I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as 'You should kill yourself.' However, for all the times that 'honesty' is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Okay but this is fundamentally a marketing problem. Computer tools have spoken to us in the first person the whole time through video games, ELIZA, Clippy, Cleverbot, Akinator. There has never been a case of Clippy psychosis. This is because everyone understands that Clippy is a program, and that programs are not people. Limiting LLMs' capabilities for speech isn't a reasonable solution for the problem that is: billionaires are trying to convince consumers that their tools are people. The problem with the Anti AI movement is the same as the problem with the Pro AI movement: everyone is attributing all the agency to the machine instead of going after the people who sell it. It's just a box of wires with electrons going through it, it cannot kill you, it cannot harm you, it cannot activate your latent schizophrenia, it cannot induce you to suicide. The thing that does that is not the tool. It's the belief in the tool. It is the treatment of the machine as an omniscient authority that knows more than you, instead of as a flawed, still-in-beta tinker toy for linguists and programmers that as a secondary trait can be applied to other things. And that belief does not come from the traits of the tool more than the belief in a chicken bone's wish comes from the bird's anatomy. It's not the tool, it's the narrative. And the narrative is constructed by humans, and it's those humans, not the tool nor its users, who should be held liable for the damage. It used to be that if you put your hand in a gearbox and lost it, the company that made the gearbox would be sued and made to pay for damages. Right now it seems like people are going "kill all gearboxes, halt the industrial revolution" while the billionaires and their puppet executives go completely scatheless. The machine is not at fault. The machine vendor is. The human who convinced you that he had put god in a circuit board is the only one who should pay for the harm it has caused. And I feel like I'm going crazy when not even the utmost critics of the industry and its repulsive practices seem to understand that they're essentially burning a mathematical formula at the stake. That's not going to work. Even if a meteor wipes out 90% of humanity and we have to start over, eventually someone will discover it, because that's how math works. So the solution isn't to ban the things, just like it wasn't for cigarettes, or alcohol, or drugs, or gambling, or social media, or punk rock concerts or any of the other myriad things that make people kill themselves. Humans, turns out, are kinda fragile. It's on each other to protect and defend the wellbeing on the hole, and to get rid of those who would threaten it, not let them roam free and take away their toys while they go buy new ones to torture us with. It's not the robots causing the robot apocalypse. It's whoever made Skynet.
