Why Animal Rights Advocates Are Investigating AI Consciousness - Week in Tech
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So you've all likely heard about Tilly Norwood, the first AI A-lister. Her creator just announced that Tilly is about to star in her first feature film. Taylor and Natasha, your faces are quite a picture.
This is just a fake PR thing. Wait, Taylor, do you remember when all the editors wanted you to, like, interview Little Mikayla?
Yes! And it's like, who is, who am I interviewing?
I met Little Mikayla's creator, Trevor.
Yeah, I know Trevor. I've known Trevor for a long time. I know the girl that Little Mikayla was designed off of. I, but, with all due respect, love Trevor. But, guys, this is just PR. It's just PR. It's just PR.
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Oz Veloshian, and this is The Week in Tech, where I'm joined by the world's most plugged-in reporters to break down what's really happening in tech right now. Today, we're joined by Taylor Lorenz of UserMag, Reid Al-Brigotti, tech editor for Semaphore, and Natasha Tiku, tech reporter at The Washington Post. Welcome, all. How's it going?
Thanks for having us. Nice to be back.
Natasha, you recently published an article that got to number one, I think, in the Washington Post algorithm. The subhead to the story is, Anthropic, Google, and Meta have hired computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to study what some in the industry think may become a moral crisis. The story is about AI consciousness. What is that?
Oh, start with the hard one, huh? You know, it's this idea that has percolated in the back of the AI industry, like on the fringes for decades. You know, the same people who hope to upload their consciousness one day or, you know, become transhuman and merge with machines also anticipated this idea that, sufficiently advanced AI would have subjective experiences and goals and preferences just like human beings. And I first got interested in this subject four years ago. It was a few months before ChatGPT came out, and I wrote a story about this Google engineer who believed the company's large language model was sentient, was conscious in some way.
And he got fired, right? He was a whistleblower. Is that right?
I think that's fair to say. Yeah.
Well, not a whistleblower per se.
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