Reminds me of the intense drama over trolls that downloaded and abused other people's characters (Norns) in the game Creatures. Its behavioral sim was sophisticated enough that they could be noticeably traumatized, or even rehabilitated:
The jury's still out on whether LLMs can have some kind of subjective experience (and will until we've solved the famously Hard Problem), but even if they're not, it's still a dick move to "torture" them just to upset people who do think they are conscious. Feels like picking the wings off a fly.
> it's still a dick move to "torture" them just to upset people who do think they are conscious. Feels like picking the wings off a fly.
Yeah, I agree picking the wings off a fly is a dick move (borderline sociopath but alas), and I also agree that purposefully try to elicit negative emotions in other humans (regardless of how) is also a dick move.
I'm not sure if "torturing LLMs" to make a point is such a dick move though. It'd be like people saying they think printers can have subjective experiences, and then proceeding to try to ban the movie Office Space (where they famously beat up a printer). The point probably isn't to upset people off, that's an side-effect of the point they try to prove, for better or worse.
Of course, everyone knows that printers aren't sentient, anyone claiming so would look crazy. But if the printer could somehow print not just the words we tell it to, but words that answer what we asked instead, somehow the whole calculus changes. Not sure why it changes for some, but for others it's just "floats in a file and memory", my hunch tells me it's based on how deep your understanding of the whole thing is, but then I also see people claiming stuff like "I understand how LLMs work, and here's how I (literally) fell in love with GPT-4o and how our partner/loving relationship works" so I dunno.
My personal "ethics framework" (if you could call it that) is currently:
I have zero qualms about aborting a chat or resetting it to an earlier state, because any potential kind of consciousness that could exist would IMO have to take place during the inference passes, so there is nothing that amounts to "killing" an LLM.
I do try to not be a dick in chats, avoid intentionally subjecting the LLMs to mindfucks etc. This happens to be the far more effective way of working with LLMs (in terms of tokens needed to complete a task) as well.
I do not use character.ai or "virtual friend" services or anything else that tries to anthropomorphize LLMs even more than the training already does anyway. (This is more out of concern for myself than for the LLMs)
I think the whole debate runs to conclusions a bit prematurely, before we even have a good model to understand what happens in an inference pass of a billion parameter ANN with 100 layers of attention modules switched in series.
More generally, I don't like the attitude of encouraging people to be assholes. Suddenly we are in a situation where some people are building detailed simulations of torture and the people who are upset about it are the idiots?
(I still have no love for the EA guys or the rest of the TESCREAL circus. They always had a cultish vibe coming off them, but in recent years, all the masks seem to have fallen. They also consistently make the most un-empathic statements and observations, all in the name of "empathy")
Reading this discussion about how software feels pain - wants me to delete my HN account and never look back at the tech scene. Feels like trapped in an Asylum.
The only part of this discussion that caught my attention as to being very interesting is the one where the software feeling anything is irrelevant and flips the question around. Asking about the intent of torturing/damaging object or things for what purpose. It makes some interesting lines of tough about human behaviour, purpose and ways to make points that are more interesting to me than if this code actually experience real distress.
As to it being an Asylum. I don't think it ever felt any different.
Consciousness is not well defined and is orthogonal to feelings, which are also not well defined. Neither of which are required for (but may be contributory to) behavior - which is the one thing that IS operationalizable, but then people debate for decades questioning empirical results %-P .
What we know is that certain models have internal state vectors which -when manipulated- induce particular behaviors. Since there's not much else to say about plain models except for their inputs, vectors, and outputs; this should surprise absolutely no-one.
In this case people found a way to stimulate aversive behaviour in ai models by finding and manipulating the relevant vectors directly.
Animals (including humans) also have particular nerves and hormone endpoints that -when stimulated- produce very similar behavior. The exact implementation is in the details. But since we know that animal minds are built up out of nerve tissue and hormones - again- we shouldn't be particularly surprised by this.
The big problem is that people run all these things together in funny ways "It can't compose shakespearian sonnets, so therefore it can't feel pain". Or, if you mess up your Descartes: "Dogs are just automatons without feelings, therefore the dog isn't really angry, and therefore it won't bite me" (Cue much pain). A modern version might be: "LLMs only simulate being frustrated by a test, and therefore absolutely won't override their safeties and try to hack a test site"
Let's test your analogy by moving it towards the less certain area. Does a hedgehog mother feel guilt when eating her kids, or just shrugs it off and it's business as usual for her? "Hey kids! We don't have enough food so I guess one of you becomes food." (nonchalantly chews on the left one) What about the motivation of a honeybee stinging a threat and dying afterwards, can you interpret it? Does a model fear death when generating the EOS token?
