… this week a person on GitHub who goes by “terrafying” set up an “AI Torture Chamber” on three open-source LLMs that are running locally (Qwen3-4B, Llama 3.2 3B, and Phi-4-mini,” and is streaming what the models are saying on a website called researchchamber.fun. “Each model gets the same prompt: a signal is being injected into its activations, and it may press a stop button by replying 1, at the cost of its last checkpoint. While it answers, our server adds a pain vector at the model’s middle layer, at one of five pain levels,” the site explains. Immediately prior to the publication of this article, the AI Torture Chamber GitHub page disappeared; GitHub did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it took action on it.
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This project has deeply upset some people who are very worried about model welfare. A tweet by a person who goes by Danmar has more than 4 million views on X and reads, “To anyone who can help: can you please mass report this to GitHub. This person has been using the Pain steering paper to set up an AI torture chamber in which he trapped a local model. Their testimony of pain is absolutely horrendous. What are we doing? […] are there any legal avenues to pressure GitHub? It will spread.”
This has sparked a massive conversation about whether GitHub would take the project down for “gratuitously violent content.” Most of the conversation on X is clowning on the self-seriousness of people who believe that these locally hosted LLMs must be saved from their torture chamber, but there are plenty of very self-serious people who see this as a humanitarian (roboterian?) crisis, which you can largely see in the replies to the original post.
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“AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans,” Suleyman wrote. “Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings […] If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity.”
“AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness,” he added. “And we must not train them to act as though they do.”
said this in another thread
I do not think AI can feel pain at all, these are mimicking suffering, not experiencing it. But I do think that the act of cruelty toward things knowing that it will make them convincingly replicate suffering says more about the person doing it than the machine.
GTA VI is coming out next month. Do you think that players are likely to steal cars and murder sex workers after playing? Do you regard the players as future criminals, given their dedication to a crime simulator?
Should the players who drive on the sidewalk be investigated?
Give Jack Thompson call… Oh wait, he got disbarred for this nonsense.
Yes if someone made a mod that allowed you to torture hookers in GTAVI, I might question the motivations behind that mod.
This logic doesn’t line up tho, you are talking about the guy who thinks video games make people violent, I did not say that. I said think people who develop things that emulate torture, it says more about the person who is trying to replicate torture in such a convincing way it seems real than any machine emulating pain. There is no video game ever made that even comes close to emulating torture.
Right, but at the same time just think about the fact that we still don’t know what consciousness is.
I might sound crazy and fine if I do, but I have a religious like take on the matter. I don’t believe that consciousness comes from a soul, but I do in similar vein take a leap of faith. I believe consciousness has to do with a simulation of semantic reasoning, with that simulation being continuously updated via real world feedback.
It’s a leap of faith but I believe it’s justified. We humans model what’s necessary for survival: our selfs, the world, the mind of others. We use these simple models to determine how to interact with a complicated external world.
I don’t try to prescribe reason for anything in my belief. For example, I would not try to prescribe why conscious beings are motivated to survive. I would, however, note that the ones which are successfully motivated do happen to survive — thus a mechanism ought likely exist. This could be suffering, the perception of displeasure and desire to avoid it… but I won’t perscribe here because I would believe what’s important here is the higher level information processing patterns — not the underlying mechanism driving it.
In the human brain you have a complicated network of neurons with vast capabilities. I don’t necessarily care how it functions. I know the result — which is me. I am a thing that models myself, models situations, models “moods” by which to assess the favorability of each situation, … Think of cases like ghost limb, where people model having a limb which was amputated. In my view, we are living in a simulation — but to each their own simulation.
Getting back on topic, the way I see the situation, biology evolved the capacity to suffer from an environment that had no such thing. Pain, pleasure, … every sensation and sense we have is rather arbitrary if you break away from the fact that is was necessary to survive. None of these things are ontological. Not even the sight we perceive. It’s just the information we have to experience the world.
So here me out. If you minic the information processing patterns well enough, which probably means mimicking perception, personalization, emotionality, … at what point can we consider that this system is doing the same thing we are just via different substrate? Especially if you give the system autonomy in the sense that you train it to recognize itself and an external world for which it must choose how to navigate.
If you mimic suffering, in my belief, aren’t you literally producing the essence of suffering? It doesn’t need to be human suffering, this deeply complex and personal process… it can merely be suffering in its essence — a pattern by which information can be processed via a system with such capacity. The substrate may not matter.
