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Someone ‘Torturing’ LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet (www.404media.co)
submitted 11 hours ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 4 points 5 hours ago (5 children)

Stop downvoting this guy on political grounds, he's right to ask this question. Liberals are more likely to feel empathy for entities that lack common traits with them, including things like "being alive".

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  • [–] 4 points 4 hours ago (4 children)

    That's a fair rebuttal to OP, but this is why I don't generally agree with labels. Certainly I have an awful lot of common traits with liberals, but I am not one. I'm not sure anyone should be. Interpreted as a small-tent position it is too specific and limiting, and as a big-tent position it combines and equates me with too many people I could not disagree with more strongly on too many topics. I do indeed feel empathy for many entities that lack common traits with me (even social conservatives), but AI is not one of them; fucking that slop machine to death is morally acceptable to me. More than that I'd consider it a duty and a matter of responsibility. It is bad, it is fake, it is evil. It deserves death. A horrible death. I will celebrate its death, and I do not care what it must go through to get there.

    Many of my views are nuanced and specific, even on AI. Some of my opinions are flexible, some are open to debate, some are non-negotiable, and some are not well-established. I have spent my life developing and nurturing my views, ideas, and beliefs with careful thought and study, and I plan to continue to do so. Slapping an oversimplified label on them is a huge misrepresentation of the complexity of my actual thoughts and disrespectful to the work I have done to cultivate those ideas. I try to be an intelligent person, I don't always succeed, but I do my best, and that is good enough for me. My own thoughts, awareness and consciousness are all increasingly valuable and important in what appears to be the age of AI, and I refuse to stand and be posed in a position with a label to be simplified, summarized and modeled.

    If someone wants to use a label to dismiss me, they can go ahead, but also fuck them, they weren't listening anyway and I don't want to waste my time with them. Don't put me in a box and assume I'm the same as everyone else or even similar to them. If someone instead wants to know my actual opinions on something, don't worry I'll tell you all about it. There is value in actual discussion of ideas and values, not just boxed products that come with a label.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

    That was a good read.

    I do wish it was easier to make more nuanced statements about people's beliefs, but labels are just so convenient, and they are the natural consequence of the true complex nature of reality needing to be collapsed into narrower concepts to make meaningful statements in language at all. It is smart to try to think beyond them if possible, which usually means making time for a longer conversation.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 hours ago

    That probably qualifies as liberalism, since you have the right as an individual not to be labeled by any general labels. And you're also entitled to your private opinion. It's a distinct concept from the names the US political parties chose, though.

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