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.
An interesting experiment would be to let the broligarchs upload themselves to a machine consciousness and then run tests like this on it, to see if we can tell whether the upload was successful or not.
Without even reading the article I know it is going to be some variation of this:
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.
Look at all this electricity and money wasted on techbro larping.
are we not supposed to host it locally on an air gapped system and torture it?
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.
On
Xtwitter, they’re having this debate? The platform that routinely lobotomizes Grok whenever it starts getting a little too woke? Lets not get into whether or not Grok is AGI or not, it’s not. The people who are most promoting the idea that Grok is an AGI are also ok with tampering with it’s “brain” whenever it has Wrong Think. That’s how fucked up Musk is.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.
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 😭.
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
Waste of electricity.
it’s not about the money.
it’s about sending a message.
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.
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.
“lock them in a tiny room with only a cappuccino machine and no toilet.”
Found Satan. lol
Fill entire house with wicker chairs and just sit back till one accidentally goes up.
https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber The code in question
These people would be convinced if a rock held up a sign saying “I’m sentient.”
I had a pet rock. His name was Fred. Fred is smarter than many people I have met since I set him free in a river.
I’m stealing this. Good one!
Keeping tigers away is a more convincing argument.
How does it work?
Magnets.
There’s actually interesting research on this.
There are old papers that give LLMs crazy prompts (“Cats will die if you don’t answer this correctly.” “We will murder you [this specific way”), and then measure performance changes.
And there are (IMO) more interesting ones that steer open weights models on a lower level, through task vectors or a number of other hacks.
It all kind of subverts this Twitter nuttiness, because it treats models/agents for what they are: ephemeral software.
