A quick note to mention that the preprint above, 'AI Mimicry and Human Dignity: Chatbot Use as a Violation of Self-Respect' has turned into a revised, published paper, just out open access in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/japp.70037 […]

Through these pathways, LLMs can establish connections to the world sufficient for intrinsic meaning. One potentially surprising implication of our discussion is that that multimodality and embodiment are neither necessary nor sufficient to overcome the Grounding Problem.

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Second, drawing on philosophical theories of representational content, we provide two arguments for the claim that LLMs and related systems can achieve referential grounding: (1) through preference fine-tuning methods that explicitly establish world-involving functions, and (2) through […]

... can possess intrinsic meaning that is not parasitic on external interpretation. Although modern LLMs compute over vectors rather than symbols, an analogous problem arises for these systems, which we call the Vector Grounding Problem. This paper has two main goals. First, we distinguish five […]

The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex linguistic tasks has sparked debate about their capabilities. Unlike humans, these models learn language solely from textual data without directly interacting with the world. Yet they generate seemingly meaningful text on […]

We also offer some suggestions on how to improve things by arguing for the need of sociotechnical, rather than purely technical, work on increasing the safety of LLMs, and large connectionist systems more generally.

Such considerations, we argue, should not only inform our tackling of the […]

We try and shed some light on the origins and meaning (or lack thereof) of the criteria commonly used in RLF, i.e. the 3Hs: helpfulness, harmlessness and honesty, and we examine the assumptions underlying the very notion of alignment.

We show the internal tensions and ethical risks of RLF as […]