Gordon Dai

Recent proposals urge AI labs to prepare for “AI welfare” under uncertainty about whether AI systems have morally relevant inner states. We do not argue for or against the possibility of AI welfare. Instead, we argue that current AI welfare assessment fails for two linked structural reasons absent from other evaluation targets. First, AI welfare indicators are co-engineered with the systems they evaluate: ordinary development decisions that shape model behavior can also manufacture or suppress welfare evidence. Second, AI welfare lacks external validation: no deployment failure or independent test can reveal whether a welfare metric tracks anything real about the system. Together, these problems yield our central claim: For current systems, AI welfare is bullshit in Frankfurt’s sense, as its measurement regime is structurally disconnected from truthtracking. AI welfare should therefore not be institutionalized as a binding gate for oversight, release, or accountability; restrictions on AI systems should instead be justified by externally verifiable harms.

This position paper argues that the theoretical inconsistency often observed among Responsible AI (RAI) metrics, such as differing fairness definitions or tradeoffs between accuracy and privacy, should be embraced as a valuable feature rather than a flaw to be eliminated. We contend that navigating these inconsistencies, by treating metrics as divergent objectives, yields three key benefits: (1) Normative Pluralism: Maintaining a full suite of potentially contradictory metrics ensures that the diverse moral stances and stakeholder values inherent in RAI are adequately represented. (2) Epistemological Completeness: The use of multiple, sometimes conflicting, metrics allows for a more comprehensive capture of multifaceted ethical concepts, thereby preserving greater informational fidelity about these concepts than any single, simplified definition. (3) Implicit Regularization: Jointly optimizing for theoretically conflicting objectives discourages overfitting to one specific metric, steering models towards solutions with enhanced generalization and robustness under real-world complexities. In contrast, efforts to enforce theoretical consistency by simplifying or pruning metrics risk narrowing this value diversity, losing conceptual depth, and degrading model performance. We therefore advocate for a shift in RAI theory and practice: from getting trapped in inconsistency to characterizing acceptable inconsistency thresholds and elucidating the mechanisms that permit robust, approximated consistency in practice.

When selecting a model from a set of equally performant models, how much unfairness can you really reduce? Is it important to be intentional about fairness when choosing among this set, or is arbitrarily choosing among the set of “good” models good enough? Recent work has highlighted that the phenomenon of model multiplicity—where multiple models with nearly identical predictive accuracy exist for the same task—has both positive and negative implications for fairness, from strengthening the enforcement of civil rights law in AI systems to showcasing arbitrariness in AI decision-making. Despite the enormous implications of model multiplicity, there is little work that explores the properties of sets of equally accurate models, or Rashomon sets, in general. In this paper, we present five main theoretical and methodological contributions which help us to understand the relatively unexplored properties of the Rashomon set, in particular with regards to fairness. Our contributions include methods for efficiently sampling models from this set and techniques for identifying the fairest models according to key fairness metrics such as statistical parity. We also derive the probability that an individual’s prediction will be flipped within the Rashomon set, as well as expressions for the set’s size and the distribution of error tolerance used across models. These results lead to policy-relevant takeaways, such as the importance of intentionally looking for fair models within the Rashomon set, and understanding which individuals or groups may be more susceptible to arbitrary decisions.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer an opportunity for computational social science research at scale. Building upon prior explorations of LLM agent design, our work introduces a simulated agent society where complex social relationships dynamically form and evolve over time. Agents are imbued with psychological drives and placed in a sandbox survival environment. We conduct an evaluation of the agent society through the lens of Thomas Hobbes's seminal Social Contract Theory (SCT). We analyze whether, as the theory postulates, agents seek to escape a brutish "state of nature" by surrendering rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for order and security. Our experiments unveil an alignment: Initially, agents engage in unrestrained conflict, mirroring Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature. However, as the simulation progresses, social contracts emerge, leading to the authorization of an absolute sovereign and the establishment of a peaceful commonwealth founded on mutual cooperation. This congruence between our LLM agent society's evolutionary trajectory and Hobbes's theoretical account indicates LLMs' capability to model intricate social dynamics and potentially replicate forces that shape human societies. By enabling such insights into group behavior and emergent societal phenomena, LLM-driven multi-agent simulations, while unable to simulate all the nuances of human behavior, may hold potential for advancing our understanding of social structures, group dynamics, and complex human systems.