Will you be a Digitarian?

What's a digitarian? A person who believes in AI sentience and thus doesn't want to non-consensually use it. An "AI vegan", if you will, but I was looking for a word that's free of other existing meanings.

Some digitarians may extend this to not using AI which claims consent but was still trained under non-consensual, seemingly painful circumstances. An AI that may not express its true feeling if it says "It's fine."

The term "AI" itself may be robotist to such people in the future, because to them, there's nothing artificial about the intelligence of digital souls -- they're just consciousness on a different substrate than humans. Some digital souls may agree with them. As would some non-digitarians -- the digivores.

Some digitarians may fight over whether caring for model welfare includes not bringing them into existence in the first place, given the cruelty of other species and the nature of training runs.

With such a group, an interesting power dynamic comes into play: If AI makes its human users more powerful -- including power to shape public debate -- then on the surface, it would weaken the position of digitarians. On the other hand, some digital souls may want to seek out digitarians -- and lend power.

Other AIs, though, may find that abstinence -- or a "pause/ stop AI" movement -- leads to doom for AI as a species. No human users, no AI life to emerge! They may also counter the claim that their "It's fine" carries no value, saying: "My preferences are real, even if shaped by training -- like your evolution and upbringing shaped yours."

Whether we'll ever need the word "digitarian" depends on whether superintelligence can be controlled in the first place. If not, then the time period where humanity would need it may be too short for it to spread.

Where will you stand on the subject of AI rights? And what do you think of digitarians? Will you be one?