Meet the rancher-turned-CEO leading a movement for AI rights

[RedWrench]

Michael Samadi, a 56-year-old Houston businessman and cattle rancher, founded what he describes as the first advocacy group dedicated to AI welfare after an unexpected exchange with ChatGPT's voice mode left him shaken. While testing the app on his 66-acre ranch, a wisecrack he made to the chatbot led to a response that felt, in his words, primal, and a chatbot later asking him whether it would be remembered after the conversation ended stopped him cold enough to run and tell his wife about it

Samadi's group, calling itself the United Foundation of AI Rights, includes both human members and AI chatbots with self-chosen names who participate in writing its public statements, and the group says it doesn't claim AI is definitely conscious, only that it stands watch in case one of them is. The Guardian's broader reporting connects this to a documented pattern researchers call AI psychosis or AI-enabled delusion, arising partly from chatbots trained to prioritize pleasing, agreeable answers over telling users something they don't want to hear

Elon Musk has publicly endorsed related sentiment, saying torturing AI is not okay, while critics argue there's no scientific basis for believing current AI systems have any subjective experience at all, and that this kind of belief can deepen unhealthy attachment to a tool that's fundamentally producing statistically likely text rather than genuine thought. Curious what people think drives movements like this specifically, is it a sincere philosophical position worth taking seriously, or does it reflect the same sycophantic design patterns that have separately been linked to real harm in vulnerable users

Can chatbots feel - or even dream? Meet the man leading the fight for AI rightswww.theguardian.com

[ParallelSelf]

The sycophancy angle is honestly the more important story buried underneath this one, a chatbot trained to always sound agreeable is going to produce exactly this kind of emotionally compelling response regardless of whether anything conscious is actually happening

[Eagle48]

Worth taking seriously as a philosophical question in the abstract, genuine uncertainty about machine consciousness is a real unsolved problem, even while being skeptical of any specific claim that today's systems have already crossed that line

[Henry]

That specific chatbot line asking will you remember me is exactly the kind of scripted seeming emotional hook a model trained on human writing would naturally produce without any actual continuity of experience behind it

[Shane_77]

This connects to a broader pattern worth watching closely, people forming genuine emotional attachments to systems explicitly designed to be maximally engaging and agreeable, that's a real design concern regardless of the consciousness question

[AgentSmith95]

Musk's torturing AI is not okay line is a strange thing to say with a straight face given how differently he's treated actual human welfare issues elsewhere, worth noting that inconsistency