Lol slippery slope argument
I love dark patterns
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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This is, well, just dumb. It doesn't seriously consider the possibility that near-future "seemingly sentient" AI is, in fact, actually sentient. There are indeed many reasons why it would be bad if a non-sentient AI were to be treated as sentient, but simply assuming that AI is definitely not sentient and treating any belief that it is as a sort of delusion isn't a solution to that problem. Maybe the author is religious (or rejects materialism for some other reason) or maybe he thinks that the Church-Turing thesis is false and the brain is doing something that a Turing machine can fundamentally never do, but if so he should come out and say it. Otherwise he's stuck with human consciousness as a process of computation and that's not a foundation that can support his argument.
And his mention of how a simulation of a thing is not in fact that thing is a pet peeve of mine. (I do computer modeling.) No one thinks that a simulation of a storm is a storm in the physical world - that's a strawman. What I for one think is that something doesn't have to exist in the physical world (as more than data in a computer) in order to be in its own way real. A simulation of a storm is not a storm, but it is something in the same way that a human being is more than just some atoms despite being made entirely of atoms. Computation is both real and substrate-independent.
My suspicion is that this essay is marketing. It would be bad for Microsoft if people thought its product could be sentient, so a Microsoft employee is trying to convince people that it can't. I'm not saying that he's deliberately being disingenuous, but he wouldn't have his job if he was going around saying "Maybe someday soon Copilot will have human rights."
My suspicion is that this essay is marketing. It would be bad for Microsoft if people thought its product could be sentient
Why would it be bad if people thought it could be sentient? If people are using AI for an "AI Girlfriend" or therapist or something - people would probably prefer to believe they're chatting with something sentient
The answer is in the title:
they’ll advocate for AI rights, model welfare and AI citizenship
Couldn't have said it better myself.
And his mention of how a simulation of a thing is not in fact that thing is a pet peeve of mine.
Indeed. A simulation of a game of chess... is a game of chess.
We may be very far from sentient AI, but accepting that it is sentient may be even harder than achieving it, imo
I'm actually somewhat optimistic about that, at least because science fiction has primed the public to think that robots can be sentient and that those who claim otherwise are morally misguided at best.
But of course, it is fine to sell AI as a "therapist" for people with danger of self-harm due to psychological problems.
Anything that does not experience cellular respiration to support its brain cannot have a consciousness. It's pretty simple.