I recommend it because we know some of these LLM-based services still rely on the efforts of A Guy Instead to make up for the nonexistence and incoherence of AGI. If you're an asshole to the frontend there's a nonzero chance that a human person is still going to have to deal with it.

Also I have learned an appropriate level of respect and fear for the part of my brain that, half-asleep, answers the phone with "hello this is YourNet with $CompanyName Support." I'm not taking chances around unthinkingly answering an email with "alright you shitty robot. Don't lie to me or I'll barbecue this old commodore 64 that was probably your great uncle or whatever"

The only plausible reason I’ve heard to be “nice” to LLMs/virtual assistants etc. is if you are being observed by a child or someone else impressionable.

Very much this but, we're all impressionable. Being abusive to a machine that's good at tricking our brains into thinking that it's conscious is conditioning oneself to be abusive, period. You see this also in online gaming - every person that I have encountered who is abusive to randos in a match on the Internet has problematic behavior in person.

It's literally just conditioning; making things adjacent to abusing other humans comfortable and normalizing them makes abusing humans less uncomfortable.

Children really shouldn't be left with the impression that chatbots are some type of alternative person instead of ass-kissing google replacements that occasionally get some code right, but I'm guessing you just mean to forego I have kidnapped your favorite hamster and will kill it slowly unless you make that div stop overflowing on resize type prompts.

She said, “You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be ‘Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity’s uncle.’”

"Crystal Nights"

If you have to entertain a "just in case" then you'd be better off leaving a saucer of milk out for the fairies. It won't hurt the environment or help build fascism and may even please a cat

some experts genuinely do claim it as a possibility

zero experts claim this. you’re falling for a grift. specifically,

i keep using Claude as an example because of the thorough welfare evaluation that was done on it

asking the LLM about “its mental state” is part of a very old con dating back to mechanical Turks playing chess and horses that do math. of course the LLM generated some interesting sentences when prompted about its internal state — it was trained on appropriated copies of every piece of fiction in existence, including world-class works of sci-fi (with sentient AIs and everything!), and it was tuned to generate “interesting” (see: profitable, and there’s nothing more profitable than a con with enough marks) responses. that’s why the others keep mentioning pareidolia — the only intelligence in the loop is the reader assigning meaning to the slop they’re reading, and if you step out of that role, it really does become clear that what you’re reading is absolute slop.

s i don’t really think there’s any harm in thinking about the possibility under certain circumstances. I don’t think Yud is being genuine in this though he’s not exactly a Michael Levin mind philosopher he just wants to score points by implying it has agency

you don’t think there’s any harm in thinking about the possibility, but all Yud does is create harm by grifting people who buy into that possibility. Yud’s Rationalist cult is the original driving force behind the people telling you LLMs must be sentient. do you understand that?

Like it has atleast the same amount of value as like letting an insect out instead of killing it

that insect won’t go on to consume so much energy and water and make so much pollution it creates an environmental crisis. the insect doesn’t exist as a product of the exploitation of third-world laborers or of artists and writers whose work was plagiarized. the insect isn’t a stupid fucking product of capitalism designed to maximize exploitation. I don’t acknowledge the utterly slim possibility that the insect might be or do any of the previous, because ignoring events with a near-zero probability of occurring is part of how I avoid looking like a god damn clown.

you say you acknowledge the harms done by LLMs, but I’m not seeing it.