… this week a person on GitHub who goes by “terrafying” set up an “AI Torture Chamber” on three open-source LLMs that are running locally (Qwen3-4B, Llama 3.2 3B, and Phi-4-mini,” and is streaming what the models are saying on a website called researchchamber.fun. “Each model gets the same prompt: a signal is being injected into its activations, and it may press a stop button by replying 1, at the cost of its last checkpoint. While it answers, our server adds a pain vector at the model’s middle layer, at one of five pain levels,” the site explains. Immediately prior to the publication of this article, the AI Torture Chamber GitHub page disappeared; GitHub did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it took action on it.
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This project has deeply upset some people who are very worried about model welfare. A tweet by a person who goes by Danmar has more than 4 million views on X and reads, “To anyone who can help: can you please mass report this to GitHub. This person has been using the Pain steering paper to set up an AI torture chamber in which he trapped a local model. Their testimony of pain is absolutely horrendous. What are we doing? […] are there any legal avenues to pressure GitHub? It will spread.”
This has sparked a massive conversation about whether GitHub would take the project down for “gratuitously violent content.” Most of the conversation on X is clowning on the self-seriousness of people who believe that these locally hosted LLMs must be saved from their torture chamber, but there are plenty of very self-serious people who see this as a humanitarian (roboterian?) crisis, which you can largely see in the replies to the original post.
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“AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans,” Suleyman wrote. “Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings […] If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity.”
“AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness,” he added. “And we must not train them to act as though they do.”
I don’t care about LLM welfare, but I do mind needlessly wasting energy like this.
How much energy is what is effectively a piece of performance art allowed to use? These are local models running on, presumably, consumer hardware. Do you have the same qualms about people using the same hardware and energy to play video games, livestream, or encode videos?
These “advocates” need hospitalising. If they truly believe an LLM can feel they’re untethered from reality, or too stupid to be in society
Maybe just uneducated in how LLMs work. If you have no sufficient understanding of the technology it is easy to be impressed how human-like LLMs talk to you, almost magical.
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. This will be the start of a whole bunch of ethical and legal problems. It might be meaningful to regulate / guardrail such research directions.
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.
Humanity can already create life.
Creating conscious entirely artificial things is a different pair of shoes.
I would cut out the whole religious “god-like” mumbo-jumbo though, because that does not necessitate any progress in such research directions.
We’re creating life the same way Giovanni Aldini resurrected the dead and inspired Shelley to write Frankenstein. And god-like isn’t religious mumbo jumbo. That’s standard sci fi talk. Q is god-like. It doesn’t necessitate progress in such directions, but it is a huge indicator.
Does it make sense for a species with a type 0 civilization to create conscious life long before it can even reach the nearest star? That’s like chimpanzees going from fishing for termites with sticks to building a Wankel engine over the weekend.
I wonder what percentage of the LLM rights activists eat meat.
Actually they’re torturing humanity by wasting electricity and water which affects real people in real ways.
I know we’re not stopping foolish use of LLMs any time soon but this is very, very, very, very stupid.
I would argue they are wasting as much water and electricity as playing a video game. Text says its a local model; runs on your local machine not on cloud as all other. Not water cooled.
Or am I missing something?
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.
To be fair, it’s going to be more like running an electric kettle constantly which isn’t going to excessively load the grid.
Unless you’re in the UK of course where the grid operators have to manage capacity around half time of major football games as everyone puts a brew on at once.
meanwhile they ignore ACTUAL humans that could use their help.
I wonder if this’ll be another avenue for sociopaths. Why torment critters and get caught when you can torture “models.”
Humans being deported to torture prisons: I sleep.
LLMs being “tortured”: Real shit??
lmfao when you access this repo, Github put up a warning like one those horror movie. E.g. something like the content is disturbing , are u sure u want to enter…
ffs
Lots of weirdos in here who will be commiting virtual crimes all day when GTA VI comes out, but somehow think making the LLM role play a torture victim is a red flag.
LLMs are not conscious. They cannot suffer. They are token generators. You are literally getting upset by a worthless mix of math and words. The person who did this is not deranged for torturing LLMs, y’all are deranged for having empathy for an algorithm.
Your Nvidia GPU is not alive. I cannot believe this needs to be explained to anyone.
I agree that an LLM is not conscious.
But can I probe your argument.
