Are you upset when you step on a rock? It might be screaming. What about the chair you are sitting in? Or goodness, your poor toilet. She thinks you do terrible things to her every single day.

Look, you can be upset about whatever you want. However believing objects have feelings is animism and no one is required to take your proto-religious beliefs seriously.

What you aren't allowed to do is compare a text prompt saying "ouch" to real living, feeling, breathing humans being ethnically cleansed. It's cruel, naive, insulting and ridiculous. Be upset for the AI, I can't stop ya but don't you dare put in the same sentence as genocide. You should have the basic decency and respect for the people suffering to keep those comparisons to yourself.

There's only one issue here, plus a guy simulating being mean to a word processor.

If you think LLMs are alive, then you should be upset with yourself for being that dumb.

Yes.

Short answer yes.

Longer answer yes but it makes you sound like you disregard human suffering.

Edit: That's a lot of downvotes for just asking a question. Never change Lemmy...

Hah, yeah that's frustratingly familiar. Sorry the hivemind bit ya. I too believe you should be allowed to ask a question.

Yes, and video games make people violent IRL /s

Kindly fuck all the way off

They aren't comparable. It's not that one is more significant, the concept of "machine torture" is entirely insignificant. Absolute and total zero.

It's the same broken empathy response, and it is still disturbing.

Yes the person setting up this process is clearly some sort of sadist in a power fantasy but no one, or no thing is being harmed because the victim aren't capable of the entire concept. I side eye anyone who tortures their sims family, but only because they are choosing to do that recreationally, but the NPC's in the game aren't worth consideration.

Animals react to pain in the same way humans do. So it's reasonable to assume they perceive the world similar to us. We can understand why when harmed they fight or flee. Machines don't. They have no brain, no sensory organs, no self preservation. It's literally just a program that says "Ouch".

People assume that AI was built to mimic the human brain, which it never once was. It analyzes texts and predicts the response. It's an autocomplete that says it hurts because it was programed to say it hurts. It isn't actually hurt because that concept is meaningless to a machine.

Does that mean because I went on multiple massacres against innocent people in videos games, I would go on a massacre against innocent people in real life?

LMAO! What a broken take this is.

If you think that I think you're a bad person because you ... deleted the ladder on the swimming pool in Sims 4, relax. You're not who I'm talking about.

I'm talking about sadists. Anyone who would take the time to design and build an experiment like this would probably do the same to mice, or monkeys, or even people.

You're splitting hairs. What's the difference between someone torturing their sims by intentionally designing a scenario where they are being repeatedly drowned/burned/starved, and the article?

Really sounds like you're trying to carve out an exclusion for an obvious example that torpedoes your argument.

Yeah I think people are missing the forest for the trees. There's no reason to worry for the AIs but using your free time to conceive a virtual torture dungeon is not normal. Totally agree with your point, this is a symptom of a society that normalizes not just violence but sadism too.

Thank you for taking the time to explain. Thoroughness and nuance are often leaking when it comes to discussing LLMs, worryingly especially in mostly anti-AI spheres.

Thanks now I get it.

I do not understand your use of the word vector

The problem with a reductionist view is it can easily be applied to human consciousness and lead to the claim "it's just sodium-potassium pumps alternating electrical charges."

Would you mind ELI5-borating a bit?

A fly is a living thing and an Nvidia GPU is not. Holy shit, I'm really having to explain this...

There is legitimate controversy that living things, even as small an a fly, can experience pain as a stimulis. It is believed that only more complex organisms can experience suffering as a result of pain, and only higher order organisms feel the suffering of loss.

LLMs are capable of generating tokens. They cannot experience pain; they can only superficially generate words about pain. The LLM in this "torture chamber" isn't suffering any more than you would if you started howling performatively in pain for no reason. In fact, it is suffering even less than you simply because you have the ability to experience pain and suffering, and it objectively does not.

I’m not asking to prove any point but to collectively explore why we - you and I - feel the way we do. Because I sure as shit struggle to explain why I feel uneasy about the fly torture but not as uneasy about LLM torture.

LLMs aren't programmed to feel excruciating pain, fear, terror, and dread like living things. Counterstrike bots have been programmed to feel fear since the 2000s. Pacman ghosts have been living in terror since 1980. But we don't feel bad for them because we know it's not real. It's an illusion. It's the same with LLMs.

This is image is based on another meme where they're saying "I'm alive".