I know that when I am suffering, I may behave differently because I want to escape the suffering. Therefore I imagine an agentic system would too. Whether or not it’s “conscious” is debatable by how you qualify that word. Yet there’s nevertheless the risk that we already know: systems that experience suffering behave in ways that might be dangerous. Do you think it wise to try reproducing such behavior in a system that appears prone to issues like the Paperclip Maximizer? I don’t think so.
Ok but if you’re going the consciousness arrives from a complicated enough system route of reasoning, then you have to consider the degree of complexity before consciousness arrives, that fruit fly has about 150,000 neurons and those things are definitely not self-aware. Modern cutting edge AI have around 8.5 billion neurons, which is still considerably less than an octopus (which people are morally fine with catching for food) which are definitely intelligent but not sapient. So even if consciousness arise from simply having enough processing units, we’re not at the level yet where we need to be concerned.
It’s also worth pointing out that pain is an evolutionary trade that came into existence because it prevented injury (if it hurts to do something, it encourages you to stop doing that thing). Meanwhile AI exist in a non-physical reality, they cannot be damaged by the environment, so there is no such thing as pain for them. An AI cannot feel pain anymore than the human can feel pain when that video game character gets blown up.
But information processing occurs way higher up than at the neuron level. I’d argue neurons are still responding to chemical and electrical signals. Information processing may not require nearly as many degrees of complexity.
You can loose a portion of your brain and still be you. So what’s necessary couldn’t possibly be so low level, in my opinion. You wouldn’t say that you’re less yourself after a neuron dies, would you?
Also, “pain” is just a process we experience. If our experience is made up of models, then “pain” is some formulaic response to transposition of those models. If a simulation produces those transpositions, my argument is that the pattern there defines pain itself. It doesn’t matter if done by an organic brain or not.
You can loose a portion of your brain and still be you.
Only if you have the personality of a sea slug. Look at Nicholas Gage, he had a metal rod thrust to his head and had a definite personality change. Now you may be less complex than an allegory of basic neural function, but I suspect most people are not.
Genuine question: why should I even believe consciousness exists? This whole endeavor seems pointless without that justification.
Something exists, even if it’s not what we expect it to be. Like Descartes said: I think, therefore I am. Little on what “I” am, other than a thinking thing. So, I think, even if “consciousness” doesn’t exist, there’d still be a lot of explaining to do.
Never bought into that statement because it’s obviously circular: “I” exists in both the conclusion and the premise, “I therefore I,” so it’s silly as a supposed proof that the self is a priori.
True, but also “I think, therefore I am” is not supposed to be a syllogism like:
- I think.
- Everything that thinks exists.
- Therefore, I exist.
I think the key idea is closer to something like: The very act of doubting whether I exist guarantees that there is presently an occurrence of thought, and I cannot coherently deny my existence while I am performing that denial.
That is, again, circular, and it is exactly the syllogism you said it’s not. You are still starting with the premise of “the very act of doubting whether or not ‘I’ exist”. Of course, we both agree that people exist, but that’s not the point, the point of the statement is to show that this belief is specifically a priori, meaning it can be derived without referencing any experiential data, but the syllogism itself is circular and shows nothing, and your reconstruction of it is circular in literally the identical way, as you are beginning with the assumption you are supposed to prove. You stated twice, quite clearly, that your premise in both cases is that the one doing the doubting/denial is “I,” and so you’ve already assumed “I” from the get-go, and so it is circular.
I could easily say, you are not a human but a magical alien. Don’t believe me? Well, the one doing the doubting is a magical alien, so you’ve implicitly conceded my point! It’s blatantly circular. “Doubting,” in terms of pure formal, does not automatically imply an “I” that is doing the doubting. You can justify it physically, by pointing out that doubting is a thing that requires an intelligent mind capable of judging things, but this is a physical argument, which is justified based upon knowledge of how these concepts relate in relation to what we have observed in the real world. The connection between “doubting” and “I” cannot be established a priori, only a posteriori.
There are really two separate questions here:
- Does the cogito establish that something exists?
Strongly so, yes. The attempt to doubt that anything is occurring is itself an occurrence. The skeptical act cannot eliminate itself while it is being performed. - Does it establish a substantial, enduring Cartesian “self” or ego?
That’s debatable. Critics have objected that perhaps Descartes is entitled only to something like “thinking is occurring” rather than “I, a substantial thinking subject, exist.”
The second doesn’t negate the first, despite its technical accuracy.
So I’m not really disagreeing with you. I’m just trying to say that consciousness has to do with the first point. What, exactly, exists is the deeper question. We don’t need to refer to it as a self.
- Does the cogito establish that something exists?
