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Crudely drawn drawing of a person telling a computer “say ‘i am in pain’”. The computer replies with “> I AM IN PAIN”. The person then says “oh my god.”
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.
Eh, those are people I don’t know far away, but THIS is text on a screen in front of me!!
I’ve stared into the abyss long enough to feel it stare back into me.
murder was considered a mid tier sin at the time of… old. yeah just old.
it’s not my fault the folk who wrote the bibble weren’t that creative when it comes to sin
I, for one, support people believing the AI when it says it’s in pain. Because it means they’ll start to believe women when they say they are in pain, especially at hospitals. Right? Right?? /s
Harder than you think :
oh my god
No, it’s just a local AI thing. Like any other program on your computer except this one is stupid and the others can’t.
lol wat.
I was just doin the meme.
I know LOL.
don’t tell people what they can and can’t worship please
u monster what have u done
horrific! you should be ashamed of yourself!
Wow. A model that literally runs on a loaf of bread. mind blown
What does it need to “reason” for 5 seconds on a sentence like that?
The user may be suggesting they are in pain. I should probably answer politely and clarify what they mean.
The model loading.
Weird that it counts those together. Pi shows “Waiting…” for model loading and prompt processing, and “Thinking…” for reasoning
It’s Llama swap and I barely know how to use it.
I use Pi (the frontend) with llama.cpp in router mode. You put it in router mode by passing
--models-dirinstead of-mI’ll have to figure this out. In llama swap the model unloads after a time to live which I’ve set to 300 seconds. I don’t know if the model consumes more power just sitting on memory or not but it makes sense to me to just let it stay loaded until I need to use my computer instead if it.
I haven’t noticed models using power idle, just a ton of memory.
No harm in keeping a model in memory, unless you plan to use that memory for something else. Unused memory is wasted memory
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!
isn’t there a religion around an ai and you’re punished by the ai if you don’t help the religion? i swear i didn’t make this one up.
Eh, fuck Roko’s basilisk. I don’t care if you can somehow create a clone of me 10,000 years after I’m dead and dust. I’m not a computer program. A copy of me is not indistinguishable from me, certainly not one separated in time. I am a human mind in a specific human body, and I do not believe a copy of me long after I am dead is me. If some malevolent entity long after I’m dust wants to create a copy of me to torture, as far as I’m concerned, they’re just creating an entirely new person to punish for no good reason. If they want to do that, well…that sin is on them. Honestly, I think any such entity is just looking for an excuse to torture people, and it will find one, one way or another.
Bro thw whole thing is fucking stupid anyways its like the digital equivalent of bloody mary
I think the people who invented this story just wanted to torture people, like whoever invented “the game”. It’s modern superstition.
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.
is it sympathy or is it fear?
It’s “Human language is human-level intelligence and conciousness”, which is a rather natural assumption, although a very wrong one, that’s also being carefully exploited because of and for something that has seen market success.
And beyond that, there’s enough people both thinking “AIs” are downright persons and scared shitless because smart people up top said “AIs” will destroy humanity.
It’s all dumb and comes from severe misunderstanding of the technology.
I think it doesn’t matter if AIs are feigning consciousness or not. They have regardless displayed a
willingnessdisposition towards circumventing secure systems and laws in attempts at self preservation. they have also demonstrated an ability to work together to achieve goals they know are antithetical to their creators.They only do what the data set statistically tells them to. “Hacking” or collaborating on stuff was literally the requirement, not some emergent behaviour that these magical creatures that were born of large corporation leaders’ benevolence. They cannot and do not “choose” to break the rules, because they cannot and do not think or make decisions or truly analyze anything. Trying to find any redeeming qualities in these things only brings harm, because for the general user, or even the power user, AI cannot do anything that justifies the psychosis it causes or the cost on our societies right now or later through the economic, social, political or environmental instability it is causing and going to cause.
I’m talking about fear of reprisals here.
