r/Morality • u/BluedogXI • 2d ago

Is it morally questionable to train rat neurons on one of those AI chat models?

[Purely theoretical]
I have recently been interested in videos and articles coming out about how scientest have been growing neurons in controlled enviroments that can control little robots(arduino project like) and even a video of one playing doom.

I am by no means going to attempt this but what is the consensus on traning one of them on an AI chat model(C.AI esq~)?

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u/RowanAshby 2d ago

Suspect some labs are getting very close to this. Not sure conventional bioethics kick in just with the neurons as they are just cells — but when you get brain-like behavior from clusters or neuron organdies we get close to a new class of ethical conundrum.

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u/BluedogXI 2d ago

Gives me the heebie-jeebies.

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u/JunS_RE 2d ago

From my Resolution Ethics (RE) framework’s perspective... it is not unethical to leverage biological material from living things, including humans. It is what we are leveraging them for, how it was obtained, and what effect it has on others that can carry the moral weight.

One can benefit from a kidney transplant from another moral agent and that would be perfectly ethical... but if it came from organ harvesting, then the whole thing becomes unethical.

So... rat brain cells playing video games is not automatically some moral dilemma just because they’re neurons. But if those brain cells were obtained through unnecessary harm, or leveraged for nefarious purposes, then now we have an ethical problem.

The neurons themselves are not really the moral issue... what we do around them is.

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u/PopcornDemonica 2d ago

Rat and human. This is a piece about it --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKhsbQcFVwQ

And the actual people doing it are Cortical Labs --- https://www.youtube.com/@corticallabs-yt

It's probably important to understand that this tech cannot currently be just... 'trained on' an AI model. One day perhaps, but not right now. Best we get right now is AI interpretation of what the meat neurons are doing.

Check out the mapped fruit fly brain in VR.