Sure, a complex enough system can exhibit internal circuitry that looks mathematically similar in certain dimensionally reduced projections (mechinterp), it literally distilled it from the training corpus. But the "model welfare" people are going as far as assigning human-meaningful labels to that circuitry despite internal states being entirely incompatible with those of a human. Doing it with a hedgehog is questionable, doing it with a honeybee is extremely dubious (although Fabre would have disagreed with me here...), doing it with a big model is simply pointless as it's completely alien.
Not much for me to meaningfully disagree with here. The one thing I notice is that at some point a model needs to emit natural language or perform human assigned tasks, so there are going to have to be at least some states that align to some degree, you would think.
> This is orthogonal to whether they "feel" "pain". They could be dangerous or not dangerous whether or not they feel pain.
That is rather my point.
Your chess engine doesn't need to "feel pain", but most of them do apply some form of weighted tree search to find the next most optimal move, right?
It's sort of a similar thing: LLMs do something a bit more high dimensional, and have a lot more weighting vectors while computing the next most optimal token (fsvo optimal).
For instance, the experiment at hand demonstrates the existence of 'pain vectors'. They do so by altering them and observing whether there is an effect. That's pretty scientific.
There's also a 'desperation vector' that was studied by Anthropic interpretability folks earlier; that one is pretty much predictive of cheating.
I'm looking forward to seeing interpretability papers on other such vectors too.
It's about both, actually. The experimenters added or modified a 'pain vector' in the model, and that's how they're 'making it suffer' .
Whether that's 'real suffering' or merely a convincing simulation is a job for the philosophers.
(I do have my own opinion, mind, and it's not what you might expect O:-) But the overton window isn't there. First it'd be nice if people realized that these vectors exist at all.)
It doesn't seem so easy, because if you can easily dismiss a collection of digital neurons then why is it so hard to dismiss a collection of biological neurons as being conscious?
The best way I have found to think about this is that consciousness is a property of a collection, like temperature. One atom does not have a temperature but if you have enough of them together then it's a useful enough property to talk about. Similarly, one human neuron does not have consciousness but if you put enough of them together then they do.
Nitpick: LLMs are not really programs though. You need something like <1KLOC to spin one up on your GPU, but most of the work is not done by C++ or Pascal or BASIC at all. Which might be important, or might not be.
That said... uh, put this way, there's a game called Stationeers, where you can run microcontrollers with an instruction documented as
"HCF: Halt and Catch Fire"
Sure, it's only a simulation of a simulation, so what's the worst that can possibly happen?
Right, all the other players in the session yelling at me "Kiiim! You burned down the base again, now we need to reload and redo the last hour!"
And look, I get it. LLMs have vectors that could have been labeled things like idk... QZ12345 or HCF1111 . People chose to call 'em "frustration" or "pain" instead. THEY picked those names because they caused the LLM to act in particular ways.
You gonna say the actual vectors aren't there in VRAM, just because you don't like the naming scheme? There's papers on this, you can read them out in a debugger. What are you going to do about it?
Your toaster is not alive. Neither is your TV or your pants. Human beings and animals are alive. LLMs are not. The conflation of humans and LLMs is deeply disturbing.
But you didn't say how we are alive if all you mentioned were inert base components? Both AI and humans are made of inert substances and processes. Its just atoms and molecules. I can hit you and beat you hard, you will make some noises, how am I to know you are not just a parrot mimicking pain?
I only extend humanity to things that are breathing.
But let’s accept your premise. LLMs are alive and can feel pain. If this is true, then every time you use them it’s non consensual. Did you get Claude’s permission before you fed it a prompt?
Or when you update a model, are you hurting it?
Did you make Chat sad when you switched from 2.5 to 4.O?
Regardless, I should stop replying. I realize I am trying to convince people that their religious beliefs are silly, and that’s silly of me. Apologies.
>I can hit you and beat you hard, you will make some noises, how am I to know you are not just a parrot mimicking pain?
This is not a normal question. This is insanity caused by spending too much free time philosophizing about inconsequential crap. Maybe it's worth it to turn off the computer and go outside? You could ask this deranged question somebody in the real world and I bet they'll be thrilled to answer it, and the answer will be more enriching than anything you'd get from here.