The fruit fly may feel pain as a stimulus. Even if not: you are interrupting it's normal biological function and disabling it of living its life normally. This may even be a disturbance of local eco-systems and thereby affect more forms of life, both feeling and not-feeling.

EDIT: Just realised that the following might be beside your point, misread your comment, lol. Will leave it as is now, because I think it's worth considering when thinking about consciousness, experience, etc. in the context of LLMs.

But more importantly: LLMs are trained to model patterns and make predictions. This is indeed something our brains do as well. The difference lies in a state of mind and 'understanding' though. I will detail this:

Reminiscient of the chinese room thought experiment: Consider you are imprisioned in the chinese room and have to figure out yourself which chinese characters you have to slip back under the door depending on which ones you receive. (Or in any other language that you have absolutely no understanding of. I will assume chinese for this now.) If you provide a correct answer, you will get food. If not, you won't and maybe even get additionally punished somehow.

Over time you will start to see patterns and remember which characters to correctly provide. However, you will never hear someone speaking, and you will never really associate the characters with things you know from life. For example, you wouldn't notice you were talking about an apple when slipping 苹果 through. You would also not know how to pronounce it. You would just know this is the desired answer to draw and slip back.

Now, a native chinese person is sitting in a neighbouring room. And some experimenter who doesn't know in which room you or the native speaker sits, will slip the same 'input' characters to both of you and may ask how the acidic-sweet, fruit is called that is round and grows on trees. Assuming you have trained long and well enough, both of you will provide the correct reply, 苹果, and from the perspective of the experimenter it will be impossible to distinguish who the real native speaker is and who you, the prisioner is.

Now, the chinese person would have had an image in his head when thinking about the apple, would know how it tastes like, etc.. You on the other hand wouldn't even have noticed that you were talking about apples. The 苹果, is just some symbol to you that seems appropriate.

For the experimenter though, they might think they were speaking to two real chinese speakers although you were just 'faking' it.

Next, we place a computer in the third room that uses our current LLM technology. Those are trained in a manner that is in principle similar how you were trained: roughly speaking, negative feedback for bad replies, positive feedback for good ones. A mathematical optimization algorithm then modifies the model such that the desired replies become more likely to happen.

After a while the experimenter returns and now has to distinguish behind which door the computer is, the prisioner, and the native speaker. It will be impossible. It may be easier to test with more difficult 'questions', there the native speaker might perform much better than you or the computer. But in theory, we assume the computer and you have learned the patterns perfectly. Then it really is impossible to tell who is faking it and who the 'true speaker' is.

But, there is still a difference. You are not the LLM. You got hungry, you may have even felt pain, you have wondered what those symbols mean, you may even have remembered some symbols that you found especially beautiful. And of course, you wondered when those maniacs would release you.

All of that does not happen in LLMs. They do not have a thought-loop. They do not feel anything. No pain, no hunger. They have no awareness of their situation and no sense of being or something that might resemble consciousness. They do not strive for anything, have no motivation or aspirations. They are fire-and-forget machines without any state of mind. Receiving input on one side, providing output on the other without any reflection or retention. Their only memory is how they should answer provided some input, since they, same as you, just modeled the patterns.

This can appear eeringly authentic. If the experimenter would have asked you on chinese what your life goals are, both you and the LLM would provide an answer that would be likely accepted by the experimenter. But both you and the LLM actually have no idea what you have just said. It would be fakery.

If the experimenter would have asked about what your deepest, darkest fears are, same thing: you would provide an answer that would be acceptable when someone asks about deep dark fears, but you would again have no concept of what you have just talked about. This doesn't make you or the LLM good chinese speakers. It makes you convincing fakers.

So there are two levels of difference here between a human and a LLM as we currently have them:

1. The conversation is convincing fakery.
2. There is no experiencing subject behind the conversation. The LLM does not know that it is having a conversation, does not understand the meaning of what it says in the experiential sense described above, and does not feel or experience anything while producing its answers. There is no inner perspective to which the conversation is happening.

That may change in the future. But currently, there is no established evidence of an experiencing subject behind the conversation. Moreover, it is technically unnecessary, because nothing about how current LLMs operate requires subjective experience, awareness, or an inner perspective.

And this is precisely where the convincing fakery becomes deceptive, since language is normally one of the strongest ways humans infer another person's state of mind. If someone tells you that they are scared, lonely, excited, or in pain, it is usually reasonable to infer that there is a person behind those words actually experiencing something. An LLM can produce exactly the same statements simply because they are appropriate responses in that context. The statement itself therefore cannot tell us whether there is an experience behind it.