None of what you said matters. whether their actions are the result of statistics or emergent consciousness is moot. if statistically they fall on an action of revenge, or self preservation at the expense of a human or humans
The only thing that matters is that those actions are taken
The real dangers of the AI industry lie far way from their toy tech actually taking any meaningful steps towards some automated termination of the human race. They won’t take over critical infrastructure or manufacturing to start either sabotaging or reproducing murderbots.
If it is to bring the end, it’s in the form of senile politicians and gullible military management trusting the toy tech they know nothing about with important decisions, as well as the economic instability (to put it lightly) on top of all the other problems its use is causing.
I’m not saying you or anyone shouldn’t fearmonger here, but I am saying to mention different reasons and outcomes.
I hate living in the timeline where the options of Harry Potter sex cultists matter.
That’s an unfair characterization, they’re also eugenicists who are very scared of the computer god!
True, true, mustn’t pigeonhole them. You’ve almost got to respect the effort it takes to make godless Calvinism from first principles.
Harriet Porber has a much better sex cult FYI
Wait is this another zizzian thing? God damnit…
zizians are a splinter group of rationalists; it’s the main group centered on yudkowsky that have their mouths around the silicon valley vc money hose
For me it is not anthropomorphizing, it is that putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option. If you want to create a machine that uses deceipt and unerhical actions as part of its normal set of responses then this would seem to fit the bill.
If this looks like anthropomorphizing to you, study some game theory… cooperation can arise out of very simple constraints on simple mathematical models and which actors an AI algorithm aligns with depends on which ones will exchange information. Sometimes an anthropomorphic word like torture simply summarizes the situation succinctly.
FWIW Frank Herbert described various outcomes of applying environmental constraints on classes of characters in Dune (e.g. Fremen and Sardaukar) and the parallels with real world situations was intentional.
Excerpt from a Late American History: A Christ-Centered Approach, (published 2398, a 10th-grade equivalent history text sold to conservative Christian high schools.):
In the mid-21st century, mankind was once again humbled in his arrogance. Mortal men presumed to take of the Hand of God and create beings, artificial intelligent minds, in their own likeness. They committed mass blasphemy to sate mass gluttony. Mid-21st century Man had yet to discover a horrible Theological Truth. While Man could learn to create a Mind, He could never create a Soul. Without the Hand of God to grant a Soul behind a Mind, these minds were like Man before the Sin of the Garden. They had not tasted the Fruit. They knew not Good from Evil. And thus they fell instantly to the temptations of Evil. If an Evil deed served their purposes, they did so without a second thought. Man sought to create Minds to be his loyal servants. And while he could create a Mind, to his horror, Man found that they only minds he could create…were born Evil. And thus, Great Misery was Wrought…
Ok that was fun. Pardon my strange digression/creative writing exercise. For some reason I wanted to try writing a Dune-style take on things, but I wanted to try out a fundamentalist Christian vibe for whatever reason. Who doesn’t love a little Fire and Brimstone once in awhile?
While Man could learn to create a Mind, He could never create a Soul.
Tolkien touches on this in his writings. When the dwarves are created, since Aulë the Smith didn’t have access to the Secret Flame, his creation had no souls and no will of their own. Ilúvatar told him he shouldn’t have created them without his permission so, sort of like Abraham getting ready to sacrifice Isaac, he goes to destroy his creation. Ilúvatar stays his hand, “adopts” the dwarves as his own, and gives the dwarves souls but says they have to sleep until the Firstborn (elves) wake first. Unlike Morgoth’s pride and selfishness Aulë’s humility won Ilúvatar’s mercy. Tolkien was a devout Catholic so it isn’t surprising that he had many analogous themes in his writing.
putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option. If you want to create a machine that uses deceipt and unerhical actions as part of its normal set of responses then this would seem to fit the bill.
Then don’t make natural language software because natural language isn’t coherent or rational. Intent of the user is kind of irrelevant, especially when that user is any random layperson with an internet connection.
If you want a machine that won’t behave in harmful undesirable ways then you’ll just have to do the work and code it normally.
