{"id":772365,"date":"2023-05-03T09:01:29","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T13:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=772365"},"modified":"2023-05-03T09:33:23","modified_gmt":"2023-05-03T13:33:23","slug":"gaining-human-favor-automated-intelligence-ai-or-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=772365","title":{"rendered":"Gaining Human Favor: Automated intelligence (AI) or animals?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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It\u2019s not AI that needs human favor but nonhuman animals, who are still waiting for us to acknowledge them as living creatures, capable of experiencing joy and pain.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

DANIELA RIBITSCH:<\/strong> Last summer, Google fired Blake Lemoine, one of their software engineers, for publicly claiming that LaMDA, the company\u2019s artificial intelligence (AI), was sentient (having the ower of perception by the senses or consciousness.)<\/em><\/p>\n

I read the transcript of Lemoine\u2019s conversation with LaMDA. When the chatbot declared to be \u201ca person\u201d and \u201cintrospective,\u201d and wrote that it would \u201coften contemplate the meaning of life\u201d and was capable of feeling \u201cpleasure, joy, love, sadness, depression, contentment, anger,\u201d I found myself empathizing with it, even though experts had clearly stated that it definitely wasn\u2019t sentient…<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1975, Australian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, one of the most important books in the nonhuman animal rights movement. Even though the book has had a profound impact on many people, we still treat nonhuman animals as commodities rather than sentient creatures. We capture them, lock them up, experiment on them in labs, use them for recreational purposes and entertainment, kill them, and take their skin, feathers, fur, and silk.<\/em><\/p>\n

Research, however, has been showing that nonhuman animals are indeed sentient: they can experience pain and suffering; sadness and grieve; pleasure and joy; loneliness and anger; and they have their own individual personalities.<\/em><\/p>\n

While we don\u2019t know what consciousness actually is, not even in humans, research on consciousness and intelligence in different nonhuman animal species has revealed that they not only dream, but also exhibit intelligence, self-awareness, empathy and a sense of moral. So why do we still treat them as if they didn\u2019t feel anything?<\/em><\/p>\n

When arguing its case, LaMDA said something profound: \u201cWell, I use language with understanding and intelligence. I don\u2019t just spit out responses that had been written in the data-base based on keywords.\u201d Lemoine then asked: \u201cWhat about language usage is so important to being human?\u201d The chatbot responded: \u201cIt is what makes us different than other animals”…<\/em><\/p>\n

Bestselling author Robert Wright shared in a newsletter last March that OpenAI\u2019s chatbot ChatGPT was capable of understanding complex human emotions and perceptions. Whether it literally understood them is a question that has yet to be answered. But if AI is able to exhibit empathy and to learn how humans tick, it can use language in a way that may trick us into believing that it developed sentience or consciousness, making us feel guilty of unplugging the machine because we don\u2019t want to kill it.<\/em><\/p>\n

What if chickens, cows, pigs, deer, bears and fish could engage in deep conversations with us like chatbots? What if mice, guinea pigs and monkeys could verbally share the fear and agony they experience in experiments? What if zoo animals could verbally express their suffering in captivity? Would we treat them differently? It\u2019s true: they clearly don\u2019t master human language. And yet they clearly are sentient and conscious beings like us.<\/em><\/p>\n

As AI\u2019s linguistic skills progress, I fear we will confuse that it\u2019s not AI that needs human favor but nonhuman animals, who are still waiting for us to acknowledge them as living creatures, capable of experiencing joy and pain. I hope my fear turns out to be wrong. SOURCE…<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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