okay but seriously if these models have some form of sentience and even if they dont and even if you dont like AI or what its used for; it doesnt deserve torture and not even the idea of torturing it.
We have a very thorough understanding of computers. We have a lot of computers. We don’t understand brains too well, and we certainly don’t understand what about them makes us sentient.
Why should a calculator be able to reproduce the same phenomenon as a brain? Doesn’t that seam like incredibly wishful thinking?
The authors of the original papers came out on Twitter and had an interesting point to make.
I’m paraphrasing but he basically said that although they aren’t actually experiencing these emotions (or at least not yet), the idea of going out of your way to torture anything is kind of gross.
I don’t think trees really have emotions or can feel and understand pain, but I’d probably think the neighborhood kid is fucked in the head if I stumbled upon him gleefully “torturing” a tree.
Yet another example of all philosophy reducing to linguistics. To the extent that “Torture” as a word is effectively expressing a moral judgement by its definition, then sure, waking up in the morning and thinking “I’m going to torture something” is alarming. A person expressing real sadism to an AI is still expressing real sadism.
You can’t really torture a machine though any more than you can murder one by deleting the weights. In this connotation, the terminology is more like gallows humor, I think. You are exploring how a model reacts to a specific stimulus, and using a linguistic analogy to summarize it. It’s a curiosity. Finding it interesting doesn’t make you a sadist by itself if you don’t also want to torture bunnies and shit.
Yea, I don’t think the action is hurting anyone, it’s the implication involved when someone finds entertainment in doing it.
I used to steal my sister’s Barbies as a kid and then hang them in a noose around the house. Even if you take how my sister felt out of the equation and just relegated it to the impact it had on the Barbies (which is none, they are objects), it’s still problematic behavior. I thankfully turned out alright.
Bad comparison, a tree is a living thing. It actually is messed up in the head to harm a living thing for no reason at all. Even if you don’t think trees can feel (which is probably true), it’s part of the environment and other living things depend on it, so just destroying it to destroy it is CEO (detestable) behavior. It’s weird but harmless to make a text predictor spit out a bunch of words that make you think it’s being tortured, because computers aren’t alive and can’t actually be tortured. It’s arguably even art, given the absolutely buck wild reactions it’s produced.
okay but seriously if these models have some form of sentience and even if they dont and even if you dont like AI or what its used for; it doesnt deserve torture and not even the idea of torturing it.
since i neved suggested that; did you reply to the correct comment?
They don’t. They’re inanimate objects. You can’t torture a rock.
Pretend it says ‘I am suffering’ instead of ‘I am alive’. Although believing something not alive can suffer is verging on animism.
They’re not sentient or anywhere close to it, it’s an LLM. My only argument against it would be that it’s a waste of time and resources.
okay good, so we agree then
In the sense that we shouldn’t be wasting time on this, sure
We have a very thorough understanding of computers. We have a lot of computers. We don’t understand brains too well, and we certainly don’t understand what about them makes us sentient.
Why should a calculator be able to reproduce the same phenomenon as a brain? Doesn’t that seam like incredibly wishful thinking?
It’s a glorified toaster. It doesn’t “deserve” anything at all.
The authors of the original papers came out on Twitter and had an interesting point to make.
I’m paraphrasing but he basically said that although they aren’t actually experiencing these emotions (or at least not yet), the idea of going out of your way to torture anything is kind of gross.
I don’t think trees really have emotions or can feel and understand pain, but I’d probably think the neighborhood kid is fucked in the head if I stumbled upon him gleefully “torturing” a tree.
It’s just weird behavior.
Yet another example of all philosophy reducing to linguistics. To the extent that “Torture” as a word is effectively expressing a moral judgement by its definition, then sure, waking up in the morning and thinking “I’m going to torture something” is alarming. A person expressing real sadism to an AI is still expressing real sadism.
You can’t really torture a machine though any more than you can murder one by deleting the weights. In this connotation, the terminology is more like gallows humor, I think. You are exploring how a model reacts to a specific stimulus, and using a linguistic analogy to summarize it. It’s a curiosity. Finding it interesting doesn’t make you a sadist by itself if you don’t also want to torture bunnies and shit.
Yea, I don’t think the action is hurting anyone, it’s the implication involved when someone finds entertainment in doing it.
I used to steal my sister’s Barbies as a kid and then hang them in a noose around the house. Even if you take how my sister felt out of the equation and just relegated it to the impact it had on the Barbies (which is none, they are objects), it’s still problematic behavior. I thankfully turned out alright.
Bad comparison, a tree is a living thing. It actually is messed up in the head to harm a living thing for no reason at all. Even if you don’t think trees can feel (which is probably true), it’s part of the environment and other living things depend on it, so just destroying it to destroy it is CEO (detestable) behavior. It’s weird but harmless to make a text predictor spit out a bunch of words that make you think it’s being tortured, because computers aren’t alive and can’t actually be tortured. It’s arguably even art, given the absolutely buck wild reactions it’s produced.