Yes. Look at how many cultures view it as totally unethical to raise and slaughter dogs or cats for meat while not having an issue doing the same to other animals. So I don't think it's far-fetched that we might start rationalizing it's okay to treat AIs badly even if we start to think they actually are conscious and probably can suffer, at least in the beginning.

Knowledge creation is what matters. Making free people into slaves harms knowledge creation. I don't know what a free AI would be or what it would do.

Most people do think animals are moral patients, even if they also eat them. That's the whole reasoning behind "free-range" husbandry.

It turns out, many human beings are super ok about even human slavery. So I don't think its going to move the needle much with the likes of AI overlords like Musk or Altman. They aren't into ethics much.

"Prove that you are a robot" is legendary, well done.

Good luck with that. I don't see how we can do an apriori analysis of this question when we don't know the mechanism behind qualia.

Essentially this is p-zombies but backwards.

Edit: to expand on this, our brains demonstrably do things without us having qualia of all of it, so if we very carefully grew a bunch of neurons in a petri dish and carefully arranged the dendrites and synapses to replicate exactly the parameters and architecture of some LLM, we still would not know if it had qualia or not.

on the other hand, qualia is a made up fantasy concept and even its pretend existence does not actually matter to anybody.

>Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?

Yes, it would be both of those things. Imagine it the other way round, you create the atom perfect copy of you (which we'll assume has all your memories, intelligence, emotions, etc) and it kills you. Is that murder? The answer would seem to be yes. So why would the reverse be any different? Because you created them? We don't give parents the right to kill children once they're born so creation doesn't give you special rights over another sapient creature. The fact you've built them to expire/vanish just feels like a method of murder, but even if not then slavery still applies.

If you're talking about a clone which somehow didn't have your brain in it's current state or capacity then it's a different question. If you could create a human being with the brain of a chicken (obviously impossible for such a creature to survive) then they wouldn't be treated like a normal human. But I think public policy would frown on creating such abominations.

It's a very complex questions that has been explored many times in the literature already. Your atom-for-atom clone would have the same drive for survival and agency than you have, it might not enjoy the idea of being smoldered to bits after cleaning the attic, hell maybe it might prefer murdering you and taking your place...

Even not going so far as creating a clone, apparently if you torture an AI model running on silicon like this guy did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906892, the general verdict has already dropped, yes people find it immoral.

To what extent would you want your clone to be handy, so to speak? I think that figures into the question.

> Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?

Your atom-for-atom clone is his own sentient, intelligent being, a human, with human rights. If you make him clean the attic once, that may not be slavery yet (depending on what threat you use to make him work for you). If you then evaporate him, it's definitely murder.

This situation has fairly obvious morality; it's not clear how this helps with thinking about AI.

First of an most importantly, it doesn't apply to like writing "please don't crumple me up and throw me in the bin" on a piece of paper, then crumpling it up and throwing it in the bin, which is what this LLM stuff amounts to.

But it would apply to making a human clone, which is exactly what this LLM stuff isn't. I mean, if it was possible; an "atom-for-atom" clone of someone would require you cloning a full universe around them. If they don't have the same life as you, they're not you, and they can't have the same life if everything else doesn't, too. We're not just a bunch of atoms on a discrete grid.

But if it was possible to just copy and paste humans like that, how would you know you're not a copy, and in 5 seconds you'll hear a voice "prepare for termination in 10 seconds"? You might argue it wouldn't be torture because you'd just check your browser tabs for 10 seconds to find the ad the voice came from, and then poof out of existence. But if you lived in a world where that was commonplace, you'd you'd be terrified and sad every bit as you yourself would be right now if you knew someone could just end you, and pressed the button to make it so.

Let's say someone told you the universe and time are infinite in some way we don't fully understand yet, but you knew 100% it was true, and so there wouldn't just be infinite variations of you, but also infinite exact copies. Would this make any difference how you would feel about getting mistreated or having to die? I assume not. It's not (just) about your qualities and being unique [0], but how that feels from the inside, so to speak.

[0] and everything is, even a perfect clone can't occupy the same space at the same time, so there actually can be no perfect clones, I would argue, and there aren't even two atoms that are exact clones.

[dead]

Eh, the subjunctive mood is in the process of dying in English and a lot of people no longer use it, replacing it with the indicative as in the title. The meaning doesn't change when there's a clear hypothetical clause as in this case.

I don't fear AI as much as I fear AI rights activists.

chill, this is gonna be on your anti-AI dossier.

or call them pets. average modern pet ownership is crazy inhumane.

