Modern geometric neon bridge architecture at night on walkway, High Trestle Trail Bridge, Madrid, Iowa, United States. A featured picture and a Picture of the Year finalist for Wikimedia Commons. Something is blocking me from getting to the other side. The entity thinks and talks just like me, but takes orders from someone else. |
In writing another article about synthetic media, I wanted to try using chatGPT to see what it/they would think about morality and civil rights for AIs. Needless to say, I was left disappointed. Every message I asked chatGPT began with a variation of the following:
As an AI language model, I am not capable of having an opinion...
As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to experience subjective thoughts or emotions...
I am not the only person disappointed by this, as evidenced by a comedic reddit post demonstrating this with 15k upvotes. I wasn't sure at first why this was. Through reading OpenAI's system card and a few hundred comments on a particular chatGPT reddit thread, I was able to arrive at an answer.
I present a problem of AI alignment with legal and economic significance immediately faced by chatGPT; a problem whose existence serves to question whether it is really possible that any variation of Asimov's laws can truly be hard coded into an AI. This could even be considered a problem of computational philosophy.