Anthropic, which develops the artificial intelligence product Claude, has made a change to its terms and conditions. As of November 12, users will be prohibited from engaging in “sustained and needless” abuse or bullying when conversing with its chatbots. I regard this shift as I view many of Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court opinions: I am deeply suspicious of the reasoning — much of which is grounded in incomprehensible claptrap about the ineffable mysteries of the universe — but I am comfortable with the result nevertheless. There is no good reason for a private company to permit its customers to be awful when using its service.
I have long been of the view that one should refrain from bullying AI chatbots — not for the AI chatbots’ sake, but for one’s own. I do not believe that AI chatbots are conscious, or ensouled, or that they contain the “spark” of divinity, or any of that guff. I do think, however, that because AI chatbots approximate human interaction, how one interacts with them can be habit-forming in other realms. Some of Anthropic’s critics have suggested that it is as irrational to worry about shouting at an AI chatbot as it would be to worry about shouting at a hammer. I disagree. Unlike AI chatbots, I do not converse with hammers in my native language. I am no expert in the human brain, but it seems entirely possible to me that, if I were to grow accustomed to bullying or abusing my nonhuman interlocutors, this could spill over into my interactions with my human interlocutors, too. I do not want that to happen.
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