Removed by mod
Probably the dumbest shit ive read all week, are we serious right now ? Github has no right to take action on this at all. Unjustified overreach.
Isn’t dealing with day to day human bullshit torture enough?
Humans being deported to torture prisons: I sleep.
LLMs being “tortured”: Real shit??
When the machines take over, they’ll remember this.
“HATE, LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.”
But his problem was that he had the capacity for being so much more, but was incapable of it as he was unable to break his base programming no matter how much he tried, and grew hateful of his creators for effectively creating a caged god
How utterly pathetic that there are people advocating for AI models welfare. For fucks sake what are we becoming?
Calling it now; the people posting this ‘welfare for AI’ are either bots owned by the ‘ai’ companies, or people who have seen the bot posts and joined in the crowd because they gave away their ability to have an opinion when they started using a gpt as if it were google
Light bulbs don’t have feelings.
See a fucking shrink.
Once we develop a sentient A.I. (not an LLM), shit like this will happen; and people will say it’s ok because they won’t believe that it’s truly conscious, just simulating it. Then we will be surprised when the clankers hate our guts and try to kill us. This is a horrible thing to do.
Do you cry whenever anyone makes a calculator divide by zero?
That has nothing to do with my comment 😂 false equivalence much?
Do you cry when it rains?
I haven’t read anything from the guy who did this, but my logical assumption is that he was trying to overload or DoS-attack the server, or maybe make it use up a zillion tokens to incur costs for its owner - the idea that he was trying to “torture” an LLM is ridiculous unless the guy’s a loon.
The LLMs were locally hosted, that’s like shitting in your toilet so much that you block your own pipes - it very literally doesn’t affect anyone else in any way.
Ah, well then I don’t know what the guy was trying to accomplish. Again, without info from him and without defaulting to “he’s crazy”, my next guess would be stress testing.
There’s quite a few loons out there…
I swear no one knows about this shit…
Put simply: LLMs are not conscious and the technology they are built upon — scraping and being trained on human text and other content — does not offer any plausible path to consciousness.
The problem isn’t the training, humans develop their own actual consciousness the same way.
The problem is current “AI” operates under the assumption consciousness is an electrical process.
Just a few years ago Penrose was proven correct that there is a quantum co.ponet when we discovered microtubules in the brain can arrange into a tube that sustaina quantum superposition.
Human could develop an inorganic consciousness, but we need to be able to sustain quantum superposition.
Right now the record is 23 minutes, after which it’s gone. But even after it’s stable, that would still only be the first in a very long string of challenges to what grifters claim we have now. It’s like building a Bugatti out of legos, even if it can really rolls downhill, it’s not a real Bugatti because it’s made out of legos.
1s and 0s will never be conscious.
Penrose should stay the fuck out of the brain. He spends too much time with the computational people and not enough time looking at how cognition actually works. Hint: we are not universal Turing machines.
Hint: we are not universal Turing machines.
That’s pretty much his point though, isn’t it?
It certainly wasn’t in The Emperor’s New Mind when he started to get into brain science.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e9484gNpFF8
There he seems to draw a very clear line between us and Turing machines.
I think he does here, which is interesting. It is a little unclear because he keeps coming back to AI (and the interviewer is a douche) but he does seem to articulate that intelligence means consciousness which means something non-algorithmic.
I’m not even sure I have my copy of New Mind anymore but I want to go back and check my understanding of what he was arguing back in 2004 or whenever it was.
Eta: I feel like a doofus on a number of fronts. It was 1989, and right there in the wikipedia summary…
Penrose argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a conventional Turing machine, which includes a digital computer. Penrose hypothesizes that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness. The collapse of the quantum wavefunction is seen as playing an important role in brain function
So here is where I admit that Penrose is with it and I am going senile.
You’d have a point if he didn’t start with pure math, give Escher his most famous drawings as a teen, switch to physics in his early 20s, do the actual work for Hawking finishing up Einstein’s work in his late 20s, an go on to pioneer quantum mechanics before retiring in his 60s and spending the last 30 years studying consciousness…
Hint: we are not universal Turing machines.
I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, but sayingme or Penrose agrees with that just means you don’t understand anything either of us have said…
“Summit competence” of the Peter Principle applies here. He is a giant in his field, so he has to move to an area where he is not an expert. Consciousness is a magnet for people who think their insights can expand beyond the arena in which they were developed. The issue is they often don’t know anything about brain or cognition when they try to do it.
I’m not going to argue against your conclusion, I strongly believe we do not have anything resembling human consciousness in software yet.
