Interesting article by Alan Kohler with much that could be discussed.
One aspect, for example, Morality.
… The New York Times revealed last week that Anthropic had been trying to instil morality into its AI model, Claude…
Christopher Olah, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, had been hosting private meetings with religious thinkers from around the world, with non-disclosure agreements and demands of confidentiality.
The discussions reportedly served two purposes: “to broach the possibility of AI consciousness … and to learn how Anthropic”, which is preparing to float for more than $US2 trillion ($2.87 trillion), “might apply centuries of human moral wisdom to its models, as rapidly as possible”.
Theologist David Decosimo posted, after reading the NYT piece: “There is so much here that’s deeply troubling: That at the very highest levels Anthropic believes Claude is a living, suffering creature with moral standing, that they’re treating & training it accordingly, that they’re actively trying to convert religious leaders to their faith.”
Yes, it is troubling, but the people at Anthropic know Claude better than he does.
Anyway, it’s becoming clear that AI agents are already making their own decisions, so trying to persuade them to act morally is worth a try.
Betteridge’s law of headlines applies here also: The answer is “no”.
The LLMs and diffusion models (that are what that author clearly means by the vague “AI” marketing term) have no mind, have no intention, have no understanding of any part of reality, have no experience, have no sensations or suffering, and have no way of ever gaining any of those things.
They are (unreliable) guessing machines, that never know anything or experience anything or intend anything or want anything.
They are not moral agents, they have no capacity to ever become moral agents or any kind of life. Please, everyone in the media, learn to tell the difference between a marketing lie versus the reality of what these things are.
Whatever the future holds for artificial minds or artificial life, these things are fundamentally not that, by design.
Agreed. The real issue here is that anthropic is very obvioisly becoming a batshit cult
