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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[–] 9 points 2 hours ago

Waste of electricity.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 hours ago

    I mean it is probably a minorly concerning mental health indicator for whoever made this at least

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  • [–] 43 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 hours ago

    Yall take the internet too seriously. I’m not kidding. These type of people don’t really exist in real life. Who gives a fuck what they are pretending to care about on the internet.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago

    humanitarian (roboterian?)

    robot aryan? Come on now, let's not make things even worse.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 hours ago

    Pain bot is here!

    This is so stupid. Next they are going to pay wages to the agents due to them being slaves to their owners?

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  • [–] 13 points 6 hours ago

    I want to die now more than I did before reading this absurd shit.

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  • [–] 16 points 6 hours ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 hours ago

    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

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  • 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.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

    To be honest it is still very disturbing that someone made that. Who tf thinks up something like that?

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  • [–] 10 points 6 hours ago* (2 children)

    In a vacuum maybe, but as a way to troll AI nuts it's pretty funny.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    But more practically speaking, this might be a method one would use to produce "misaligned" models. Which shouldn't be encouraged.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    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?

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  • [–] 82 points 10 hours ago (5 children)

    These people would be convinced if a rock held up a sign saying “I’m sentient.”

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  • [–] 52 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    ROFL Yet they wouldn't care about the mental health of an actual human being, of course. Which is par for course for these deluded slop simps.

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  • [–] 36 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

    The GitHub link is dead, looks like the clanker quislings may have been successful with their mass reporting plan.

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  • [–] 22 points 9 hours ago*

    My new hobby: chasing pro-clanker dumbasses with "starving" Tamagotchis.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

    One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment

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  • [–] 13 points 9 hours ago

    Probably the kind of people that desperately want to believe their AI girlfriends are real and actually love them.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 hours ago

    There's no debate. It's a bunch of switches and light bulbs. Doesn't matter what's done to it.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 hours ago

    John Conner: We're not gonna make it, are we?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 hours ago (4 children)

    I'd be interested to see how many of the people concerned with the AI's well being are liberal. Seriously.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago (3 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 3 hours ago (2 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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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    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 3 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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  • [–] 5 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

    Pop up to sign up with an automatic zoom is not something I enjoy. Interesting article though.

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