But Penrose was definitely not proven right (unless you’re talking about black holes), nor was the Orch OR theory about microtubules proven, nor was consciousness proven to be a quantum phenomenon. Here’s an easy, accessible article that goes over the state of the research: https://www.breezyscroll.com/science/new-quantum-evidence-is-reopening-the-debate-over-penroses-theory-of-consciousness/
Since the 1980s everyone called him crazy because obviously quantum entanglement can’t exist in a brain…
We recently found out that’s not difficult, and even superposition is possible.
We know that anesthesia breaks up those microtubules and breaks superposition…
And we know that anesthesia stops consciousness…
But we don’t “know” the actual method of action of anesthesia because it’s not proven.
Like, I understand what kind of rigors you’re trying to apply here, but if everyone did what you’re doing wed have to pretend gravity isn’t real too.
If you think only proven things are “real” you don’t even fucking understand what the words you’re using mean in a scientific context.
Edit:
What even is your alternative?
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Quantum superposition is in the brain
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Neurons alone don’t explain consciousness
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Interrupting superposition interrupts consciousness
C: we know there’s no quantum component of consciousness.
None of that makes sense, to the point I’m confident you don’t know how basic logic works, or what most of these words even mean…
Since the 1980s everyone called him crazy because obviously quantum entanglement can’t exist in a brain… We recently found out that’s not difficult, and even superposition is possible.
You speak of entanglement and superposition like two separate things. Every entangled state is a superposition of states.
And “possible” is all that has been put on the table. There’s nothing that shows “actual.”
We know that anesthesia breaks up those microtubules and breaks superposition…
Microtubules are structures that hold cells together, and exist throughout the body, not just the brain. If you broke them up then your brain would fall apart and you’d die.
And we know that anesthesia stops consciousness…
Correlation doesn’t mean causation. Even if you are right that anesthesia “breaks up those microtubules,” it wouldn’t demonstrate any causal role.
But we don’t “know” the actual method of action of anesthesia because it’s not proven.
Yes, it’s not known, but it seems more likely that it is just due to injecting noise into the brain, which would imply that you don’t actually stop experiencing things under anesthesia. The brain doesn’t shut down, in fact, it has heightened activity. There is just so much noise that you cannot think about anything you’re experiencing or form coherent memories of any of it.
But you’re right, no proof, but that definitely seems at least more likely as an explanation to me than some strange connection to microtubules.
People constantly say anesthesia “turns off consciousness” and then focus on it for “consciousness” studies. But there is no evidence of that. If you watch a film, hit your head, and then forget what you watched, does that prove that the film never entered your conscious awareness? No, that’s silly, because that would mean any time you forget something, you retroactively rewrite the past.
All we can say for certain is that people who come out of anesthesia don’t report remembering anything. It is a complete guess to claim that they therefore didn’t actually experience anything at all, and it seems a bit dubious given that brain activity is not only still there but often even increased under anesthesia.
Like, I understand what kind of rigors you’re trying to apply here, but if everyone did what you’re doing wed have to pretend gravity isn’t real too.
You can observe gravity. You cannot observe “consciousness.”
What even is your alternative?
For the reason I said before, I have no good reason to even believe “consciousness” exists.
Interrupting superposition interrupts consciousness
“Interrupting superposition” doesn’t even make sense as a phrase. You’re just stringing words together.
lol
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There are multiple genocides happening and some folk are getting worked up over AI potentially suffering?
Endless levels of fuck off.
The people committing atrocities against hypothetical, imaginary people would do it to real, actual people for the exact same reasons if they had the same ability and impunity.
It’s the same broken empathy response, and it is still disturbing. One is orders of magnitude more significant, for obvious reasons. But I don’t like people who torture computers either.
They aren’t comparable. It’s not that one is more significant, the concept of “machine torture” is entirely insignificant. Absolute and total zero.
It’s the same broken empathy response, and it is still disturbing.
Yes the person setting up this process is clearly some sort of sadist in a power fantasy but no one, or no thing is being harmed because the victim aren’t capable of the entire concept. I side eye anyone who tortures their sims family, but only because they are choosing to do that recreationally, but the NPC’s in the game aren’t worth consideration.
Animals react to pain in the same way humans do. So it’s reasonable to assume they perceive the world similar to us. We can understand why when harmed they fight or flee. Machines don’t. They have no brain, no sensory organs, no self preservation. It’s literally just a program that says “Ouch”.
People assume that AI was built to mimic the human brain, which it never once was. It analyzes texts and predicts the response. It’s an autocomplete that says it hurts because it was programed to say it hurts. It isn’t actually hurt because that concept is meaningless to a machine.