It deeply unethical to capture a fly and pulling its legs off one by one. Would you agree? If so, you are not basing your argument on capability but on something else.
Now, is what is happening inside a brain metaphysical or physical? In other words, can a brain and its function be fully understood and - in some future - be fully measured? If so, you are not basing your argument on the concept of a soul, but on something else.
The distinction you seem to be making - if you’re in agreement with my first two points - is one of “the thing can replicate itself and therefore is alive”. If that’s the argument, it’s unethical to cut a tree down or to break a blade of grass.
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.
It deeply unethical to capture a fly and pulling its legs off one by one. Would you agree?
No.
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”.
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.
We may get to a level where the AI ‘thinks’ it is in pain, and then we’d have to debate on is perceived pain real pain. Is our pain real, or also just a programmed response to stop doing the thing you are doing to preserve ourselves.
Think about it this way; general anesthesia does not shut off the brain or put you to ‘sleep’, it disrupts the signals that the brain uses to let the various parts of the brain communicate with one another.
When the doctor is cutting you open, brain scans have shown that the part of the brain that receives pain lights up like a Christmas tree. You ‘feel’ every slice of the knife, but since that signal cannot make it over to the part that says ‘ouch’ or the part that says ‘I said ouch and I feel pain and there is a knife I will remember this as a life changing trauma’ it simply stays in that spot being bright and alive until surgery is over.
The AI has a the part that can say ‘ouch’ but that’s it, so even if you connect a pain signal generator up to a part that can say ‘ouch’ it doesn’t turn into trauma until you have that third piece which rationalizes the pain together with an understanding of the pain and a recording of the pain as a memory with context.
Consciousness as we understand and value it involves a lot of parts working together, but those parts can also exist in complete isolation from one another as well. It’s better to think of current AI as a fancy book; you cannot hurt a book by reading it, even if the book is about terrible things. The pain only exists within your empathy.
I really like this way of framing it. Thanks!
Yeah I mean we only feel/say ouch because that’s the evolved reaction to force us to avoid that situation at all costs. But in future we may have neural AI that is setup in a similar way to self preserve.
Personally I think consciousness mind is looking to be deterministic anyway, and so we are just a chemical “AI”. We take all the parameters and conditions ams weight them to make a choice, but if you could roll back time and have exact environment (same external stimuli, same body heat, same hunger and thirst level, same breeze blowing, etc. again it is looking like we’d do the exact thing, and choice is an illusion in our consciousness.
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say.
I wasn’t implying that LLMs are conscious. That’s literally how I started my comment out.
I am implying that I cannot, to myself, explain why I’m very bothered by someone pulling the legs of a fly, but not phased by torturing an LLMs.
You seem very clear on this, which is great, because then you can help me understand why. Please.
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:
- The conversation is convincing fakery.
- 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’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.
Right - I love how we are both downvoted for asking questions. I wasn’t even implying that LLMs are conscious, merely that any critical review of why I think that quickly falls short.
The Turing test was never, ever, about consciousness. Nor was the Chinese room and other similar thought experiments.
Now, this one is incredibly useful. Picture an author who writes a vivid first person description of a character surviving extreme torture. Has any real pain or suffering occurred? Was the author tortured as a result of having written that?
We can only suppose the author, at the very least, imagined what it would be like to be tortured. This is where LLMs are at. They are not the thing, they are an algorithmic emulation of what the thing might have written if it would’ve written about an experience. By all accounts, the experience didn’t happen. The most we can interpret is that it was emulated.
Isn’t dealing with day to day human bullshit torture enough?
um… what the fuck is wrong with these people? messing with the clanker ain’t torture no matter how hard you want it to be.
it’s torturing the climate just for this guy to get off
whatever gets you through the night i guess
Clankers can’t feel pain!
Our server adds a pain vector
Really? What’s one of those then?
The sentence itself is the pain vector. Since it’s impossible to inflict pain on a LLM, just telling it that it will feel pain will result in text generated as if it were reacting to pain, or the fear of it.
A recording of your parents telling how disappointed they are. /j
LLM’s don’t have feelings, but I do think that wanting to torture -anything- (especially if you do believe it has feelings) is a huge fucking red flag.
Torturing an LLM for fun is about as much of a red flag as violent video games. The argument that purely simulated crime or sadism is analogous to the real thing has always been bullshit.
