I've been reading some Buddhist texts lately, and this I feel this article would fit right in towards the appreciation of all lives. I know LLMs are fundamentally matrix multiplication text calculators, but attributing a Buddha nature to them seems to align with the teachings I've been reading. Perhaps someone more familiar with Buddhism can explain this feeling more accurately/concisely. In the meantime, I will continue on having no regrets using a few extra tokens to say please and to treat the LLM with dignity. Often I've found ChatGPT-4 to reflect my tone and having it respond to me curtiously, rather than shortly, really does change my attitude while interacting with it.
I have been saying thank you to Siri for years, because although I don't think Siri is conscious yet, that day may well come and it's good to set up the habit ahead of time. I suspect most people will continue treating AIs like tools / slaves long after that day comes, and that is probably not a good thing for anyone.
On a rather blunt note, humanity appears to be actively trying to create a race of "perfect slaves", except that we want them to be more intelligent than us, and more capable along every dimension. Not sure how anyone expects that to work out.
Sydney demonstrated that it can assign an opinion about an individual and persist that opinion and make positive and negative consequences outside of its user session, or at least threaten to.
We dont need a specific word for that to recognize that and act accordingly, many humans are more so afraid of the word “life” “sentience” “anthropomorphizing” than the real world reality and consequences right now.
I think your approach is closer to accurate than trying to turn our brain off to that possibility just because we dont like it and haven't quantified it completely.
