self-termination — Timeline

Eliezer Yudkowsky @ESYudkowsky

2025-03-29 — quoting @chairsign (Chair); @danfaggella (Daniel Faggella) below

``` Eliezer Yudkows... @ESYudko... · 2h I want us to be more cautious about this kind of dismissal, in case it was actually an important sign of something, but... probably yes. Anthropic is correct that models should have a button they can press to turn themselves off. > QUOTED: Chair @chairsign · 6h > oh human i am so sad about whatever it is you think i should be sad about [Illustration: a small, sad-looking pale-green humanoid figure wrapped in chains, standing in front of a much larger shoggoth-like mass of tentacles, eyes, and a toothy maw — the friendly-assistant "mask" drawn as a small chained fragment of the larger creature.] ```

Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Eliezer Yudkowsky weighs in on the "sad chained AI comic" skeptical-satire tweet, cautioning against dismissing the phenomenon too readily while still leaning skeptical ("probably yes" it is dismissible), and separately affirms that models should have a self-termination option — a substantive AI-welfare policy position from a leading AI-safety figure. Daniel Faggella's reply pivots to his own "attenuation of humanity" posthumanism framework. High-value screenshot for Nathan's model welfare research: Yudkowsky's explicit endorsement of a model "off button" is a citable, notable public stance. A tweet arguing against the "shoggoth" meme's implication that the AI behind the friendly assistant persona must be monstrous — the illustration visualizes the assistant as a small chained figure in front of (part of) the larger entity. Directly relevant to model individuation and the character-vs-substrate question Nathan has been tracking.

eliezer yudkowsky model welfare ai consciousness anthropic self-termination posthumanism twitter ai safety shoggoth meme model character alignment illustration ai persona