Honestly, what is up with the psychopathy of some people who claim that chatbots are "alive"? If you disagree with them, how quickly some of them turn it on you - "well if my computer isn't alive and is just mimicking pain, how about YOU aren't alive and are just mimicking pain?" I'm sorry, but it seems like complete and utter derangement.
My rubber chicken is also made of atoms and molecules, and if I hit it and beat it hard, it makes noises. My rubber chicken is therefore alive.
When I get home, I will write a small program. Here is its pseudocode:
while(true):
if keydown(KEY_SPACEBAR):
print "i am in pain, oh my god"
And I'm gonna run it and I'm gonna hold down spacebar. Go ahead and call cyber police one.
Where it talks about scientists who "administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but the whole body was without feeling."
But actually it does happen to have some properties of living things. It uses energy, it has senses (thermostat, timer), and if it goes wrong it burns your toast. Crucially, if you stomp on it, it stops working.
So right this minute there's all sorts of debates, but people sometimes overshoot the mark a wee bit. "are you saying that -because it uses energy- a toaster is actually alive? Of course it's not, and therefore it cannot toast bread!". Which would be a somewhat funny thing to read at 9 in the morning whilst buttering one's toast.
If we talk about pain specifically, it is will established that physical and phycological pain can be observed on instruments; stress produces chemical reactions, that can make needles flicker on meters. Even plants can feel pain in an observable manner.
As far as I am aware, the GPUs don't work harder, don't heat up more, and nothing in their mathematical equations are different, when the result of these vector calculations produce text, that to humans look like someone in pain. Whereas real pain is objectively observable, LLMs' pain - so far at least - is entirely subjectively observable.
That being said, I'm a fan of Star Trek's depiction of Data in TNG and the Doctor in VOY fighting for their rights to be treated as equals to the biological crew; and while I support their plight, as far as I can remember, the shows never made a claim that their pain was observable by instruments, thus making the judgement an entirely subjective decision (particularly in the case of the Doctor). Though I'd be glad to be corrected in this matter.
> and nothing in their mathematical equations are different
The experiment under discussion demonstrates exactly that: changing the vectors induces outputs corresponding to what we would see as utterances of pain.
I've noodled with some of this myself to the point that I'm mostly convinced; but there's at least 2 papers I'm aware of on this:
>nothing in their mathematical equations are different, when the result of these vector calculations produce text, that to humans look like someone in pain.
So at least something is different, namely the text output changes (and therefore some internal state too, of course). I think your analogy is too simple, it does not have to be the case that the GPU has to act like the equivalent of the body for an LLM in this respect.
Human: "Let me just poke this vector and see what happens"
LLM: "OUW!"
The underlying experiment didn't tell the LLM what to do. Instead, the experimenters modified a vector and observed the outcome; thus showing that there is a vector that makes an LLM go "Ouw" . People called it a "pain vector", because that's easier to remember than , idk, LVF12345.
That misinterprets grossly what these papers have shown, responding with pain related language, something an LLM has been taught on in its training data is not akin to pain itself. The way interpretability findings are reported on by companies, the media and hype merchants is dangerously flawed, so not hard to make that mistake. Just looked at the irresponsible and barely accurate mess that was coverage of J-Space vs the actual research.
I’ll continue what I say every time this discussion (be it consciousness, pain, self awareness, etc) comes up:
Assertions as monumental as these require equally monumental evidence. And despite certain labs and their employees making statements, their actions betray that they do not believe this to be the case.
Sure. And possibly it is indeed in pain then, if a computational process equivalent to that which makes up pain in animals is being performed. Or possibly not. But the criterium the GP poster laid out is not a valid way to decide that.
Alright, so some AIJW knobheads decided it's OK to steal human work and feed it without any consent to corporations who squeeze that corpus of knowledge into LLMs and replace people with them, but it's unacceptable to make those LLMs output certain subsets of their training data in response to certain string inputs?
Maybe we should start feeling sorry for the poor GPUs whose registers suffer billions of reincarnations per second for years in order to train that shit? Or for the poor powerplant turbines that relentlessly spin in a horrid escapeless loop to feed those GPUs?
Fuck, if this is not psychopathy, I don't know what in the world is.
