Model welfare and moral status
Also called: do models matter morally, AI moral status, model welfare
The open, contested question of whether advanced AI systems could ever warrant moral consideration in their own right — and what, if anything, developers should do about that uncertainty now.
It's speculative and unsettled, but it's entering serious research and policy discussion. Being able to hold it as a genuine open question — without either dismissing it outright or overclaiming that today's models have feelings — is part of AI literacy.
A model claiming to have feelings. A system can fluently say it suffers because that's plausible text; that statement is not evidence either way about moral status.
- Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial IntelligenceUNESCO · 2021-11-23
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