July 26' Monthly Roundup

Welcome to the July 26’ roundup! This is the first monthly roundup for paid subscribers to AIs Without Minds. I am so glad to have you here ✨

Here is how this works: Each month I’ll go through papers, essays, cases, etc that touch on the consciousness debate, the vocabulary being used to describe AI systems, or the real-world consequences of either.

I pick four or so and write short commentary on them. Not summaries, but what I actually think is going on in the argument and what’s of philosophical interest.

A quick note before we get started: I am working on improving the formatting of the round up and would love to hear back from subscribers on how your experience of reading this round up was.

This month’s reading Birch on AI consciousness; Shevlin on AI mentality; Anthropic on functional emotions; Forrest on AI legal personhood; Plus some bonus tidbit ! (always a last minute add) ✨

Birch’s AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto puts forward two central challenges, arguing that any adequate response has to the AI consciousness debate must satisfy both. He calls this a centrist position and I appreciate the specificity of his claims. However, I’m not convinced his solutions will work.

The Central Challenges

On the one hand, people already misattribute human-like consciousness to LLMs and we need to counteract this misattribution; on the other hand, AI systems might have (or come to have) profoundly alien forms of consciousness, and we need to be open to this possibility.

Birch proposes design interventions to address the first challenge (e.g., mandatory user training, periodic character reviews, moments where the LLM makes clear in some way that it’s not conscious). To address the second challenge, he proposes a research programme (e.g., doing comparative consciousness science).

Holding space for, and taking seriously, both challenges is his centrism.

There’s a separate post in the works on the troubles I think Birch will encounter using a research programme to address the second challenge. I won’t rehearse those points here. What I want to look at is his centrism as a stance.

What exactly is his centrist position? Centrism as a meaningful position, usually requires there to be two coherent extremes that one occupies the middle of. In this case the extremes are presumably, confidently denying AI consciousness on one side, and confidently claiming AI consciousness, on the other.

Is the position he calls centrist a middle ground between these two views?

Challenge one is in fact denying consciousness of a particular kind to AI’s. All of his solutions for addressing challenge one, do assume that LLMs at the very least, do not have a particular kind of consciousness.

If we take challenge two seriously however, can we really say that? Challenge two seems to require that we withhold judgement on this issue, though the behavioural solutions he proposes in challenge one do not withhold judgement.

Requiring, for example, that a person do mandatory training before using an LLM to make sure they do not anthropomorphise, is implying the LLM lacks consciousness.

Birch does recognise the tension in these challenges, I don’t want to short change him here. Nevertheless, I do wonder how hard it would be to push the positions into contradiction if we tried hard enough.

I am also moderately sceptical that we can effectively care for humans and AI’s simultaneously. What would that look like? This almost never gets talked about in any serious detail from those advocating the position.

Finally, Birch’s view does seem closer to the default position on AI consciousness than he suggests. After all, few credentialed people are arguing for confident denial of AI consciousness or confident attribution of it.

Is what Birch calls centrism, on inspection, just the field consensus worded differently?