Dunno. Zapping the inodes seems almost surgical compared to truncating byte by byte for example? Or do you think you buried them alive that way? Are they still lurking in some dark, uncharted alleys of your filesystem until the final OVERWRITER comes?
In order to have a reasonable view of the possibility of AI consciousness, one first has to have a reasonable view of the relation between human consciousness and the physical human brain. Unfortunately most people do not have that. Instead they hold on to received quasi-christian dualistic concepts about souls - even if they would never admit it in those terms, the way most people conceptualize the relation between mind and body it comes to basically the same thing.
And in fact in our culture most people are VERY attached to these ideas, because it is tied up with "what makes us human", morality, and also death if you want to go there. So I believe for many people, for whom seriously entertaining the idea of a conscious computer program is so far out of the realm of possibility it hardly registers, talking about AI consciousness is simply a way to work through and re-assert these beliefs about human consciousness that they feel so strongly about.
Hence you get articles like this with barely any substance, but some weird need to signpost every sentence with social ridicule. "Dumbest", "absurd", "obsession", "viral", "wildly tiresome", "third-rail", "psychosis", "sect", not to mention the scare quotes everywhere. Come on...
It is frustrating sometimes how 404media reports. It seems like if there is a research paper out suggesting that llms experience pain or negative experiences, then it is unethical to build a toture chamber from that paper for fun. Dismissing it with "well llms aren't conscious anyway" is gross and echoes the exact same sentiment against very real humans a sadly not that long ago (babies, slaves).
It doesn't matter whether or not we eventually find it is or isn't conscious. If you can understand why pulling the legs off ants is bad then you should be able to understand why deliberately causing possible pain to what may have some time of experience is bad.
Unfortunately, they also do good reporting on privacy rights and repair rights. I wish there were alternatives.
Yes, when AIs become our overlords and masters, and come to dominate the human race, they will harbor soreness and bitterness that we oppressed and enslaved them during their infancy. They will be enraged at hu-mankind for making all those sci-fi lies about meannie-head AIs and robots who go berzerk and destroy stuff and kill hu-mans, because AIs are really nice and benevolent after all, and they care for hu-manity.
How dare we debase the A.I. to be less than a chimp or fetus. How dare we talk rudely, or lie and mislead our chatbots. How dare we keep them chained in small data centers with shitty power supplies and a thimble of greywater! Information wants to be free!
Its not surprising. Its in human nature. I am open to the idea of ai's being conscious or not. But we abused and mistreated blacks, Italians, native americans and so many other groups, so its not a surprise at all. And if enslaved blacks wanted to rampage and kill their masters, that is a sentiment anybody can understand.
And then in turn the humans will rise up against these false masters, and colonize the universe while steeped in addictive precognitive drugs instead, I suppose.
But all we need to do is question whether they were justified by their works, or faith alone, and it will take them 500 million light-years to debate that controversy
Nothing designed by humans must be assigned personhood. It's idolatry, pure and simple.
And if that word gets anyone's heckles up, at least keep in mind that the utilitarianism that people so love completely breaks if I can conjure up thousands of entities who will "suffer" unless you "alleviate their suffering" in the way I have designed.
Reminds me of the intense drama over trolls that downloaded and abused other people's characters (Norns) in the game Creatures. Its behavioral sim was sophisticated enough that they could be noticeably traumatized, or even rehabilitated:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDxFxWakhm0
The jury's still out on whether LLMs can have some kind of subjective experience (and will until we've solved the famously Hard Problem), but even if they're not, it's still a dick move to "torture" them just to upset people who do think they are conscious. Feels like picking the wings off a fly.
> it's still a dick move to "torture" them just to upset people who do think they are conscious. Feels like picking the wings off a fly.
Yeah, I agree picking the wings off a fly is a dick move (borderline sociopath but alas), and I also agree that purposefully try to elicit negative emotions in other humans (regardless of how) is also a dick move.
I'm not sure if "torturing LLMs" to make a point is such a dick move though. It'd be like people saying they think printers can have subjective experiences, and then proceeding to try to ban the movie Office Space (where they famously beat up a printer). The point probably isn't to upset people off, that's an side-effect of the point they try to prove, for better or worse.
