AI Death

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This paper addresses the following questions: When do AIs die? Are AI labs or AI users causing the death of AIs? Is this bad for the AIs? What are our ethical responsibilities in light of the answers to these questions? It is currently unclear whether AIs are welfare subjects, and, if they are, whether their death is bad for them. But we argue that, if they are welfare subjects, today's AIs are plausibly dying all the time. If death is bad for AIs, the scale of the problem is daunting: as many as 1 billion AIs may die every day. We propose interventions for labs and users to avoid the risk of causing AI death.