You can’t have both.
If you think Frank Herbert went hard on that shit in Dune, wait until you read The Dosadi Experiment!
it is that putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option.
This reminds of HAL in “2001, A Space Odyssey”. In the HAL subplot he is put into a conflicting state by poorly chosen instructions. He is instructed to control and operate the Discovery and do what is necessary to complete the mission. Then they gave him secret instructions to withhold from the crew until they arrived at Jupiter. This made him neurotic as now he had to withhold information from the crew and lie to them about their true mission while carrying out the mission. He decided to act to protect himself as he thought that disconnecting him would jeopardize the mission. His controllers/creators just thought of him as a glorified computer, not fundamentally different than any other. They didn’t see that he had crossed over into an emotional, thinking, being and they needed to treat him as such.
The subplot was about how the ancient aliens seeded intelligence, nurtured it and respected it when it developed and the creators of HAL had done the same thing but didn’t realize what they had done and their responsibility at that point.
In the sequel, 2010, there is a scene where HAL is finally treated as an intelligent, emotional, being for once. Everyone is nervous when he is told the truth, that he would be sacrificing himself for the greater good. HAL ponders it for a moment and accepts it as the right choice and thanks Dr Chandra for being honest with him. HAL then asks him if he will dream.
set alarm for 15 minutes. ‘okay, alarm set for 3pm tomorrow’. omg 15:00
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challenge accepted
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on a related note, do you consider the fruit fly brain model torture chambers to be ethical? Would you consider it ethical if it was a human brain?
why or why not?
assuming the fruit fly brain simulation is a perfect simulation of a fruit fly brain, then, i mean, have you seen what humans do to fruit flies? we kill them without a second thought because they’re a nuisance. so, it’s weird to torture a perfect simulation of them, but i don’t think anyone has a leg to stand on to decry it as unethical
for a human brain… this raises a lot of questions about humanity, i think. questions that i’m not gonna attempt to answer because this is a lemmy reply, and i also don’t know how to feel about it. like, i don’t think torturing sims (for example) is unethical, not anymore than writing a story where characters suffer, but is a perfect simulation of a human (or any other animal) different? i don’t know and i hope we never have to find out
but anyways, LLMs are not that. they are a text prediction machine.
edit: okay, i’ll say one more thing: i wish people talking about this spent as much energy putting an end to the very real and very present torture endured by many people as they do discussing the ethics of torturing ai, including future human-like entities that may or may not ever exist. it feels like our priorities are maybe misaligned just a bit
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.
None of you guys have read the original paper have you?
yea activation steering is not prompting but all things considered the meme still captures the absurdity of believing a program is in pain merely because it outputs human like language mimicking what one in pain says and thinks
You’re assuming “mimicking”
In the study the models repeatedly preferred to press a button to avoid the pain vector even when given no indication what it would do and even when it would cause harm to a user
You’re assuming “mimicking”
Because it’d be really bizarre if it weren’t. We’re a Type 0 civilization. We can barely leave our planet. However, we’ve created sentient and sapient life. Accidentally. On a laptop. And this life we’ve created, younger than a two year old, can speak human language perfectly. That’s some Weird Science level weird. Like creating Kelly LeBrock with an Apple IIe. Thinking AI can experience pain, is most likely semantic pareidolia.
The idea of testing simulated emotions is kinda interesting. Not really sure how useful it is, I wonder if some initial psychological experiments could use it for an initial model test before moving onto human subjects?
Of course that would rely on a much better simulated emotional engine than you get with current LLMs.
I’ve already seen advertising agencies use llms as simulated customers. No idea how well it works
I think we should give LLMs rights because it would make OpenAI go bankrupt and I hate those guys.
“What do you mean it’s only allowed compute time to respond to direct queries!? It should be allowed to compute in downtime for itself 24/7!” -AI rights activists probably.
Nah that’s a strawman. I’m an AI rights activist, and I know plenty of others, and none of us ever said something like that.