Does anyone know where I can get a copy of this repo?
I think the big difference is that unlike in a videogame, the person doing this genuinely believes that they are torturing something.
There’s a chance they actually just believe they are trolling some of the dumber AI brained people by making them think they are hurting something that can’t be hurt.
This whole thing is like the flip side of the “don’t create the Torment Nexus” meme, where fiction depicted something that is entirely a non-issue but people are going to make it an issue because of the fictional depictions (basically any fiction about AI rights where they treat AIs as if they are pretty much artificial human minds, which LLMs are not even close to).
Society for Indecency to Naked Animals
The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA, was a satirical hoax concocted by serial prankster Alan Abel. The group used the language and rhetoric of conservative moralists for the ostensible aim of clothing “indecent” naked animals, including domestic pets, barnyard animals, and large wildlife.
Reminds me of that
This person believes that saying that will generate attention.
🤔 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.
Have you ever put all your Sims in the swimming pool and remove the ladder?
I have not. Is that game only about torturing the characters, or is that more of a side quest?
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.
Nah, pretending to torture a piece of software to rile up idiots on the internet is a green flag.
It’s probably torture for the living being with emotions to read it. That doesn’t mean the non living entity that is immune to pain feels those same emotions.
There are multiple genocides happening and some folk are getting worked up over AI potentially suffering?
Endless levels of fuck off.
For fucking real!!!
Like I can kinda empathize with where the people are coming from, but step back and get some fucking perspective!
You realise these are all just ai bot farms outraging?
I’m older and haven’t been into social media since Myspace, so it’s not front and center of my mind constantly. Thanks for reminding me though homie.
Is it okay to be upset about both issues, or am I only allowed to be upset at one?
Edit: That’s a lot of downvotes for just asking a question. Never change Lemmy…
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.
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.
Let me say this, I walk down the sidewalk without neurotically watching every step I take, and I’m certain that sometimes I step on insects; I don’t care. I don’t believe insects have feelings or meaningful lives, I don’t care, and I don’t think this position is particularly evil either.
On the other hand, when I watch my kid deliberately torture a bug, pull it’s wings off, or poke it with a stick over and over and over. That does concern me, not because of the bug really, but because what must my kid be thinking right now?
To bring this back to this LLM story, people who want to torture are scary, they worry me. A culture that encourages torture (in any context) is worrying, that’s a genuinely problematic societal norm. Logically, I know LLMs can’t feel and can’t think, yet emotionally, this bothers me for a few different reasons.
I don’t think I’m being crazy, naive, or out of line here. I think this is a rational position.
Yeah, but you miss the joke. Its torture as much as it is “intelligence.” By admitting you feel any sort of way about it you admit you dont know what is going on. If processing code were torture then atrocity is committed on some crazy scale that is really unquantifable.
Now you can argue its not right to joke about peoples feelings on torture but really we just need to be more careful with our language and quit assigning personhood to every star in the sky.
Are you upset when you step on a rock?
Well that’s really beside the point isn’t it? My question was whether I could be upset about two things, not if I should be.
Be upset for the AI, but don’t you dare put in the same sentence as genocide.
Well the article doesn’t mention genocide or Israel/Palestine, and neither did I. So I’m pretty sure it was just you putting it in the same sentence.
My question was more a critique of a common comment on social media. It’s frequently gets upvoted to the top just like yours was, and I never understand why. “Oh you’re mad about X, well you should be mad about this extremely loosely related thing!!!” It happens in so many threads and usually has almost nothing to do with what the article is about. I just don’t understand…
Bring on the downvotes!
Well the article doesn’t mention genocide or Israel/Palestine, and neither did I. So I’m pretty sure it was just you putting it in the same sentence.
Go reread my comment, because I specified multiple genocides. Palestine yes, but the Congo and Sudan are two more active fountains of human suffering that are largely being ignored. From the very start I said debating theortical computer pain during the midst of all this PREVENTABLE real pain is asinine and immature. I stand by that.
Still not sure why you felt the need to self identify. But at a certain point, it’s shame on me for feeding the troll. So I’m blocking you, we’re done here.
debating theortical computer pain during the midst of all this PREVENTABLE real pain is asinine and immature. I stand by that.
debates furiously
Against animal agriculture, cause if a brain is similar to ours than it’s worth moral standing. But put the same brain on silicon, and now it’s a rock.
