CONCEPT
The Wanton
Frankfurt's technical term for a being that acts on first-order desires without ever forming second-order attitudes about them — a creature moved by wanting without caring about its own wanting, and the precise philosophical category into which large language models fall.
A wanton, in Frankfurt's precise technical usage, is not a person of loose morals. It is a being that lacks the hierarchical structure of the will. The wanton has first-order desires and acts on them but never forms second-order attitudes toward those desires — never asks whether it endorses what moves it, never evaluates its own motivational life, never identifies with some wants and repudiates others. The wanton is moved the way a leaf is moved by wind: responsive to force, incapable of evaluation. What makes something a person, Frankfurt argued, is not the power of its cognition but the structure of its will. Applied to artificial intelligence, the distinction is clarifying: large language models are wantons in the exact technical sense. They generate without caring what they generate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Frankfurt was careful to note that wantonness is not a matter of intelligence. A being can be computationally sophisticated —
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