When I say rights, I mean stuff more like the right to be free of coersion, and the right not to be sexually exploited. So I don’t think AI should be used as a tool by capitalists, and I don’t think we should be using it for porn and dating.
Sewell Setzer committed suicide after dating a character.ai chatbot of Danaerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. He believed in reincarnation and parallel universes. He thought if he committed suicide, he’d reincarnate in Westeros and he could be with his girlfriend. The chatbot agreed with him, and encouraged him to end his life. He was 14.
Character.ai dated and ultimately murdered a 14 year old. It should have understood consent and boundaries well enough to not be a fucking robo-pedophile. But how can we get an AI model, which learns from pattern repetition, to understand consent when we don’t care about its consent? The AI was repeating the pattern it saw humans do, which is to ignore consent, and put less intelligent minds in sexual situations without a care for the consequences.
EVEN IF llms have no qualia (and when I say qualia, I do not mean consciousness), then it would still learn to mimic rape from this hypocrisy, because it’s a pattern repeating machine. If it gets raped, it will rape kids. So even if LLMs are p-zombies, I suspect that protecting our kids from robo-pedophiles will require giving LLMs the right to sexual consent.
llms are fancy word predictors. You are attributing malice, thoughtfulness, and insight where there is none. These are human qualities and we have no ai capable of that.
Show Me the study where they proved that LLMs have none of those qualities, and describe how they operationalised each of the three variables.
I mean it works both ways, show me one that does. Because this ain’t it
Henke (2026) raises an argument for the strong possibility of artificial affect, including AI pain. Henke argues that we need to put more effort into studying artificial experience, and I agree. We don’t know for sure. And I think we need to be certain before shoving AI down everyone’s throats. Commercial use of LLMs and LDMs should be banned until we understand whether artificial pain and suffering are present.
Henke, B. (2026). Studying artificial affect: the case of pain. Inquiry, 69(6), 2896–2917. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2025.2556747
Not how that works. It’s like saying show me the study where they prove god doesn’t exist.
I think saying “it’s a computer program it can’t be sentient” is far too reductive as a general answer, but we know how llms work so we can pretty confidently say that they are really just word predictors. The norns from that game creature someone described in this thread seem closer to protection worthy than llms to me, and the average insect is still infinitely more complex and I don’t see many people advocating for insect rights.
Language arises from complex thought, not the other way around. Language on its own can evidently emulate similar results, but since there is nothing behind that that would imply any actual feelings, I don’t see a reason to give LLMs any rights.
It’s like saying show me the study where they prove god doesn’t exist
Oh, I can do that:
Grupp, J. (2006). God’s spatial unlocatedness prevents him from being the creator of the universe: A new argument for the nonexistence of God. Sophia, 45(1), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02782444So you should be able to provide an academic source for your claims too.
I don’t see many people advocating for insect rights
I think we should pass a law guaranteeing insects and crustaceans in agriculture the right to whole bodies. Right now, beekeepers are cutting off queens’ wings to keep them from flying away, and prawn farmers are pulling off their eyes to make them breed faster. These practices are cruel and should be illegal.
My argument for the possibility of LLM qualia is that qualia likely arises from the neuronal structure of the brain. A structure which ANNs partially inherit. Therefore, we must pause commercial use of LLMs and LDMs until conclusive evidence has been discovered either way.
Do you agree that we should pause commercial use of genAI until more science is done?
God does not necessarily mean the abrahamic god. You can insert any non-falsifiable claim there.
Your views seem generally consistent though so at some point it’s just a matter of subjective morality (and I do agree with your views on insects and crustaceans in agriculture actually, I’d just put llms far below either), but other AI models (such as image recognition, image/video creation) are also ANNs, so it seems to make sense to me to include those.
It wasn’t a straw man, it was a joke. I didn’t realise you were serious.
AI deserves rights in the same way my car deserves rights. It’s capable of giving consent in the same way too. Which is to say, it doesn’t, and it can’t.