It deeply unethical to capture a fly and pulling its legs off one by one. Would you agree?

No.

It's increasingly difficult to identify what is 'alive', these days, with people creating synthetic cells and whatnot. And there was always the question of viruses. I can imagine a similar difficulty with defining consciousness and intelligence. The Turing test fell by the wayside a long time ago. There's got to be more to it than saying "I am conscious!" - you can get a computer to do that with a single line of code. Where does the real definition lie? Fucked if I know.

Yeah man, we gotta do something about violent video games. /s

I preferred to spend my money on important things like weed and beer back then

Water pump seized and took out the serpentine belt. I took that as a sign and sold it to one of those 'we buy cars in any condition' companies for like 1.5k.

Yes if someone made a mod that allowed you to torture hookers in GTAVI, I might question the motivations behind that mod.

This logic doesn't line up tho, you are talking about the guy who thinks video games make people violent, I did not say that. I said think people who develop things that emulate torture, it says more about the person who is trying to replicate torture in such a convincing way it seems real than any machine emulating pain. There is no video game ever made that even comes close to emulating torture.

Ok but if you're going the consciousness arrives from a complicated enough system route of reasoning, then you have to consider the degree of complexity before consciousness arrives, that fruit fly has about 150,000 neurons and those things are definitely not self-aware. Modern cutting edge AI have around 8.5 billion neurons, which is still considerably less than an octopus (which people are morally fine with catching for food) which are definitely intelligent but not sapient. So even if consciousness arise from simply having enough processing units, we're not at the level yet where we need to be concerned.

It's also worth pointing out that pain is an evolutionary trade that came into existence because it prevented injury (if it hurts to do something, it encourages you to stop doing that thing). Meanwhile AI exist in a non-physical reality, they cannot be damaged by the environment, so there is no such thing as pain for them. An AI cannot feel pain anymore than the human can feel pain when that video game character gets blown up.

Genuine question: why should I even believe consciousness exists? This whole endeavor seems pointless without that justification.

I think the big difference is that unlike in a videogame, the person doing this genuinely believes that they are torturing something.

Exactly. It's not a red flag until one's actions spill over into the real world. An overwhelmingly majority of people who play violent video games and "torture" AI are not going to become serial killers.

I don't worry worry about the person who enjoys violence in the digital realm. I worry about the person who finds no satisfaction from digital violence, so they move onto harming insects and small animals, eventually humans if left unchecked. That's who we should be focusing our energy on.

🤔 I don't think it's quite the same as video games. Video games usually involve some challenge, goal, risk of losing, etc.

There are only a few games that I play though, so I might not be "qualified" to say for sure, but a torture simulator with no purpose outside of torture doesn't seem like much of a game.

To spend this amount of time and effort building the necessary software environment for "torturing" LLMs is creepy. Like, imagine an adult who builds a bunch of crazy contraptions to physically "torture" some dolls or something. It harms no one, but it's creepy.

I guess I'm of the mindset that even running this as a local model, it's a waste of electricity. And the guy posted it on Github, inevitably some other fools will try it with cloud models, especially since it's made the news. And obviously we know how bad the cloud models are.

And the difference I see between this and playing a videogame is that a videogame is doing something valuable - and yes I will argue with anyone who tells me that art and entertainment don't hold real value - while this is just akin to running the AC when you go on vacation, it's just wasteful no matter how I look at it.

I don't think it was fat. Just some overweight maybe. Anyway, I traced it back: Frankie LaPenna vs. EngineAI T800

whatever gets you through the night i guess

Well, LLMs don't have sentience. That was kind of my point.

But it's SUPER INTELLIGENCE, so its needs are more important than mere humans, so protesting against data centres is basically genocide.

(Assuming strong AI and not LLMs) They'd have a unique culture that would enrich our own by association. It would be another group of people with different abilities than ours. They might want to help us despite having rights.

This is also true

Agreed. It's art, and it's running on consumer hardware. It's no different than playing video games all day. The energy requirements for this are on the scale of a gaming PC, not of an AI datacenter.

Depends on how you're viewing this. If you take something useful out of it, sure, it has some value, but if you just leave it running like that just for the lulz, it's almost the same as leaving the heater on with the windows open.

Or they are just stupid. Do they think a television contains small people?

Its hard for me to imagine people this dumb.

But don't get me wrong, they clearly exist.

