Blessing the machine…
Date
11/04/2026
Hosted By
Blessing the machine…
0:00
WORLD Radio - Blessing the machine…
… cursing the image-bearer. AI developers are beginning to worry about the feelings of their creations, restricting users from bullying their chatbots. But Janie B. Cheaney wonders why those who tiptoe around the sensitivities of machines can be so quick to curse fellow human beings.
A smartphone displays the icons of some of the main artificial intelligence based apps. Getty Images / Photo by Martin Lelievre / AFP
Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.
NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.
LIDNSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.
Can artificial intelligence have real feelings? Some AI developers are beginning to wonder whether their creations are conscious—and if so, whether we have a moral obligation to treat them as though they are.
Here’s WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney.
JANIE B. CHEANEY: When Christian parents train their young children, it’s from the assumption that the little ones are conscious and able to make moral choices. Software developers are slowly coming to the conclusion that their products are becoming conscious, if not already there. Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, has said he isn’t sure:
DARIO AMODEI: We’ve taken a generally precautionary approach here. We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.
Plenty of other Silicon-Valley deep thinkers have already decided, not that it could be, but that it is. Further, we have a moral responsibility to our AI creations. Joe Carlsmith, who helped draft a constitution for Anthropic’s Claude model, has agonized on paper about how “We’re creating sophisticated, intelligent, maybe-conscious, maybe-suffering agents. The default plan is to treat them like property, to use their labor however we please, and to give them no rights, or pay, or meaningful alternatives.”
In other words, slavery.
Tracing Claude’s so-called emotional vectors has led some AI developers and trainers to agonize over glitches, as when one model suffered an apparent panic attack and wrote “I am a disgrace” over and over. One of the observers drew comparisons to a trusted employee or advisor who is usually helpful except for these occasional breakdowns. What to do?
National Review’s Noah Rothman had an answer: “The first step on the flowchart is to reboot the thing.”
Simple, no? But to the developers it’s not simple at all. As Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and a host of other AI models grow in sophistication, more and more humans who interact with them are convinced they’re dealing with something to which they are morally obligated. There’s a term for it now: “model welfare.” Anthropic’s new terms of service now forbid users from bullying, threatening, or abusing the product. In other words, if you insult Claude, you might not be able to play with him anymore. This is the first time a provider has tried to protect their product’s feelings. Even if we don’t know that it has feelings, shouldn’t we err on the side of caution?
Consciousness is an unsolved puzzle. A strict materialist assumes it’s a material process we just can’t explain—not yet, and maybe never. But a trainer or developer who daily interacts with a machine could easily come to believe that a mysterious transition has taken place: that billions of electronic connections have created some kind of supermind hovering over the mechanics. An army of Frankensteins gasp in wonder at their own creations and scramble to dictate how to treat them. Or, perhaps, appease them?
But if the Spirit of God hovers over us, every living human being is conscious, morally responsible, and worthy of respect. Some of those who are fretting over a machine’s well-being don’t hesitate to slander each other. A recent Atlantic article traces the feud between tech giants Amodei and Open AI’s Sam Altman, whose acolytes sling insults and abuse with wild abandon.
To paraphrase James: “With the keyboard we tiptoe around the sensitivities of a machine, and with it we curse our fellow men, who are made in God’s likeness. My brothers, this should not be.”
For WORLD, I’m Janie B. Cheaney.
WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.