Anthropic bans ‘abusive or cruel behavior’ toward Claude

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1452445/anthropic-bans-abusive-or-cruel-behavior-toward-claude

Maybe this is part of the campaign trying to convince people that their chatbot has developed a consciousness. Recently they even tried to convince the pope that Claude is a conscious being: https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/anthropic-tried-persuade-pope-ai-131853948.html

They are less arguing for people to think the model is conscious, and more to avoid people prematurely claiming certainty it is not (like the Pope did). From their view, the research keeps leading to surprising (to them) results at odds with high confidence disclaiming of potential consciousness (according to several of the many, many differing definitions of that term).

If the LLM is conscious then terminating a session is murder.

Is killing a pig murder?

What about putting someone under general anesthesia?

(It was a nice try at a reductio ad absurrum fallacy, but those tend to kind of suck, just fyi.)

Also, personally I’d say that given the general poor standing of consciousness research in humans across both neurological and philosophical domains, the much more important and relevant question than whether models are conscious (a fool’s errand to debate) is whether or not they are simulating consciousness. Lots of reasons engaging with the “as if” conscious makes sense for the latter even if the former is false.