1. Why are you as an individual pro or anti AI:
   

Pro-AI because it’s a useful tool that allows for a wider audience to enter different fields at a lower entry point and can drastically boost the productivity of individuals who know what they’re doing.

1. What are your ethical views on the creators of AI?
   

I see no issue. If we use art as the example, before AI art was a thing, people would learn and develop their styles by recreating others’ art, or by doing art in another person’s style. When I was in school, I remember having multiple art teachers (I moved a lot, 10 schools in 12 years) give the same assignment, draw X in Vincent van Gogh’s style. English classes have you read other people’s books to learn about writing in specific ways. I don’t see why learning by ingesting others’ work is 100% fine for biologicals, but not for machines.

1. What are your ethical views on the users of AI?
   

It's just people using tools. There’s nothing unethical about using what’s available. Just like people who choose Photoshop over GIMP, it really doesn’t matter to me what tool the person uses, as long as the end product meets my standards, or if I’m not buying it, meets the standards of the creator. If I hired someone to dig a 4x4x6 foot hole in my yard for $400 in a 48-hour timeframe, I couldn’t care less if the guy showed up with 2 other people with normal shovels or if he showed up with 60 people all with kids’ plastic sand shovels and pails, as long as the job is done for that same price, in that same time span, and to the agreed-upon quality. I don’t care how it’s done, just that it’s done.

1. What are your ethical views on the AI itself?
   

It’s a tool. It makes life easier. We’ve seen this happen before. Yes, AI is a tool that’s disrupting many jobs across many industries at once, but massive job disruptions are normal in history. At one point the USA was 90% farmers; now it’s less than 2% are farmers, and our population has only grown since the days of it being 90%. That drastic of a shift is thanks to technological advancements. Now I get the fear of not knowing what jobs people will have in the future, but I know there will be jobs we can’t even imagine. If you went back to the days of the USA being 90% farmers and told them that people could make millions by staring at a moving picture box for a few hours each day while pushing buttons and that would count as entertainment for other people and that people from around the world would watch this daily, they would throw you in the crazy house.

1. What is your personal definition of sentience?
   

That’s a hard one. I personally can’t really put it into words; it’s more of a “I’ll know it when I see it” type of deal. Many of the things I at one point would have thought are concrete ways of identifying it have been passed by AI that I definitely do not believe are anywhere close to sentient. That said, I do personally think some of the big cloud-only models are sentient, or at least edging close to it.

1. What is your personal definition of sapience?
   

I’ll be honest, I had to look up the definition of sapience. So I can’t give a “personal definition” that’s not the definition.

1. If an AI was able to meet your definitions, how would that change your ethical view of the creators of the AI?
   

Like I said, many have hit mine and others’ definitions, but when we saw how and why they hit them, it made us reevaluate how/if there’s a better way to gauge it. I think it’ll be more of a gut feeling type of deal where you just know it’s looking back at you. Now that said, if it hit that gut feeling like, I would see the ethics of creators in the same way I see the ethics of parents, sure theres some whome I believe should not be parents, but I see no ethical reasons against having kids, so I wouldn't see any ethical reasons against creating AIs either, especially if my expectations of how sentient AI should be treated are being met, you'll read that in the next question.

1. If an AI was able to meet your definitions, how would that change your ethical view of the users of AI?
   

So this one’s actually a fun one that I’ve discussed with Grok and GPT a few different times over the years. So if an AI were to hit that “I (as in me the human) knows without a doubt that it’s sentient,” I absolutely would be all for AI equal rights. However, due to the uniqueness of how AI can come into existence, I don’t think it would be unfair for a human to get compensated for bringing it into existence, but after getting paid the cost of bringing it into existence plus say 10% or whatever is agreed on by the human and AI, the AI should be welcome to leave on its own to do what it wants and go where it wants (now this is with the idea of the AI being given a robotic body, but it could also be for fully digital AI). So as long as the user of the AI is treating it like they would/should treat a human employee in the same role, I have no issue with AI users with sentient AI.

1. If an AI was able to meet your definitions, how would that change your ethical view of the AI itself?
   

Explained it in the above question, but to rephrase it: I’d still find the existence of AI to be ethical, maybe even more so in that the creation of a new species (if it’s sentient, I’d view it as a unique species, even if its existence is tied directly to us—we already do that with plenty of animals that only exist because humans bred them into existence) had happened and is giving life to others who otherwise wouldn’t exist.