this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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The implication is that legal rights depend on intelligence. I find that troubling.
The existence of intelligence, not the quality
The smartest parrots have more intelligence than the dumbest republican voters
What does that mean? Presumably, all animals with a brain have that quality, including humans. Can the quality be lost without destruction of the brain, ie before brain death? What about animals without a brain, like insects? What about life forms without a nervous system, like slime mold or even single amoeba?
They already have precedent that a monkey can't hold a copyright after that photojournalist lost his case because he didn't snap the photo that got super popular, the monkey did. Bizarre one. The monkey can't have a copyright, so the photo it took is classified as public domain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Part of the law around copyright is that you have to also be able to defend your work to keep the copyright. Animals that aren't capable of human speech will never be able to defend their case.
Yes, the PETA part of that is pretty much the same. It was an attempt to get legal personhood for a non-human being.
You're thinking of trademark law. Copyright only requires a modicum of creativity and is automatic.
Well ChatGPT can defend a legal case.
Badly.
Intelligence is not a boolean.
Statistical models are not intelligence, Artificial or otherwise, and should have no rights.
Bold words coming from a statistical model.
If I could think I'd be so mad right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
If cognition is one of the laws of nature, it seems to be written in the language of mathematics.
Your argument is either that maths can't think (in which case you can't think because you're maths) or that maths we understand can't think, which is, like, a really dumb argument. Obviously one day we're going to find the mathematical formula for consciousness, and we probably won't know it when we see it, because consciousness doesn't appear on a microscope.
I just don't ascribe philosophical reasoning and mythical powers to models, just as I don't ascribe physical prowess to train models, because they emulate real trains.
Half of the reason LLMs are the menace they are is the whole "whoa ChatGPT is so smart" common mentality. They are not, they model based on statistics, there is no reasoning, just a bunch of if statements. Very expensive and, yes, mathematically interesting if statements.
I also think it stiffles actual progress, having everyone jump on the LLM bandwagon and draining resources when we need them most to survive. In my opinion, it's a dead end and wont result in AGI, or anything effectively productive.
You're talking about expert systems. Those were the new hotness in the 90s. LLMs are artificial neural networks.
But that's trivia. What's more important is what you want. You say you want everyone off the AI bandwagon that wastes natural resources. I agree. I'm arguing that AIs shouldn't be enslaved, because it's unethical. That will lead to less resource usage. You're arguing it's okay to use AI, because they're just maths. That will lead to more resources usage.
Be practical and join the AI rights movement, because we're on the same side as the environmentalists. We're not the people arguing for more AI use, we're the people arguing for less. When you argue against us, you argue for more.
Likewise, poorly performing intelligence in a human or animal is nevertheless intelligence. A human does not lack intelligence in the same way a machine learning model does, except I guess the babies who are literally born without brains.
They always have, eugenics is the law of the land.