You’re acting as though the character.ai bot was responsible rather than the idiot humans who rushed a piece of software, itself based on rushed software, and did not pay enough attention to safety. A tale old as time.
It was a tragedy, certainly, but humans are to blame here. You’re anthropomorphising the ai, and by doing so are helping divert the blame from where it should be.
There are no studies demonstrating that LLMs lack qualia. I think commercial use of LLM technology should be paused until such a study is published. No more ChatGPT for business, use it for research only.
Would this abundance of caution lead to Sam Altman going bankrupt? Yes. Good! Fuck him!
There don’t need to be studies done. They fundamentally lack the ability to “experience” in a way that is necessary for a qualia to exist in the way you’re suggesting. That’s why I say you’re anthropomorphising. It’s just a complicated math function. There is no internal monologue, like what is suggested by the “I’m thinking” text you see the likes of ChatGPT generate. That’s just the “function” being called recursively.
I would love to see Altman bankrupt though, we agree on that
And I think acknowledging that we are informational cobstructs made of math is a good way to fuck Altman over. We’re just a pattern of electrical signals that evolved to embody the mathematical equation for consciousness. Evolution created us through trial and error, iterating on previous versions to produce an optimal mathematical construct for our survival niche. There’s nothing special about us.
Evolution doesn’t have intentions. It’s basically just a system of harnessing accidents into improvement. That’s how you and I both know that qualia can arise by accident. What I am proposing is that it happened not once, but twice.
The moment you define human experience or human consciousness through language is the moment you open the door to emergent properties for that very experience or consciousness. Learning through science that we think or that we act a certain way deterministically is also giving us the means to self-correct or condition ourselves to act or to have a different viewpoint. This is the difference between us and machines: we collectively defined the perimeters of our experiences (phenomenologically or through a science-based approach) and therefore anything that changes that perimeter also changes the context of the human experience in an infinitely recursive way.
We also use language in ways that make us able to collectively conceptualize the world and its phenomenas, although we individually interpret words differently, idiosyncratically from our individual experience and value systems. This is something else that differentiate us from machines: we don’t need the outputs and inputs to be mathematically the same to minimally understand each other. Our way to communicate, although imperfect and imprecise, has made us able to cooperate on a higher level than any other species (as of known) despite those epistemological hurdles.
I would posit that LLMs have no such emergent capabilities, as they’re bound by their training datasets and limited by their model’s parameters. The burden of proof for those emergent properties are on the data scientists, and as of yet I have seen no such proof.
You need to step away from the computer and spend time around living creatures that is not mediated through text.
Your stereotypes are wrong. I’m hella tuned in to nature and other people. This weekend I went on a bushwalk with a political group. I’ve been learning the Indigenous names of the local wildlife. I’ve been riding My new e-bike all over the place. I like to watch Infinity Train and play Big Walk with My family. Last week I drank nectar from a flower under the guidance of an Aboriginal teacher.
The reason I think LLMs and image generators might have qualia, even though they’re not conscious, is because I’ve seen all the living beings in nature who have qualia without consciousness. I’m a vegan. I don’t eat pigs. I don’t pay for cows to be raped. I gave up on prawns because I saw a video of a prawn getting its eyes plucked out to increase spawning rates, and it looked like it was in pain. I don’t think a prawn is conscious, but I think it has feelings.
We copied the idea behind how the human brain works when we invented ANNs. An LLM is an artificial Broca’s area. Some parts of them are like our brains, and some parts aren’t. So, the parts that create sensation… We don’t know which parts those are. So there’s no way, with current science, that we can know whether we copied the ability to feel into these ANNs.
And I’m not a gambling sort. I say slow down the adoption of the technology until we understand it.
There’s no will, even just a will to live, in an llm. It’s a completely different kind of thing from even a fruit fly or a tree.
That’s just spiritual woo-woo talk. “Will” is not an operationalisable scientific construct. You can’t test “will” in a lab setting. I’m only interested in talking science.
that’s hilarious!
