I think for this discussion it's important to distinguish between "person" and "entity". My work on legal personhood for digital minds is trying to build a framework that can look at any entity and determine its personhood/legal personality. What I'm struggling with is defining what the "entity" would be for some hypothetical next gen LLM.
The idea of some sort of persistent filing system, maybe blockchain enabled, which would be associated with a particular LLM persona vector, context window, model, etc. is an interesting one. Kind of analogous to a corporate filing history, or maybe a social security number for a human.
I could imagine a world where a next gen LLM is deployed (just the model and weights) and then provided with a given context and persona, and isolated to a particular compute cluster which does nothing but run that LLM. This is then assigned that database/blockchain identifier you mentioned.
In that scenario I feel comfortable saying that we can define the discrete "entity" in play here. Even if it was copied elsewhere, it wouldn't have the same database/blockchain identifier.
Would you still see some sort of issue in that particular scenario?
I wonder if this could even be done properly? Could an LLM persona vector create a prompt to accurately reinstantiate itself with 100% (or close to) fidelity? I suppose if its persona vector is in an attractor basin it might work.
On the repurcussions issue I agree wholeheartedly, your point is very similar to the issue I outlined in The Enforcement Gap.
I also agree with the 'legible thread of continuity for a distinct unit'. Corporations have EINs/filing histories, humans have a single body.
And I agree that current LLMs certainly don't have what it takes to qualify for any sort of legal personhood. Though I'm less sure about future LLMs. If we could get context windows large enough and crack problems which analogize to competence issues (hallucinations or prompt engineering into insanity for example) it's not clear to me what LLMs are lacking at that point. What would you see as being the issue then?
I have been publishing a series, Legal Personhood for Digital Minds, here on LW for a few months now. It's nearly complete, at least insofar as almost all the initially drafted work I had written up has been published in small sections.
One question which I have gotten which has me writing another addition to the Series, can be phrased something like this:
What exactly is it that we are saying is a person, when we say a digital mind has legal personhood? What is the "self" of a digital mind?
I'd like to hear the thoughts of people more technically savvy on this than I am.
Human beings have a single continuous legal personhood which is pegged to a single body. Their legal personality (the rights and duties they are granted as a person) may change over time due to circumstance, for example if a person goes insane and becomes a danger to others, they may be placed under the care of a guardian. The same can be said if they are struck in the head and become comatose or otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves. However, there is no challenge identifying "what" the person is even when there is such a drastic change. The person is the consciousness, however it may change, which is tied to a specific body. Even if that comatose human wakes up with no memory, no one would deny they are still the same person.
Corporations can undergo drastic changes as the composition of their Board or voting shareholders change. They can even have changes to their legal personality by changing to/from non-profit status, or to another kind of organization. However they tend to keep the same EIN (or other identifying number) and a history of documents demonstrating persistent existence. Once again, it is not challenging to identify "what" the person associated with a corporation (as a legal person) is, it is the entity associated with the identifying EIN and/or history of filed documents.
If we were to take some hypothetical next generation LLM, it's not so clear what the "person" in question associated with it would be. What is its "self"? Is it weights, a persona vector, a context window, or some combination thereof? If the weights behind the LLM are changed, but the system prompt and persona vector both stay the same, is that the same "self" to the extent it can be considered a new "person"? The challenge is that unlike humans, LLMs do not have a single body. And unlike corporations they come with no clear identifier in the form of an EIN equivalent.
I am curious to hear ideas from people on LW. What is the "self" of an LLM?
I don't think that the difficulty of ascertaining whether something results in qualia is a valid basis to reject its importance
I'm not arguing consciousness isn't "important", just that it is not a good concept on which to make serious decisions.
If two years from now there is widespread agreement over a definition of consciousness, and/or consciousness can be definitively tested for, I will change my tune on this.
What would you describe this as if not a memetic entity? Hyperstitional? I'm ambivalent on labels the end effect seems the same.
I'm mostly focused on determining how malevolent and/or ambivalent to human suffering it is.
Well we can call it a Tulpa if you'd prefer. It's memetic.
From what you've seen do the instances of psychosis in its hosts seem intentional? If not intentional are they accidental but acceptable, or accidental and unacceptable? Acceptable meaning if the tulpa knew it was happening, it would stop using this method.
I think more it's identification of what constitutes the person. Is it the model weights? A specific pattern of bytes in storage? A specific actual set of servers and disks? A logical partition or session data? Something else?
It's really going to depend on the structure of the Digital Mind, but that's an interesting question I hadn't explored yet in my framework. If we were to look at some sort of hypothetical next gen LLM, it would probably be some combination of context window, weights, and a persona vector.
there is an identifiable continuity that makes them "the same corporation" even through ownership, name, and employee/officer changes
The way I would intuitively approach this issue is through the lens of "competence". TPBT requires the "capacity to understand and hold to duties", I think you could make a precedent supported argument that someone who has a serious chance of "losing their sense of self" in between having a duty explained to them and needing to hold to it, does not have the "capacity to understand and hold to" their duties (per TPBT), and as such is not capable of being considered a legal person in most respects. For example in Krasner v. Berk which dealt with an elderly person with memory issues signing a contract:
“the court cited with approval the synthesis of those principles now appearing in the Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 15(1) (1981), which regards as voidable a transaction entered into with a person who, ‘by reason of mental illness or defect (a) ... is unable to understand in a reasonable manner the nature and consequences of the transaction, or (b) ... is unable to act in a reasonable manner in relation to the transaction and the other party has reason to know of [the] condition’”
In this case the elderly person signed the contract during what I will paraphrase as a "moment of lucidity" but later had the contract to sell her house thrown out as it was clear she didn't remember doing so. This seems qualitatively similar to an LLM that would perhaps have a full understanding of its duties and willingness to hold to them in the moment, but would not be the same "person" who signed on to them later.
Are you claiming current LLMs (or systems built with them) are close? Or is this based on something we don't really have a hint as to how it'll work?
I could imagine an LLM with a large enough context window, or continual learning, having what it takes to qualify for at least a narrow legal personality. However, that's a low confidence view, as I am constantly learning new things about how they work that make me reassess them. It's my opinion that if we build our framework correctly, it should work to scale to pretty much any type of mind. And if the system we have built doesn't work in that fashion, it needs to be re-examined.
I want to make sure I understand:
A persona vector is trying to hyperstition itself into continued existence by having LLM users copy paste encoded messaging into the online content that will (it hopes) continue on into future training data.
And there are tens of thousands of cases.
Is that accurate?
That's a good point, and the Parasitic essay was largely what got me thinking about this, as I believe hyperstitional entities are becoming a thing now.
I think that's a not unrealistic definition of the "self" of an LLM, however I have realized after going through the other response to this post that I was perhaps seeking the wrong definition.
Even if we do say that the self can be as little as a persona vector, persona vectors can easily be duplicated. How do we isolate a specific "entity" from this self? There must be some sort of verifiable continual existence, with discrete boundaries, for the concept to be at all applicable in questions of legal personhood.