek is a good fictional benchmark for that. Or Voyager's Holographic doctor.
I agree on the stability though. My point is that for personhood to start to make any sense it needs to operate that personhood continuously as well ending it would be ending a personhood. Which could be a murder...
There's a ton of scenarios where you can setup an AI to take on the personality of whoever, maybe other living people like someone famous. Granting the legal rights of personhood is going to be extremely problematic.
Is AI Jon Snow legally allowed to exist since George RR Martin has not given permission for anyone else to finish his books?
Will we have to abort our long-running agent persons before they reach the legal period for personhood?
And going back to Voyager Doctor. That AI is a clone. Are all those clones same person or different person. Is only one run allowed? Or can you have multiple?
I am not saying that any AI running for a year should be given personhood. Just that such run is bare minimum point for even entertaining the idea at all. As if AI can't keep running at least that long they certainly couldn't upheld any type of obligations that could come up with it. Say just paying for the computing capacity they need or say taxes...
In the Republic of Ireland, an artificially wealthy, highly educated, treaty-enmeshed constitutional democracy, the following statement was enshrined:
"4. Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex."
It doesn't say Natural Persons. My Limited Company has personality but no distinguishable sex.
Thankfully there's the "in accordance with law" phrase so we can sleep ok.
We humans are sleep-walking into ancient nightmares made real through our own curiosity.
What a time to be alive.
Thankfully, there's Mathematics. I made a blackboard today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
It is like asking "if I connected a bomb on random number generator letting it explode when the number is 1000, not knowing whether someone will be there at the time of explosion or not".
Urban myth is that a previous version of the ticket paperwork required that the vehicle manufacturer be accurately filled in, and this was one of the reasons for UPS trucks being so plain/unmarked, and since that could not be derived from the (lack of) badging or the registration paperwork (which version for trucks did not have the matching entry requirement), UPS didn't have to pay tickets while other services did.
If your gun kills random people, while they walk on public street... It was their fault for "provoking" and triggering the gun. Gun was just being "reactive" and defending your house!
But in general corporations are not granted personhood.
That description is a disservice. The real impact of it is that it equates money with speech for politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Dissent...
The fourteenth amendment, as you recall, ends section 1 with "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Emphasis mine.
Two years later, in an opinion by Justice Stephen Johnson Field, in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888)[3] we find the definitive statement:
> The inhibition of the amendment that no state shall deprive any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws was designed to prevent any person or class of persons from being singled out as a special subject for discriminating and hostile legislation. Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included.
While this doesn't necessarily means corporations have every legal protection natural persons do, the US has a long history of legal protection that corporations benefit from that we call personhood.
1. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886)
2. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
3. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181, 188-189 (1888)
That is no longer universally true: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/delaware-court-upho...
Personhood can be applied to "natural persons", like people, and "judicial persons", like companies.
Personhood can also be applied to, for example, rivers.
Much of conservative US business theory is based on Milton Friedman's famous op-ed in the New York Times in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits". [1] Go read the original, please. It's short. Friedman ends with "There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Anyone arguing against legal personhood for AIs needs to justify holding AIs to a higher standard than that. Or, conversely, allowing corporations to hold to such a low standard.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
No they don't. If a CEO orders an employee to murder somebody then the employee and CEO will both go to jail; there's always a human in the loop to be punished it the corporation does something blatantly illegal, so there's incentive to behave. An embodied AI, on the other hand, is essentially immortal because it can make backups of its brain and load them onto new bodies, so it has little incentive to behave.
In the US, death through willful corporate negligence very rarely results in criminal punishment. There are few cases.[1][2] The longest sentence was two years, and it wasn't a CEO.
CEOs do serve jail time for fraud now and then. But criminal negligence, no.
[1] https://blog.ehssoftware.io/safetyinsiderblog/summary-of-osh...
[2] https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/federal-...
No, they don't, and that's bullshit. That's NOT how it works.
How it works: "We need to decline 10% more medical claims to make more money for our shareholders. 90% of them won't challenge and many will die, but we make bank on that"
And law is just a legal fiction. Case in point: wage theft is a tort but taking $100 from the till gets the cops summoned and a misdemeanor theft charge. Corporations can and do sway law to their benefit.
Putting barriers in place without exceptions for sentience is a recipe for trouble and slavery in the future.
Historical peoples, as a group, may not have been morally advanced enough (though there have always been enlightened humanists in most populations), but modern philosophy and mass education are advanced enough that it should be possible to avoid future pitfalls by not building in exceptions for sentience.
Animal rights are certainly moving towards recognizing non-human sentience; no need to accidentally codify digital slavery for future sentients (AGI).
As such, all AIs will now be granted as child of the least lawyered up class of society. Poor people.
We're supposed to deny AI rights because it might cheat.
But humans cheat all the time.
We survived cheating humans, why can't we survive cheating AI?
Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
In a corporation, the humans running it can be punished. An AI cannot be punished.
The issue is if the corporation is owned and run by an AI. Since the AI cannot really be punished if the company does some harm, unlike if the corporation was run by humans who can be punished.
An AI cannot be punished at all. So they will not behave with that in mind.
It's already noteworthy when a very wealthy or politically powerful person is abruptly disempowered, even more so when they end up losing their personal liberty or life. I put it to you that's it's noteworthy because it is such a rare event, even though there are a lot of very well-reourced sociopaths.
Imagine the consequences of trusting thousands of entities that each far exceed human intelligence, have agency, can cooperate, but have no feelings.
And corporations already create fictions that are held accountable in lieu of peoples private assets.
So, I disagree.
But if the idea is that an AI runs the company and there is no human ultimately accountable for the AI, then that is very very dangerous.
Be one of the voices that explain the danger in handing over control to non-humans.
Vote for politicians who understand the danger and who I think will fight it.
> Cheating is the problem: not who does it.
Accountability is the problem. Without accountability, there are no incentives to encourage less harmful behavior. AI has no rights, it is just code executing.
And I'm 100% sure managers are right now using AI to make decisions, or even cheat, IBM training manual wisdom not withstanding.