Taking AI Welfare Seriously · HackerPapers discussions

Taking AI Welfare Seriously — mentioned by anonu

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 21:06:19 GMT

Anthropic hired their first AI Welfare person in late 2024. Here's an article about a paper that came out around the same time https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-welfare-paper Here's the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986 > In this report, we argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. Our work on AI is like the classic tale of Frankenstein's monster. We want AI to fit into society, however if we mistreat it, it may turn around and take revenge on us. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818! So the…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Taking AI Welfare Seriously — mentioned by bbor

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 15:02:13 GMT

They're not ascribing consciousness, they're investigating the possibility. We all agreed with Turing 75 years ago that deciding whether a machine is "truly thinking" or not is a meaningless, unscientific question -- what changed? It doesn't help that this critique is badly researched: The Anthropic researchers do not really define their terms or explain in depth why they think that "model welfare" should be a concern. Maybe check the [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986) instead of the blog post describing the paper? Saying that there is no scientific *consensus* on the consciousness of…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.