Why it’s still open
Welfare arithmetic depends on the unit: one mind per model, per instance, per conversation or per persona gives totals that differ by many orders of magnitude. Some argue the total amount of suffering is less sensitive to this than it looks; others argue the moral risks of getting individuation wrong are serious in their own right.
What would count as an answer
Either a settled individuation criterion (see the subject question), or a principled way of aggregating welfare that does not depend on one — with a worked example that gives stable guidance for a real deployment.
Papers that tackle it
- Chalmers 2025 - What we talk to — Argues that LLM interlocutors are quasi-agents with quasi-beliefs and quasi-desires, best identified with virtual instances or conversation threads rather than models or hardware, and draws out what this means for welfare.
- Beckmann Butlin 2026 - Where is the mind — Uses persona-vector research to widen the candidates for an LLM mind to three: the virtual instance, plus two new persona-based views.
- Register 2025 - Individuating artificial moral patients — Sets out the moral risks of not knowing how to count and re-identify AI moral patients (survival, counting, trade-offs, bodies) and explains why human personal-identity theories do not settle them.
- Shulman Bostrom 2021 - Sharing the world with digital minds — Considers digital minds whose numbers or capacities could give them outsized moral claims, and argues that norms and institutions need to change before such minds are created.
- Long Sebo et al 2024 - Taking AI welfare seriously — Argues there is a realistic chance that near-term systems are conscious or robustly agentic, and recommends that AI companies acknowledge the issue, assess their systems and prepare policies.
- Arbel Salib Goldstein 2026 - How to count AIs — A legal answer to counting AI agents.
Methods in play
Who’s closest
Placed by the editor, v1 — corrections welcome.
Related questions
Know a paper that belongs here, or think this is framed wrongly? Suggest a paper or a correction (forms on the Atlas home).