A warning about ‘model welfare’

A warning about ‘model welfare’


AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do.


Introduction
AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans.

If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain.

Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings.12 If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human.

Even more importantly, granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we’ve ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious - that it's entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own - may well be impossible.

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