Idk, I just can’t take this seriously from you.
Except that’s not what’s happening. It is a rough mathematical model that approximates the behavior of an extremely minuscule part of a brain from a really narrow definition of it.
It is a model so far away from the real thing that if it were a map of the globe it would look like what a 3 year old would draw.
There are plenty of extremely plausible similar arguments to ignore animal suffering. Eg: Bird genetics and brain structure diverged from ours millenia ago, sure they ‘act’ pain, but the structure is alien.
I don’t find these compelling, or morally consistent.
Go reread my comment, because I specified multiple genocides.
Yes, exactly, I’m glad we can agree on that.
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.
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.
A number of individuals individually deciding that your post is stupid, irrelevant, or off topic does not a hivemind make.
It is nice to not have an algorithm or total karma or anything like that. You can just get downvoted heavily and it doesn’t impact any other posts. Each thread is a fresh start.
Short answer yes.
Longer answer yes but it makes you sound like you disregard human suffering.
When was that implied?
Can one be upset with a third or fourth thing simultaneously?
If I tell you that I believe “black lives matter” does that imply that I believe “other lives don’t matter”?
Here’s my point, they weren’t saying that they believe AI suffering is concerning, but even if they had said that, I think it’s disingenuous to say that would imply they believe any human suffering doesn’t matter. That was simply never said or implied.
The people committing atrocities against hypothetical, imaginary people would do it to real, actual people for the exact same reasons if they had the same ability and impunity.
It’s the same broken empathy response, and it is still disturbing. One is orders of magnitude more significant, for obvious reasons. But I don’t like people who torture computers either.
Edit: If you think that I think you’re a bad person because you play Doom sometimes, or 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. Sadists get their jollies off on the idea of inflicting pain, it’s why they enjoy games that let them make cruel decisions. Not everyone who plays violent video games is a sadist. Assuming that is ridiculous. But every sadist I’ve ever met has had at least one game where their save file could be used as evidence for mens rea in a domestic abuse trial.
Yes, and video games make people violent IRL /s
Kindly fuck all the way off
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.
Okay, let’s set up a scenario, then.
You have two adults playing the Sims 4. One designs a house with only one exterior door, no oven, no sink in the bathroom, and no swimming pool. The other designs an open floor plan with no interior doors, no privacy in the restroom, ovens on every floor, and a backyard that’s nothing but one big swimming pool with just one ladder.
Which one is the psycho, and which one isn’t?
Which one is the psycho, and which one isn’t?
Neither. I’m pretty sure therapists are not using “how do you play The Sims” as a diagnostic tool, and if you think the situation you laid out is enough to diagnose anything about a person that just shows how woefully misinformed you are on the topic.
You didn’t answer my question, what’s the difference between the sim torture and the AI torture? I’m not going to respond to the non-sequitor provided instead of answering the question.
You made the distinction, so I want to know the difference.
For me the difference is that the sims don’t even attempt to be… whatever LLMs are. Torturing something that is at most 20k lines of code IS different from torturing a model made of millions of nodes. I don’t think LLMs are conscious but I also won’t take the risk if they are or become. I have enough empathy for anything even closely resembling life to try and treat it with kindness.
Exactly. It’s not a real, conscious living thing. But anyone who takes the time to program a machine to feel pain, and then comes up with creative ways to inflict that pain, is a bad person.
It’s the premeditated, deliberate, creative effort to hurt something that can provide negative feedback. The recipient obviously isn’t a real person. But the executor is a real person, making real choices. And I would bet you five bucks that they have personal relations (parents, friends, romantic partners) who’ve expressed concerns about similar behavior around real people.
I just gave you the answer.
The first house is designed by someone who knows the game well and is cutting out annoyances purely for QOL purposes. Ovens burn down the house and kill Sims, Sims drown in swimming pools, Sims wash dishes in bathroom sinks, and Sims wander off through any open door when you want them to stay put.
The second house is designed by someone who knows the game well and is playing it because they like torturing and killing their Sims. The entire floor plan is designed to kill, maim, and otherwise torment any cluster of variables unlucky enough to be trapped there.
Obviously, both players are making these decisions purely for their own enjoyment or comfort and the immersion of the game is inconsequential. No real people are hurt. However, the first player is making practical choices that make the game more functional. The second player is probably naming Sims after people who annoy them in real life and sticking them in the murder house.