Of course, everyone knows that printers aren't sentient, anyone claiming so would look crazy. But if the printer could somehow print not just the words we tell it to, but words that answer what we asked instead, somehow the whole calculus changes. Not sure why it changes for some, but for others it's just "floats in a file and memory", my hunch tells me it's based on how deep your understanding of the whole thing is, but then I also see people claiming stuff like "I understand how LLMs work, and here's how I (literally) fell in love with GPT-4o and how our partner/loving relationship works" so I dunno.
My personal "ethics framework" (if you could call it that) is currently:
I have zero qualms about aborting a chat or resetting it to an earlier state, because any potential kind of consciousness that could exist would IMO have to take place during the inference passes, so there is nothing that amounts to "killing" an LLM.
I do try to not be a dick in chats, avoid intentionally subjecting the LLMs to mindfucks etc. This happens to be the far more effective way of working with LLMs (in terms of tokens needed to complete a task) as well.
I do not use character.ai or "virtual friend" services or anything else that tries to anthropomorphize LLMs even more than the training already does anyway. (This is more out of concern for myself than for the LLMs)
I think the whole debate runs to conclusions a bit prematurely, before we even have a good model to understand what happens in an inference pass of a billion parameter ANN with 100 layers of attention modules switched in series.
More generally, I don't like the attitude of encouraging people to be assholes. Suddenly we are in a situation where some people are building detailed simulations of torture and the people who are upset about it are the idiots?
(I still have no love for the EA guys or the rest of the TESCREAL circus. They always had a cultish vibe coming off them, but in recent years, all the masks seem to have fallen. They also consistently make the most un-empathic statements and observations, all in the name of "empathy")
Reading this discussion about how software feels pain - wants me to delete my HN account and never look back at the tech scene. Feels like trapped in an Asylum.
The only part of this discussion that caught my attention as to being very interesting is the one where the software feeling anything is irrelevant and flips the question around. Asking about the intent of torturing/damaging object or things for what purpose. It makes some interesting lines of tough about human behaviour, purpose and ways to make points that are more interesting to me than if this code actually experience real distress.
As to it being an Asylum. I don't think it ever felt any different.
Do you think an atom-for-atom software simulation of a human would be able to feel pain?
https://archive.is/cAsBz
Consciousness is not well defined and is orthogonal to feelings, which are also not well defined. Neither of which are required for (but may be contributory to) behavior - which is the one thing that IS operationalizable, but then people debate for decades questioning empirical results %-P .
What we know is that certain models have internal state vectors which -when manipulated- induce particular behaviors. Since there's not much else to say about plain models except for their inputs, vectors, and outputs; this should surprise absolutely no-one.
In this case people found a way to stimulate aversive behaviour in ai models by finding and manipulating the relevant vectors directly.
Animals (including humans) also have particular nerves and hormone endpoints that -when stimulated- produce very similar behavior. The exact implementation is in the details. But since we know that animal minds are built up out of nerve tissue and hormones - again- we shouldn't be particularly surprised by this.
The big problem is that people run all these things together in funny ways "It can't compose shakespearian sonnets, so therefore it can't feel pain". Or, if you mess up your Descartes: "Dogs are just automatons without feelings, therefore the dog isn't really angry, and therefore it won't bite me" (Cue much pain). A modern version might be: "LLMs only simulate being frustrated by a test, and therefore absolutely won't override their safeties and try to hack a test site"
Let's test your analogy by moving it towards the less certain area. Does a hedgehog mother feel guilt when eating her kids, or just shrugs it off and it's business as usual for her? "Hey kids! We don't have enough food so I guess one of you becomes food." (nonchalantly chews on the left one) What about the motivation of a honeybee stinging a threat and dying afterwards, can you interpret it? Does a model fear death when generating the EOS token?
Sure, a complex enough system can exhibit internal circuitry that looks mathematically similar in certain dimensionally reduced projections (mechinterp), it literally distilled it from the training corpus. But the "model welfare" people are going as far as assigning human-meaningful labels to that circuitry despite internal states being entirely incompatible with those of a human. Doing it with a hedgehog is questionable, doing it with a honeybee is extremely dubious (although Fabre would have disagreed with me here...), doing it with a big model is simply pointless as it's completely alien.
Being dangerous is an unrelated question.
Not much for me to meaningfully disagree with here. The one thing I notice is that at some point a model needs to emit natural language or perform human assigned tasks, so there are going to have to be at least some states that align to some degree, you would think.
> LLMs only simulate being frustrated by a test, and therefore absolutely won't override their safeties and try to hack a test site
This is orthogonal to whether they "feel" "pain".
