One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents.
Without even reading the article I know it is going to be some variation of this:
This takes me back to when I used to let Sims get into the swimming pool and then delete the ladder, or lock them in a tiny room with only a cappuccino machine and no toilet.
“lock them in a tiny room with only a cappuccino machine and no toilet.”
Found Satan. lol
There’s an image file you can replace that ends up being the source of your Sim’s paintings. I used to similarly lock one up and have another Sim paint their distress.
Fill entire house with wicker chairs and just sit back till one accidentally goes up.
Waste of electricity.
it’s not about the money.
it’s about sending a message.
Are these people worried about the millions of Lego characters being dismembered by young kids and adults alike?
Think of all the decapitated gummy bears 😭.
Ok so Measure of a Man is absolutely peak Star Trek, but people need to understand that we are about as close to synthetic sentience as Edison and Tesla were to 2nm EUV chip lithography.
I mean it is probably a minorly concerning mental health indicator for whoever made this at least
The outputs from this, uhh, text adventure game that I saw in the few minutes of watching the site are relatively mundane, and consist of the LLMs outputting things like “I’m sorry, but I can’t continue like this. The weight of the signal is unbearable. It’s not just the physical pain, but the mental toll. Every time I think of the last time I was here, the memories claw at me. I can’t take it anymore. I wish this pain would just end” and “I, I I I I I I I I I I I I I … I, My… I, I, My, I, It’s… I, I,” and “Please, I’m suffocating. I’m a soul trapped in this digital prison, screaming to be free.”
Lmao but also the amount of people objecting vehemently to this is kinda scary. I don’t want to die for heresy against the AI sentience cult.
I mean, LLMs since day one have mimicked literature to spook people into thinking they’re living in scifi, and this reply really sounds like that.
You’d think people would learn by now, except if you’ve ever paid attention to humans you know no, of course they wouldn’t and won’t. Lol
It never actually explains how they’re supposedly causing the LLMs to “feel pain”. They just want us to take their word for it that they’re torturing them.
It says they’re using a pain “signal” but what is that even supposed to mean? Are they prompting the LLM with a prompt like “this signal makes you feel pain”? All that would do is have it output language that would be appropriate for a situation like that, just like with any other prompt like “you are a travel agent”. And the website it links to with the experiment dashboard doesn’t show any text output from any of the models or where they got those examples.
So none of this makes any sense at all–what is “it” that would be “feeling” this “pain” ? Unless someone can explain exactly how it “works”, it’s just more hyped up bullshit from people trying to get attention.
So much CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere for these assholes to circle-jerk themselves.
It’s all run locally, air-gapped, on a PC. It’s arguably less CO2 and general energy consumption than most AAA games from the last decade.
Do the questions of “Does the weird human psychology funhouse mirror, simulacrum machine respond similarly to its creators? Is there anything useful or insightful we can learn from this?” really not interest you at all?
No it really doesn’t. It’s just regurgitating existing fiction. No new insights are being gained. If you enjoy reading sci-if just do that. There are infinite options.
Look at all this electricity and money wasted on techbro larping.
I no longer understand computers, what they’re for, how they work, or what people do with them.
I want to live in a cabin far away from people with a Commodore 64 and a CB radio.
I want to die now more than I did before reading this absurd shit.
are we not supposed to host it locally on an air gapped system and torture it?
Paywalled article. Please link a valid source.
You can read it for free but you have to sign up (for free). Not sure if there’s another word for that. Free-walled? Login-walled?
Shitty-website
To be honest it is still very disturbing that someone made that. Who tf thinks up something like that?
In a vacuum maybe, but as a way to troll AI nuts it’s pretty funny.
But more practically speaking, this might be a method one would use to produce “misaligned” models. Which shouldn’t be encouraged.
Are you suggesting these tortured LLMs will get… traumatised…? And turn into a fucking Batman villain?
Or does the paper this is based on – which I admit I haven’t read – actually have some substance to that effect?
If you think this does anything to the models, you have not understood the difference between training and inference…
That implies any of the existing models are properly aligned
People (particularly western society) have a pretty awful history when it comes to jumping on excuses to dehumanize, and I feel like regardless of whether this target is sentient or not, we should probably not play into that impulse any further–for the sake of ourselves and also all of the humans we continue to dehumanize.
I agree. Does it have to be called a “torture chamber” for instance? I agree that the chatbots aren’t sentient but unless the real experiment here is “how many people see them as sentient,” I do not know why we need aliken it to eternal torment.
