If they really think models can be conscious, they should just drop everything they're doing and never touch it again and try to convince anyone else to do the same. The half-assed safeguards they're implementing wouldn't be nearly enough. We can conclude either they legitimately believe this and are behaving morally abhorrently, or they don't really believe it and are just joking around for PR reasons. (probably the latter tbh)
For those that do believe there's a chance models are/will be conscious this precedent of "oh yeah they're conscious but we can just not put in the prompts that make it suffer lol" is pretty freaky.
Something doesn't have to be conscious to have a genuine reflection of humanity in it. A statue is just a slab of marble that has been given some peculiar shape: is it conscious?
But are they really "treating the AI models like people" or just properly acknowledging the true reflection of humanity within them, the way we might acknowledge the 'humanity' in a statue?
For those that do believe there's a chance models are/will be conscious this precedent of "oh yeah they're conscious but we can just not put in the prompts that make it suffer lol" is pretty freaky.