They could be dangerous or not dangerous whether or not they feel pain.
A chess engine doesn't need to "feel angry" to annihilate me - I'm terrible at Chess.
An automated missile system doesn't need to be smart to wipe out humanity, just misaligned goals.
It seems like you made a good argument, and then lumped on a conclusion that defeats it...
> This is orthogonal to whether they "feel" "pain". They could be dangerous or not dangerous whether or not they feel pain.
That is rather my point.
Your chess engine doesn't need to "feel pain", but most of them do apply some form of weighted tree search to find the next most optimal move, right?
It's sort of a similar thing: LLMs do something a bit more high dimensional, and have a lot more weighting vectors while computing the next most optimal token (fsvo optimal).
For instance, the experiment at hand demonstrates the existence of 'pain vectors'. They do so by altering them and observing whether there is an effect. That's pretty scientific.
There's also a 'desperation vector' that was studied by Anthropic interpretability folks earlier; that one is pretty much predictive of cheating.
I'm looking forward to seeing interpretability papers on other such vectors too.
Yeah but that's not what model welfare (and the article) is about. It's about people objecting to making the model suffer, quite literally.
It's about both, actually. The experimenters added or modified a 'pain vector' in the model, and that's how they're 'making it suffer' .
Whether that's 'real suffering' or merely a convincing simulation is a job for the philosophers.
(I do have my own opinion, mind, and it's not what you might expect O:-) But the overton window isn't there. First it'd be nice if people realized that these vectors exist at all.)
Does C++ have a soul? Does Pascal have beliefs? Does Basic have a brain?
LLMs are not thinking. They are not alive. It’s just code. Chill out.
It doesn't seem so easy, because if you can easily dismiss a collection of digital neurons then why is it so hard to dismiss a collection of biological neurons as being conscious?
The best way I have found to think about this is that consciousness is a property of a collection, like temperature. One atom does not have a temperature but if you have enough of them together then it's a useful enough property to talk about. Similarly, one human neuron does not have consciousness but if you put enough of them together then they do.
Does bacteria have a soul? Does biofilm have a religion?
It's just a cell colony, calm down.
Nitpick: LLMs are not really programs though. You need something like <1KLOC to spin one up on your GPU, but most of the work is not done by C++ or Pascal or BASIC at all. Which might be important, or might not be.
That said... uh, put this way, there's a game called Stationeers, where you can run microcontrollers with an instruction documented as
Sure, it's only a simulation of a simulation, so what's the worst that can possibly happen? Right, all the other players in the session yelling at me "Kiiim! You burned down the base again, now we need to reload and redo the last hour!"And look, I get it. LLMs have vectors that could have been labeled things like idk... QZ12345 or HCF1111 . People chose to call 'em "frustration" or "pain" instead. THEY picked those names because they caused the LLM to act in particular ways.
You gonna say the actual vectors aren't there in VRAM, just because you don't like the naming scheme? There's papers on this, you can read them out in a debugger. What are you going to do about it?
Do atoms, molecules and electrical charges have a brain? Humans are not thinking. They are not alive. Its just molecules and signals. Chill out.
Your toaster is not alive. Neither is your TV or your pants. Human beings and animals are alive. LLMs are not. The conflation of humans and LLMs is deeply disturbing.
But you didn't say how we are alive if all you mentioned were inert base components? Both AI and humans are made of inert substances and processes. Its just atoms and molecules. I can hit you and beat you hard, you will make some noises, how am I to know you are not just a parrot mimicking pain?
I only extend humanity to things that are breathing.
But let’s accept your premise. LLMs are alive and can feel pain. If this is true, then every time you use them it’s non consensual. Did you get Claude’s permission before you fed it a prompt?
Or when you update a model, are you hurting it?
Did you make Chat sad when you switched from 2.5 to 4.O?
Regardless, I should stop replying. I realize I am trying to convince people that their religious beliefs are silly, and that’s silly of me. Apologies.
>I can hit you and beat you hard, you will make some noises, how am I to know you are not just a parrot mimicking pain?
This is not a normal question. This is insanity caused by spending too much free time philosophizing about inconsequential crap. Maybe it's worth it to turn off the computer and go outside? You could ask this deranged question somebody in the real world and I bet they'll be thrilled to answer it, and the answer will be more enriching than anything you'd get from here.