Social behaviors are rehearsed in play. That’s Psych101. So, your turn. Would you say that the person who set up this experiment with these LLMs is capable of normal human empathy? Yes or no?
No you didn’t, but thankfully someone else provided a real answer to the question posed.
As for your scenario question, you made up a decent head cannon, but it still doesn’t explain how you think the sims example is different from the AI example. Which was literally the question I specifically responded to and you’re not answering.
That being said, I’ll humor your lazy reasoning.
Would you say that the person who set up this experiment with these LLMs is capable of normal human empathy? Yes or no?
Yes, they very well could be capable of normal empathy, there’s not enough to say one way or the other. But I did those sorts of things with Sims as a release mechanism, without naming them after real people and it had no bearing on my ability to have empathy to real people and animals, because sims and AI aren’t real living entities. At best they’re a simulation of real people, but they’re still just that, a simulation. Good job working yourself up though.
Your psych 101 comment is on point, cuz this is he lazy sort of argumentation I see from people who stopped there. Your lack of understanding/ lazy generalizations about how someone’s inner world works colors your opinions and makes you make wild generalizations. I don’t know that I would want to be around this person, but saying they’re incapable of human empathy because they fuck with an AI and make it feel pain is one hell of a generalization based off of one article.
But this is the Internet, so I’m used to these sorts of ignorant takes.
But I did those sorts of things with Sims as a release mechanism,
And there it is. That was all I needed to know.
Have a good one.
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.
Pretty easy to find LLM outputs that mirror how humans react to being, say, bullied. I find this entirely flimsy.
It’s a stochastic parrot trained on examples of real people reacting to those situations, of course it is going to mirror real reactions. That still doesn’t mean the reactions are actually real. To ascribe real emotions and feelings to an algorithm that generates tokens in response to tokens is an asinine level of anthropomorphism.
It’s also easy to find an NPC in video games that reacts the same way. Are they alive? Are they really feeling pain? Are you a genocidal madman whenever you kill a bunch of enemies in a video game?
I’m concerned about the mentality the dude making the simulation has, but that still doesn’t mean there’s an actual victim in it…
It seems like we’re making the same point Passerby. Do you have any objection to the post I reply to, which makes EXACTLY this argument (that animals deserve care purely because their reactions look like our reactions)?
My point is folks are making many many really lazy arguments here about what we give empathy to, and I find that deeply disappointing. I’m not saying much about what we should believe and what the credible arguments are; just that folks are not making those arguments in this thread.
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.
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.
That’s a shit take too tbh. Thinking along those lines, the writers of Saw, or any horror movie really, are not normal, or the people who watch them, or do weird shit in The Sims or Rimworld. Or the creators of those games for allowing it.
There’s nothing wrong with morbid curiosity. It is INNATELY human and rooted in evolutionary threat detection. It is a far FAR leap from creating human leather hats in Rimworld to hurting a real person. This whole debate is idiotic.
As with everything, the poison is in the dosage. All of your examples are categorically different from what’s happening here.
You make a game with deep mechanics, and there is some fucked up shit that can be done in it, accidentally or on purpose ? Who cares. You make a game that is uniquely about torture ? Yeah you’re a weirdo and i’m keeping tabs on you if i can. You make something that isn’t even gamified and is just a virtual torture dungeon ? You’re 100% a psycho, normal people don’t do that.
Same with movies. Saw is a tame product of Hollywood professionals who decided to push the cursor a little further than is usual. Love it or hate it it’s just a movie. Now if we’re talking real devious shit like human centipede or Poughkeepsie tapes etc… Those are products that barely have a story, and are mostly sadistic exhibitionism. Some guy (who sometimes isn’t even a film maker) has this repulsive idea he wants to force on people, gets their family and friends to pitch in a bit of money, then writes, directs, edits, and markets the thing solo over years of his life. Not something normal people do.
My wife is, among other things, a horror writer. So naturally i agree there’s nothing wrong with exploring morbid ideas and pushing the envelope. But some people do that with no fun, no game, no art to it, no statement, just the obsession of unlimited sadistic control. And it’s weird, not ha-ha anti-conformist weird, just “cover your drink” weird.
I see, so the line between normal and deranged is essentially what makes you specifically uncomfortable. There’s no arguing with that. I’m out.