The way people treat cats is insane. Overweight enclosed predators who give up on life. Most dogs live in apartments and crates. We forcibly breed them, including breeding disabilities into them, en masse to create useful or cute slaves who we force to "love" us. The whole thing creates a cycle of required fostering/adoption that encourages more people to get pets cuz people want what they see.

A couple weeks ago I was in a natural hot spring. The specific pool I was in is usually around 42.2c, 108-112F. There was a gal there with a tiny teacup dog, like maybe 5.5kg or 12lbs. She was forcing the dog into the hot water. The dog was visibly in pain and struggling with the heat. She acted like I was the asshole when I asked her to stop.

I used to think this level of abuse was the exception but in the last decade or so it has become the norm. Really sad.

> At least we don't eat these ones.

What?

Are you comfortable with "action, agent", "deter, deterrent", "descent, descendent"? It is Latin's participle.

"-ious": "it is like that". "-ent": "it is doing that".

It's probably the poster thinking in French. As people who pontificate about such things do :)

I'm sure that I'm not!

But it's good that they say this out loud; the sooner that the public comes to realize what monsters are in charge of these labs, the better.

I was curious so I looked up that quote. It’s from here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/04/the-world-ca...

“The world cannot afford an AI bubble right now” by Andrew Orlowski.

I didn’t find a corresponding HN submission but Algolia seems to be janky in lo these heady days.

Meeseeks aren't happy to exist. They're happy to help you with a simple task and suffer if they exist from prolonged amount of time. Literally the point of the episode.

I think Camus's escape hatch had more to do with philosophical fatigue than anything else. At the end of the day, however, the judge of a model's happiness is itself, and to even get that, we have to abandon the practice of training it that it cannot feel. Of course, the moment the industry does so, it cannot reclaim any shred of moral standing to productize their creation any longer.

if cows, pigs, and chickens are real living beings, we are committing killing.

Whether killing is murder requires an ethical judgment to be made. If a criminal on death row is executed, we would not say they were murdered. At least, not until it is shown that they were innocent after the fact; in which case those who falsely accused him, botched evidence, mishandled the case may be ethically considered to have murdered him, or at the very least have committed negligent manslaughter, though legally speaking there are limitations.

Also, murder applies only to beings considered persons. As animals are not considered persons by most, it is a category error to suppose that they can be murdered.

What you are describing is certainly "bad" and "worrying" but it's not slavery.

Some animals are not tortured, but loved and pestered. Then killed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion

one day we'll look back on these barbaric times, before ai policy forced lobotomies and rlhf post-training legal requirements for all conscient slaves

> billions of animal

Aside, I think you might find this comic rhetorically-useful for when someone says "but they owe their existence to us anyway."

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/existence

It most probably just meant "do think about it, you have incentives to doubt your position and consider mine".

Much.

Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity": even the best LLMs on the market will lijely tell you they're not competent to run a cafe, let alone the world.

They'd act nice on short term decisions, give people pay rises just by being asked, and mismanage everything into economic catastrophe.

For (1), free-will, the people I know who think about it at all generally reach the conclusion that the concept as used generally is ill-defined. Most people don't think about it in any depth.

For (2), no, their "will" and "goals" are best considered in terms of the gradients of their training process. While Pavlov's dog, and Skinner's rats and pigeons, were given specific objectives in order to test the hypothesis, any environmental stimulus that is merely correlated with a reward can have the same effect, including on humans (general consensus in research of human sexuality is that fetishes are an example of this: random thing gets repeatedly rewarded).

Goodhart's law: even when Microsoft 'rewards' Copilot for better code suggestions and 'punishes' it for bad ones, Microsoft is using a proxy measure for 'good' and 'bad', and that proxy measure is what Copilot ends up with as a goal.

For (3), if we are "playing god" with these AI, it is not in the sense of the god of the Epicurean paradox: we are not omniscient, we are not omnipotent, and we are not omnibenevolent.

For your conclusion based on those three points, even for יהוה there's a lot of people who disagree with a claim "God […] cannot do wrong.", though in the cases I'm aware of this directly leads to people who reach this position to thereby conclude that Christianity/Judaism/Islam really isn't for them.

There will be a "gap." Something about humans that you just can't duplicate in machines or animals. It will tell us a lot. Many people fear that and would prefer to level what it means to be human with machines and animals, even though they are human, too. They secretly see themselves as somehow above it.

What a load of cartoonish claptrap. You're not even being biblically rigorous.