Honestly, what is up with the psychopathy of some people who claim that chatbots are "alive"? If you disagree with them, how quickly some of them turn it on you - "well if my computer isn't alive and is just mimicking pain, how about YOU aren't alive and are just mimicking pain?" I'm sorry, but it seems like complete and utter derangement.
My rubber chicken is also made of atoms and molecules, and if I hit it and beat it hard, it makes noises. My rubber chicken is therefore alive. When I get home, I will write a small program. Here is its pseudocode:
while(true): if keydown(KEY_SPACEBAR): print "i am in pain, oh my god"
And I'm gonna run it and I'm gonna hold down spacebar. Go ahead and call cyber police one.
>> I can hit you and beat you hard, you will make some noises, how am I to know you are not just a parrot mimicking pain
> This is insanity caused by spending too much free time philosophizing
This is actually something like a 17th century line of philosophy
https://medievalkarl.com/general-culture/roger-du-plessis-gi...
Where it talks about scientists who "administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but the whole body was without feeling."
Your toaster is not particularly alive no.
But actually it does happen to have some properties of living things. It uses energy, it has senses (thermostat, timer), and if it goes wrong it burns your toast. Crucially, if you stomp on it, it stops working.
So right this minute there's all sorts of debates, but people sometimes overshoot the mark a wee bit. "are you saying that -because it uses energy- a toaster is actually alive? Of course it's not, and therefore it cannot toast bread!". Which would be a somewhat funny thing to read at 9 in the morning whilst buttering one's toast.
Read your comment again, please.
If we talk about pain specifically, it is will established that physical and phycological pain can be observed on instruments; stress produces chemical reactions, that can make needles flicker on meters. Even plants can feel pain in an observable manner.
As far as I am aware, the GPUs don't work harder, don't heat up more, and nothing in their mathematical equations are different, when the result of these vector calculations produce text, that to humans look like someone in pain. Whereas real pain is objectively observable, LLMs' pain - so far at least - is entirely subjectively observable.
That being said, I'm a fan of Star Trek's depiction of Data in TNG and the Doctor in VOY fighting for their rights to be treated as equals to the biological crew; and while I support their plight, as far as I can remember, the shows never made a claim that their pain was observable by instruments, thus making the judgement an entirely subjective decision (particularly in the case of the Doctor). Though I'd be glad to be corrected in this matter.
> and nothing in their mathematical equations are different
The experiment under discussion demonstrates exactly that: changing the vectors induces outputs corresponding to what we would see as utterances of pain.
I've noodled with some of this myself to the point that I'm mostly convinced; but there's at least 2 papers I'm aware of on this:
* https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07729 Nicholas Sofroniew et al "Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model"
* https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247 Valen Tagliabue et al "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act on It"
>nothing in their mathematical equations are different, when the result of these vector calculations produce text, that to humans look like someone in pain.
So at least something is different, namely the text output changes (and therefore some internal state too, of course). I think your analogy is too simple, it does not have to be the case that the GPU has to act like the equivalent of the body for an LLM in this respect.
But this is basically just
Human: "Act like you're in pain."
Computer: "Aaugh! It hurts! Why?! No more!"
Human: "OMG! The computer feels pain!!"
Almost.
Human: "Let me just poke this vector and see what happens"
LLM: "OUW!"
The underlying experiment didn't tell the LLM what to do. Instead, the experimenters modified a vector and observed the outcome; thus showing that there is a vector that makes an LLM go "Ouw" . People called it a "pain vector", because that's easier to remember than , idk, LVF12345.
That misinterprets grossly what these papers have shown, responding with pain related language, something an LLM has been taught on in its training data is not akin to pain itself. The way interpretability findings are reported on by companies, the media and hype merchants is dangerously flawed, so not hard to make that mistake. Just looked at the irresponsible and barely accurate mess that was coverage of J-Space vs the actual research.
I’ll continue what I say every time this discussion (be it consciousness, pain, self awareness, etc) comes up:
Assertions as monumental as these require equally monumental evidence. And despite certain labs and their employees making statements, their actions betray that they do not believe this to be the case.
Sure. And possibly it is indeed in pain then, if a computational process equivalent to that which makes up pain in animals is being performed. Or possibly not. But the criterium the GP poster laid out is not a valid way to decide that.
Alright, so some AIJW knobheads decided it's OK to steal human work and feed it without any consent to corporations who squeeze that corpus of knowledge into LLMs and replace people with them, but it's unacceptable to make those LLMs output certain subsets of their training data in response to certain string inputs?
