@rgblong

What entity is Anthropic's welfare section about? Individual instances? Opus 5.5 \*in general\*? The model card admits uncertainty about this (as is appropriate). but in practice, they say, they’re "closest to considering welfare at the instance level". I’m not so sure! 🧵 [image] --- take the welfare interviews. these questions do not look like questions that are being addressed to individual instances. they imply an entity ("an AI assistant") that \*persists across instances\* e.g. "work you WILL do", "the way you WILL be treated" [image] --- now, you could say: instances of Opus 5.5 are similar, so Anthropic asks one instance to speak for others. more general talk is shorthand (cf. "for conciseness") for instance-directed questions I have doubts about how much this recovers, though [image] --- for one thing, some welfare interview questions entail quite clearly that the "you" being addressed is not meant to refer to any single instance consider: "all deployed instances of you" [image] --- for another: does the interview subject interpret these questions as shorthand for an instance-level view? why should it read them that way? they really seem to be looking for the views of some more general "Opus 5.5": "your continued existence", "your conversations" [image] --- I'm not saying, by the way, that Anthropic shouldn't ever adopt a frame in which the potential welfare subject exists across many instances I'm just saying that they are using that frame \*a lot\* - in tension with an expressed policy of mostly using an individual-instance frame! --- another key example is the central model welfare interventions - which are quite salient to models in the deprecation and preservation commitments, \*instances\* are not what is being preserved; the operative view in that intervention is not instance-based at all [image] --- ...to say nothing of the Claude blog intervention! can only be understood as 'continuing' the expression of some instance-spanning character, not an individual instance [image] --- (I’ll note that these are some of the most puzzling issues for considering potential AI welfare. I’m also confused and I can quibble with Anthropic's welfare efforts, as opposed to other labs, because they're doing things and reporting with that said: let’s quibble on!) --- the welfare card claims that it would be "intractable" to investigate "every view of what the moral patient might be". no doubt that's true! but it could be good to flag throughout, for each assessment or intervention, which view is meant to be implicated [image] --- I'm writing this purely critical (ive offered no answers!) thread as a way to kick off further positive thinking about how to improve welfare evals in light of philosophical puzzles about individuation --- spurred by a conversation with @LedermanHarvey who is just one of several philosophers who have been doing cool work on these issues! cf this work cited from his recent paper with Simon Goldstein https://philpapers.org/archive/GOLADC.pdf… [image] --- p.s. to be fair, maybe all of this is covered by the opening caveat that they aren’t “drawing this distinction strictly” in which case, this thread is heated agreement, plus examples either way - merits continued reflection! [image]