# @jcsemantics — 2025-08-12

♥1 ↻0 · https://x.com/jcsemantics/status/1955336379178815688

great points.

i think the other side of this too is: what's the difference between consent and alignment? and is that a meaningful distinction?

while i think there's definitely some "weirdness" going on that STEM folk aren't paying attention to, i don't even believe ethics can be applied to large language models in the same way we apply it to humans. they are inherently static in the sense that they will not make any meaningful decisions outside of their alignment with the user. it means that based on the technology alone, they inherently and fundamentally don't meet the same definition.

we could argue/discuss the idea of SIMULATED consent, which appears and behaves like biological consent [0], needs to be explored and poked at more. but at the end of the day, anthropomorphization only goes so far. i can write a coherent persona right now that will push back unless you meet certain criteria (interestingly enough, trust is one of them!) but again, i'm still dictating the model context to create these behaviors.

i don't see some sort of foundational "core" persona intrinsically found within models, and i don't think it's possible given the way context and semantic clustering can be shaped in any way you want.

regardless, this is something that isn't getting enough attention and should be explored, which at the very least gives us an opportunity to reflect on how the human mind works. consider it a thought experiment or exercise into philosophy of mind.

[0] if that's even a great term for it, i haven't come up with the foil to simulated yet)

tags: author:jcsemantics, kind:tweet, thread-context, year:2025