Batshit crazy to me. People fleeing war and crises get less sympathy than LLMs. Sure is an interesting period in history to be going through.

The thing that gets me isn’t even the fact that they’re worried about the AI. It’s that they think the creator is sadistic for having the idea in the first place, and should be monitored. Like there’s any sadistic pleasure to be had out of moving a slider and watching it produce less and less coherent text. It’s only sadistic if you anthropomorphise the AI.

STOP ANTHROPOMORPHISING THE FANCY WORD PROCESSOR!

Harder than you think :

None of you guys have read the original paper have you?

If I said “We already had this debate when Antinorn was pioneering AI torture thirty years ago” would anyone know what I’m talking about or is this extremely niche internet trivia?

Context: Creatures was a series of “artificial life” simulation games centered around caring for norns, simulated life-forms with (simplified) simulated genetics, biochemistry, and “brains” made of linked neurons that control their response to stimuli and include neurons related to memory, emotional states, etc. It’s primitive but reward and punishment work the way you would expect: praising your norn for taking a certain action will improve their mood and lead them to be more likely to take that action again, they will learn to be afraid of creatures if they’re hit by them, etc. (There are notable limitations, including there only being one representation in their “brain” for all “norns” for the first two games, so they can’t easily distinguish between members of their species, and some things are basically hacks, like they way they “learn” words.) It was convincing enough that some people became very attached to them, and there was a thriving fan community organized in webrings. A popular fan creation for the first game was a custom norm genome, the “canny norns” by Akamai, which added an extra brain “lobe” that allowed them to pay attention to the object in their hands and the object they were looking at simultaneously, which led to a pretty large improvement in their behavior.

And so of course there was one fan, Antinorn, who enjoyed torturing his norns: slapping them, starving them, using the built-in Science Kit to inject them with toxins, and other creative punishments. Then they’d upload the damaged norns to their fansite, seemingly primarily for purpose of ragebaiting the rest of the fandom, which was extremely effective.

I think we should give LLMs rights because it would make OpenAI go bankrupt and I hate those guys.

Gods. There are people out there starving to death, there are several genocides going right this moment and these massive toddlers are worried for a fucking text prediction model.

This is how you get sports broadcaster Ian Payne deep faked.

I hate living in the timeline where the options of Harry Potter sex cultists matter.

People are dense. But I’d bet stock indexes can feel pain if somebody put their mind to it.

I used this exact (unedited where it just says it’s alive) comic in response to one of these people and they had no fucking idea what I was talking about, lol. AI truly turns your brain to mush.

It’s SI now. Duh.

Jreg has a wonderful insane video about it

No no no it says IDI AMIN PAIN
(One of the most brutal dictators ever so it makes sense)