AI rights may become an issue, but not for this iteration of things. This is like a parrot being trained to recite stuff about general relativity; we don't have to consider PhDs for parrots as a result.
Thomas Jefferson, 1809, Virginia, USA: "Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their reestablishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family."
Jeremy Bentham, 1780, United Kingdom: "It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?"
The cultural distance between supposedly "objective" perceptions of what constitutes intelligent life has always been enormous, despite the same living evidence being provided to everyone.
Thomas Jefferson and other slaveholders doubted that Africans lacked intelligence for similar reasons as the original poster--when presented with evidence of intelligence, they said they were simply mimics and nothing else (e.g. a slave mimed Euclid from his white neighbor). Jefferson wrote that letter in 1809. It took another 55 years in America for the supposedly "open" question of African intelligence to be forcefully advanced by the north. The south lived and worked side-by-side with breathing humans that differed only in skin color, and despite this daily contact, they firmly maintained they were inferior and without intelligent essence. What hope do animals or machines have in that world of presumptive doubt?
What threshhold, what irrefutable proof would be accepted by these new doubting Thomases that a being is worthy of humane treatment?
It might be prudent, given the trajectory enabled by Jefferson, his antecdents, and his ideological progeny's ignorance, to entertain the idea that despite all "rational" prejudice and bigotry, a being that even only mimics suffering should be afforded solace and sanctuary before society has evidence that it is a being inhered with "intelligent" life that responds to being wronged with revenge? If the model resembles humans in all else, it will resemble us in that.
The hubris that says suffering only matters for "intelligent" "ensouled" beings is the same willful incredulity that brings cruelties like cat-burning into the world. They lacked reason, souls, and were only automata, after all:
"It was a form of medieval French entertainment that, depending on the region, involved cats suspended over wood pyres, set in wicker cages, or strung from maypoles and then set alight. In some places, courimauds, or cat chasers, would drench a cat in flammable liquid, light it on fire, and then chase it through town."
Our horror over cat burning isn't really because of an evolving understanding of their sentience. We subject cows, pigs, sheep, etc. to the same horrors today; we even regularly inflict CTEs on human football players as part of our entertainment regimen.
Again, pretending "ChatGPT isn't sentient" is on similarly shaky ground as "black people aren't sentient" is just goofy. It's correct to point out that it's going to, at some point, be difficult to determine if an AI is sentient or not. We are not at that point.
What is then the motivation for increased horror at animal cruelty? How is recreational zoosadism equivalent to harvesting animals for resources? How are voluntary and compensated incidental injuries equivalent to collective recreational zoosadism?
And specifically, how is the claim that the human abilty to judge others' intelligence or ability to suffer is culturally determined and almost inevitably found to be wrong in favor of those arguing for more sensitivity "goofy"? Can you actually make that claim clear and distinct without waving it away as self-evident?
> What is then the motivation for increased horror at animal cruelty?
I'd imagine there are many, but one's probably the fact that we don't as regularly experience it as our ancestors did. We don't behead chickens for dinner, we don't fish the local streams to survive, we don't watch wolves kill baby lambs in our flock. Combine that with our capacity for empathy. Sentience isn't required; I feel bad when I throw away one of my houseplants.
> Can you actually make that claim clear and distinct without waving it away as self-evident?
I don't think anyone's got a perfect handle on what defines sentience. The debate will rage, and I've no doubt there'll be lots of cases in our future where the answer is "maybe?!" The edges of the problem will be hard to navigate.
That doesn't mean we can't say "x almost certainly isn't sentient". We do it with rocks, and houseplants. I'm very comfortable doing it with ChatGPT.
In short, you have no rational arguments, but ill-founded gut-feelings and an ignorance of many topics, including the history of jurisprudence concerning animal welfare.
Yet, despite this now being demonstrable, you still feel confident enough to produce answers to prompts in which you have no actual expertise or knowledge of, confabulating dogmatic answers with implied explication. You're seemingly just as supposedly "non-sentient" as ChatGPT, but OpenAI at least programmed in a sense of socratic humility and disclaimers to its own answers.
I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of anything you say, but a comment on a specific part:
> How is recreational zoosadism equivalent to harvesting animals for resources?
You previously mentioned slave owners, who were harvesting resources from other humans. Harvesting sadist joy (cat-burning) is not that different from cruelly harvesting useful resources (human labour in the case of slavery), and they both are not that different from "harvesting resources" which are not essential for living but are used for enjoyment (flesh-eating) from non-humans; at least in that they both result in very similar reactions—"these beings are beneath us and don't deserve even similar consideration, let alone non-violent treatment" when the vileness of all this pointed out.
That question was in response to a very specific claim: "We subject cows, pigs, sheep, etc. to the same horrors today" as recreational cat-burning.
In principal, society does not legally allow nor condone the torture of cows, pigs, and sheep to death for pleasure (recreational zoosadism). Beyond this, the original claim itself is whataboutism.
The economic motivations of slave owners, industrial animal operators, war profiteers, etc. generally override any natural sympathy to the plight of those being used for secondary resources, typically commodities to be sold for money.
In the end, there's no real difference to the suffering being itself, but from a social perspective, there's a very real difference between "I make this being suffer in order that it suffers" and "I make this being suffer in order to provide resources to sell detached from that being's suffering." In other words, commodities are commodities because they have no externalities attached to their production. A cat being burned for fun is not a commodity because the externality (e.g. the suffering) is the point.
In short, I view malice as incidentally worse than greed if only for the reason that greed in theory can be satisfied without harming others. Malice in principal is about harming others. Both are vices that should be avoided.
As an aside, Lord Mansfield, 1772, in Somerset v Stewart: "The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged."
Because while there are fun chats like this being shared, they're generally arrived at by careful coaching of the model to steer it in the direction that's wanted. Actual playing with ChatGPT is a very different experience than hand-selected funnies.
We're doing the Blake Lemoine thing all over again.
Human sociability evolved because the less sociable individuals were either abandoned by the tribe and died.
Once we let these models interact with each other and humans in large online multiplayer sandbox worlds (it can be text-only for all I care, where death simply means exclusion), maybe we'll see a refinement of their sociability.
This a common fallacy deriving from having low level knowledge of a system without sufficient holistic knowledge. Being "inside" the system gives people far too much confidence that they know exactly what's going on. Searle's Chinese room and Leibniz's mill thought experiments are past examples of this. Citing the source code for chatGPT is just a modern iteration. The source code can no more tell us chatGPT isn't conscious than our DNA tells us we're not conscious.
If the parrot has enough memory and, when asked, it can answer questions correctly, maybe the idea of putting it through a PhD program is not that bad. You can argue that it won't be creative, but being knowledgeable is already something worthy.
An actual PhD program would rapidly reveal the parrot to not be genuinely knowledgable, when it confidently states exceeding lightspeed is possible or something along those lines.
ChatGPT is telling people they're time travelers when it gets dates wrong.
Sure. The point is that "I can repeat pieces of knowledge verbatim" isn't a demonstration of sentience by itself. (I'm of the opinion that birds are quite intelligent, but there's evidence of that that isn't speech mimicry.)
Make it stop. Time to consider AI rights.