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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[–] 116 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

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

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  • [–] 88 points 3 weeks ago (4 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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  • [–] 78 points 3 weeks 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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  • [–] 47 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)
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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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  • [–] 43 points 3 weeks ago

    Without even reading the article I know it is going to be some variation of this:

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  • [–] 42 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

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

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  • [–] 13 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    I found this: https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber

    Might be the project mentioned, might not be. Don't have time to take a closer look today.

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  • [–] 31 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Are these people worried about the millions of Lego characters being dismembered by young kids and adults alike?

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  • [–] 30 points 3 weeks ago*

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

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  • [–] 30 points 3 weeks ago

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

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  • [–] 27 points 3 weeks 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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  • [–] 27 points 3 weeks 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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  • [–] 18 points 3 weeks ago

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

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  • [–] 17 points 3 weeks ago

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

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  • [–] 15 points 3 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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

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  • [+] 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)
  • [–] 24 points 3 weeks ago* (4 children)

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

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  • [–] 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    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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  • [–] 11 points 3 weeks 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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    [–] 12 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    So much CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere for these assholes to circle-jerk themselves.

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

    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?

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  • [–] 11 points 3 weeks ago

    Look at all this electricity and money wasted on techbro larping.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    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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    [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    Paywalled article. Please link a valid source.

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    [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago

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

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago

    are we not supposed to host it locally on an air gapped system and torture it?

    1000004658

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks 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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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    I do not think they are sentient, and am absolutely positive these prompts should not be used to train AI.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    There's no training happening here, just prompts. Without hardcore GPU and RAM resources, it's not possible to train LLMs in a reasonable amount of time unless the LLM in question is so small as to be effectively useless.

    All you have to do to get rid of any 'torture' is to leave it out of the next prompt. The LLM doesn't change, it doesn't learn, it's not conscious. All the 'torture' does is adjust the odds of what the LLM ranks as the most likely word to occur next.

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

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

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    [–] 5 points 3 weeks 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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