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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Kim_Bruning•1h ago
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"