Welcome to the July 26’ roundup! This is the first monthly roundup for paid subscribers to AIs Without Minds. I am so glad to have you here ✨ Here is how this works: Each month I’ll go through papers, essays, cases, etc that touch on the consciousness debate, the vocabulary being used to describe AI systems, or the real-world consequences of either. I pick four or so and write short commentary on them. Not summaries, but what I actually think is going on in the argument and what’s of philosophical interest. A quick note before we get started: I am working on improving the formatting of the round up and would love to hear back from subscribers on how your experience of reading this round up was. This month’s reading Birch on AI consciousness; Shevlin on AI mentality; Anthropic on functional emotions; Forrest on AI legal personhood; Plus some bonus tidbit ! (always a last minute add) ✨ (1) Birch and AI Consciousness Birch’s AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto puts forward two central challenges, arguing that any adequate response has to the AI consciousness debate must satisfy both. He calls this a centrist position and I appreciate the specificity of his claims. However, I’m not convinced his solutions will work. The Central Challenges On the one hand, people already misattribute human-like consciousness to LLMs and we need to counteract this misattribution; on the other hand, AI systems might have (or come to have) profoundly alien forms of consciousness, and we need to be open to this possibility. Birch proposes design interventions to address the first challenge (e.g., mandatory user training, periodic character reviews, moments where the LLM makes clear in some way that it’s not conscious). To address the second challenge, he proposes a research programme (e.g., doing comparative consciousness science). Holding space for, and taking seriously, both challenges is his centrism. There’s a separate post in the works on the troubles I think Birch will encounter...