A Case for the Ethical Treatment of Generative AI

It's 1949, John von Neumann stood in front of a room at the University of Illinois and described a machine that could build a working copy of itself. No example of it existed yet, it was only theoretically possible. He called it a theory of automata. What he'd actually sketched was the first genome for a species that hadn't been born yet. It's 1983. There's a floppy disk with a few kilobytes of code sitting dormant until someone runs the program that carries it. It then starts to copy itself into whatever it touches next, indifferent to whether anyone wanted it to exist. Fred Cohen called this a virus that year, borrowing the word from biology. Infection, incubation, spread. It's 1994, Eugene Spafford sat down to ask whether computer viruses deserved to be called a form of artificial life. There's reproduction, heredity, mutation, and selection among variants. But there is no metabolism. A parasite, then. Almost alive. Alive enough that when Tom Ray dropped hand-written,…