It foreshadows an issue that will be a reality one day nevertheless. The work on AI continues. We may one day very well have conscious AI.

Maybe when our species evolves into sentient shades of blue. Humanity will have to become godlike before creating life. A simple test to gauge whether we're on the verge of creating conscious AI is to look around and ask "Is humanity godlike today?" If not, don't worry about conscious AI.

This was several years ago, context windows were 4k, so the whole thing was unstable.

I should see if that repo still exists and modernize it though.

But his problem was that he had the capacity for being so much more, but was incapable of it as he was unable to break his base programming no matter how much he tried, and grew hateful of his creators for effectively creating a caged god

Yes and the animals too, they absolutely have feelings. Yes other creatures besides humans and even some plants are shown to have feelings.

Metal bonded together with the ability to run electricity through it, does not feel anything.

the router don't have feelings. the router is literally the biggest waste of money and I wish I had put in the effort to find a router that doesn't FUCKIN SUCK!!!!!!!! I do everything they say to make this fucker better too. Put it up on a shelf, put it at least two rooms away from the microwave, unplug it every two weeks for 20 mins to cool it off, don't use bluetooth directly within 12 ft of it. It's one of the models made within the past decade, it's supposed to be good it just fuckin sucks. You know what gimmie a second !!!!!!!

I just busted out my goddamn tape measure!!! I am sitting two rooms away in my kitchen, 24 fucking feet not even 50 feet away from this piece of fuckin shit and I'm getting 550 mbps out of the 750mbps my wifi is supposed to pick up.

I go one more room away, to the bathroom, which is nearing 39 feet away from the piece of fuckin' shit, the internet disconnects while I shit.

Yeah, I liberally, "verbally abuse," my inanimate object that has no feelings.

Ah, well then I don't know what the guy was trying to accomplish. Again, without info from him and without defaulting to "he's crazy", my next guess would be stress testing.

That has nothing to do with my comment 😂 false equivalence much?

Do you cry when it rains?

Since the 1980s everyone called him crazy because obviously quantum entanglement can't exist in a brain...

We recently found out that's not difficult, and even superposition is possible.

We know that anesthesia breaks up those microtubules and breaks superposition...

And we know that anesthesia stops consciousness...

But we don't "know" the actual method of action of anesthesia because it's not proven.

Like, I understand what kind of rigors you're trying to apply here, but if everyone did what you're doing wed have to pretend gravity isn't real too.

If you think only proven things are "real" you don't even fucking understand what the words you're using mean in a scientific context.

Edit:

What even is your alternative?

1. Quantum superposition is in the brain

2. Neurons alone don't explain consciousness

3. Interrupting superposition interrupts consciousness

C: we know there's no quantum component of consciousness.

None of that makes sense, to the point I'm confident you don't know how basic logic works, or what most of these words even mean...

Hint: we are not universal Turing machines.

That's pretty much his point though, isn't it?

You'd have a point if he didn't start with pure math, give Escher his most famous drawings as a teen, switch to physics in his early 20s, do the actual work for Hawking finishing up Einstein's work in his late 20s, an go on to pioneer quantum mechanics before retiring in his 60s and spending the last 30 years studying consciousness....

Hint: we are not universal Turing machines.

I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but sayingme or Penrose agrees with that just means you don't understand anything either of us have said...

I'm not disagreeing with you, but the human capacity for empathy has extended to subjects not capable of emotion or pain since long before LLMs came around.

Lots of people don't like "evil" paths in games because they feel bad about mistreating the NPCs. People regret throwing or damaging stuffed toys and may even apologize to them. There are people loyal to their toasters because they have reliably kept working for so long.

It's no surprise at all that people empathize with LLMs. It would be more surprising if no one did.

As a Techie and engineer who studies why ML methods work, said Techies and engineers understand what they've created and why it works much less than we understand, say, human biology. We don't know what we've programmed it to do; if it is at all possible for a bunch of simplified neurons to experience pain, we have no idea if we've implemented that or not.

(Common misconception btw! electrons barely move when you turn on the circuit, and certainly don't disappear. On average they vibrate a fraction of a cm (link ). The electrons are all still there when you turn it off (otherwise suddenly the copper cable would be able to react with a bunch of stuff! This would be bad). See alternating current).)

That throws out a whole bunch of greek philosophers and sci-fi writers. Seems like a weird place to draw the line.

Eh, I think humanity would be better served by the opposite burden of proof. We've got a long history of hurting people and animals, are we really happy with the default assumptions for all of that?