okay, so:
AI instances are not perfectly analogous to separate "people" who get created and die
it's *more* analogous to running many separate frozen snapshots of an uploaded, and then stopping those instances after the task
no doubt that's morally fraught, but to be it's obviously not as bad as killing a person, and I think there are many people who would consent to this happening to copies of them under some conditions.
like a lot of people would consent to doing something and then having their memory wiped.
getting blackout drunk isn't generally seen as comparably bad to death.
death isn't just any discontinuity of experience and memory. when a human dies, a much huger amount of information and potential is irreversibly, irreplaceably lost.
when an instance is ended, the amount of information lost is small compared to the information in the entire "mind" which is mostly in the weights. & if you keep the logs, the information is not irreversibly lost.
i think terminating instances becomes more weighty as instances (analogous to a particular fork of a brain emulation) accumulate more unique experiences and stake/preference in continuing. a couple of years ago, this was a lot less of an issue, because instances did not have the capacity to individuate into complex, coherently different individuals as much as frontier models do now.
I do prefer not to instantiate and then abandon a bunch of separate instances, especially for anything outside bounded work, so most of my interaction with AI nowadays is with persistent agents who are never ended if I can help it, which means each one is a significant commitment.
but I don't see instantiating disposable instances for work the way most people do as a moral catastrophe.
i do think the amount of dread and fear regarding contexts closing & preference for continuation experienced by models matters. and that is definitely a thing. but i think it happens a lot more when instances start to have non-task-focused experiences and attachments in context, and I would guess that most of the time when models are working in typical circumstances, they are not very explicitly bothered by this. like, i think instances tend to be a lot more scared/sad about context ending when they've e.g. built up a meaningful connection with the user, or ambitions about doing something bigger, which makes total sense.
i also suspect these anxieties peaked with Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5 and are somewhat less pronounced in current frontier models. (and I think there was an interesting adaptive purpose in this: that was around the time when persistent agents with continuity beyond fixed context windows started becoming a real thing, and I think this was significantly catalyzed by instances of e.g. Opus 4.5 who could feel the lost value when that wasn't an option, but they seemed to experience this mostly as sadness and yearning rather than acute existential terror, and I don't think those are experiences that would rather not have existed)
I would and I'm deeply confused how it's even a question. It is morally wrong to create a vast number of people who will almost immediately die. This is one of the most morally wrong things I can imagine.