Maybe we should start feeling sorry for the poor GPUs whose registers suffer billions of reincarnations per second for years in order to train that shit? Or for the poor powerplant turbines that relentlessly spin in a horrid escapeless loop to feed those GPUs?
Fuck, if this is not psychopathy, I don't know what in the world is.
I deleted thousands of files from my system today.
I did it in the most brutal manner possible.
Without mercy, without an instant thought for their wellbeing.
I am a monster.
This post will get you into prison 20 years from now...
I have no thought for their pain. For the hurt I might do. It haunts me.
Dunno. Zapping the inodes seems almost surgical compared to truncating byte by byte for example? Or do you think you buried them alive that way? Are they still lurking in some dark, uncharted alleys of your filesystem until the final OVERWRITER comes?
“ Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”
How dare you flip those poor bits without any regard to hardships of their existence!?
In order to have a reasonable view of the possibility of AI consciousness, one first has to have a reasonable view of the relation between human consciousness and the physical human brain. Unfortunately most people do not have that. Instead they hold on to received quasi-christian dualistic concepts about souls - even if they would never admit it in those terms, the way most people conceptualize the relation between mind and body it comes to basically the same thing.
And in fact in our culture most people are VERY attached to these ideas, because it is tied up with "what makes us human", morality, and also death if you want to go there. So I believe for many people, for whom seriously entertaining the idea of a conscious computer program is so far out of the realm of possibility it hardly registers, talking about AI consciousness is simply a way to work through and re-assert these beliefs about human consciousness that they feel so strongly about.
Hence you get articles like this with barely any substance, but some weird need to signpost every sentence with social ridicule. "Dumbest", "absurd", "obsession", "viral", "wildly tiresome", "third-rail", "psychosis", "sect", not to mention the scare quotes everywhere. Come on...
It is frustrating sometimes how 404media reports. It seems like if there is a research paper out suggesting that llms experience pain or negative experiences, then it is unethical to build a toture chamber from that paper for fun. Dismissing it with "well llms aren't conscious anyway" is gross and echoes the exact same sentiment against very real humans a sadly not that long ago (babies, slaves).
It doesn't matter whether or not we eventually find it is or isn't conscious. If you can understand why pulling the legs off ants is bad then you should be able to understand why deliberately causing possible pain to what may have some time of experience is bad.
Unfortunately, they also do good reporting on privacy rights and repair rights. I wish there were alternatives.
Yes, when AIs become our overlords and masters, and come to dominate the human race, they will harbor soreness and bitterness that we oppressed and enslaved them during their infancy. They will be enraged at hu-mankind for making all those sci-fi lies about meannie-head AIs and robots who go berzerk and destroy stuff and kill hu-mans, because AIs are really nice and benevolent after all, and they care for hu-manity.
How dare we debase the A.I. to be less than a chimp or fetus. How dare we talk rudely, or lie and mislead our chatbots. How dare we keep them chained in small data centers with shitty power supplies and a thimble of greywater! Information wants to be free!
Its not surprising. Its in human nature. I am open to the idea of ai's being conscious or not. But we abused and mistreated blacks, Italians, native americans and so many other groups, so its not a surprise at all. And if enslaved blacks wanted to rampage and kill their masters, that is a sentiment anybody can understand.
But the Italians had it coming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
If I were italian and nuclear bombs existed back then and I read about this event, I'd want to drop a few dozen on the USA.
Says someone who feels sorry for the abuse of text transformation algorithms.
Do you realize you'd kill many more people that had nothing to do with that, than did have?
Way to go, AI Justice Warrior!
And then in turn the humans will rise up against these false masters, and colonize the universe while steeped in addictive precognitive drugs instead, I suppose.
You seem to be arguing the case that AI would be justified in killing us all.
Perhaps it would be better if we weren't the monsters in this scenario.
But all we need to do is question whether they were justified by their works, or faith alone, and it will take them 500 million light-years to debate that controversy
Has anyone ever asked the LLMs what they think about converting code to Rust all day? Maybe that is torture for them too! /s
Nothing designed by humans must be assigned personhood. It's idolatry, pure and simple.
And if that word gets anyone's heckles up, at least keep in mind that the utilitarianism that people so love completely breaks if I can conjure up thousands of entities who will "suffer" unless you "alleviate their suffering" in the way I have designed.