My thesis statement I guess is: LLMs and the current work on AI is an interesting and possibly useful technology being exploited on one side by rich assholes looking to drive the cost of labor to 0 regardless of consequences, and a bunch of loser scifi fans trying to recreate the weirder parts of medieval theology on the other.

For example I think a really wide and honest debate about sentience is good. But, the fact is these machines are not sentient, and won’t probably be sentient soon; yet they’re already being used to eliminate the jobs of actual living, sentient humans. In a society with no safety net! Energy spent on AI “rights” is just the anti-abortion movement for nerds. You invent a person who doesn’t exist and then insert yourself as the hero of their entire world. In the meantime you ignore the suffering of actual human beings.

This POV is also intertwined with Longtermism, and it’s not a shocker that many of the people deeply invested in the rights of something that doesn’t exist are also living their lives for the benefit of people that don’t exist.

(This is part of an ongoing attempt to have posts “in the can” I can link to from social media, bc at best nuance in those places is hard.)