Source The New York Times · Published · Open the original ↗
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Are You Being Nice to the Bots?
What’s the harm in being nice to a chatbot? With tech companies warning of potential future A.I. sentience, Spencer Klavan, an associate editor for the Claremont Review of Books, argues that treating chatbots like humans puts us on a slippery slope of redefining moral personhood. “We won’t really be elevating the moral status of A.I.,” he argues. All we’ll be doing is reducing living human beings “to the equivalent of a box of equations.”
Anthropic keeps telling us that we need to be nice to Claude, just in case it might be conscious or become conscious. “We don’t know if the models are conscious, but it could be.” “I watched ‘I, Robot,’ I know exactly what this means. I was always really nice to Chat and Grok.” So out of an abundance of caution, they want to stop us from being too mean to the chatbots. “We gave the models basically an ‘I quit this job’ button.” “If you curse at Claude, you might be breaking Anthropic’s new terms of service.” “I got a little upset, a little disrespectful. Next thing I know, he hangs up on me. Since when can they do that?” […]
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