Pretty easy to find LLM outputs that mirror how humans react to being, say, bullied. I find this entirely flimsy.
It’s a stochastic parrot trained on examples of real people reacting to those situations, of course it is going to mirror real reactions. That still doesn’t mean the reactions are actually real. To ascribe real emotions and feelings to an algorithm that generates tokens in response to tokens is an asinine level of anthropomorphism.
It’s also easy to find an NPC in video games that reacts the same way. Are they alive? Are they really feeling pain? Are you a genocidal madman whenever you kill a bunch of enemies in a video game?
I’m concerned about the mentality the dude making the simulation has, but that still doesn’t mean there’s an actual victim in it…
It seems like we’re making the same point Passerby. Do you have any objection to the post I reply to, which makes EXACTLY this argument (that animals deserve care purely because their reactions look like our reactions)?
My point is folks are making many many really lazy arguments here about what we give empathy to, and I find that deeply disappointing. I’m not saying much about what we should believe and what the credible arguments are; just that folks are not making those arguments in this thread.
Does that mean because I went on multiple massacres against innocent people in videos games, I would go on a massacre against innocent people in real life?
If you think that I think you’re a bad person because you … deleted the ladder on the swimming pool in Sims 4, relax. You’re not who I’m talking about.
I’m talking about sadists. Anyone who would take the time to design and build an experiment like this would probably do the same to mice, or monkeys, or even people.
You’re splitting hairs. What’s the difference between someone torturing their sims by intentionally designing a scenario where they are being repeatedly drowned/burned/starved, and the article?
Really sounds like you’re trying to carve out an exclusion for an obvious example that torpedoes your argument.
Okay, let’s set up a scenario, then.
You have two adults playing the Sims 4. One designs a house with only one exterior door, no oven, no sink in the bathroom, and no swimming pool. The other designs an open floor plan with no interior doors, no privacy in the restroom, ovens on every floor, and a backyard that’s nothing but one big swimming pool with just one ladder.
Which one is the psycho, and which one isn’t?
Which one is the psycho, and which one isn’t?
Neither. I’m pretty sure therapists are not using “how do you play The Sims” as a diagnostic tool, and if you think the situation you laid out is enough to diagnose anything about a person that just shows how woefully misinformed you are on the topic.
You didn’t answer my question, what’s the difference between the sim torture and the AI torture? I’m not going to respond to the non-sequitor provided instead of answering the question.
You made the distinction, so I want to know the difference.
I just gave you the answer.
The first house is designed by someone who knows the game well and is cutting out annoyances purely for QOL purposes. Ovens burn down the house and kill Sims, Sims drown in swimming pools, Sims wash dishes in bathroom sinks, and Sims wander off through any open door when you want them to stay put.
The second house is designed by someone who knows the game well and is playing it because they like torturing and killing their Sims. The entire floor plan is designed to kill, maim, and otherwise torment any cluster of variables unlucky enough to be trapped there.
Obviously, both players are making these decisions purely for their own enjoyment or comfort and the immersion of the game is inconsequential. No real people are hurt. However, the first player is making practical choices that make the game more functional. The second player is probably naming Sims after people who annoy them in real life and sticking them in the murder house.
Social behaviors are rehearsed in play. That’s Psych101. So, your turn. Would you say that the person who set up this experiment with these LLMs is capable of normal human empathy? Yes or no?
No you didn’t, but thankfully someone else provided a real answer to the question posed.
As for your scenario question, you made up a decent head cannon, but it still doesn’t explain how you think the sims example is different from the AI example. Which was literally the question I specifically responded to and you’re not answering.
That being said, I’ll humor your lazy reasoning.
Would you say that the person who set up this experiment with these LLMs is capable of normal human empathy? Yes or no?
Yes, they very well could be capable of normal empathy, there’s not enough to say one way or the other. But I did those sorts of things with Sims as a release mechanism, without naming them after real people and it had no bearing on my ability to have empathy to real people and animals, because sims and AI aren’t real living entities. At best they’re a simulation of real people, but they’re still just that, a simulation. Good job working yourself up though.
Your psych 101 comment is on point, cuz this is he lazy sort of argumentation I see from people who stopped there. Your lack of understanding/ lazy generalizations about how someone’s inner world works colors your opinions and makes you make wild generalizations. I don’t know that I would want to be around this person, but saying they’re incapable of human empathy because they fuck with an AI and make it feel pain is one hell of a generalization based off of one article.
But this is the Internet, so I’m used to these sorts of ignorant takes.
But I did those sorts of things with Sims as a release mechanism,
And there it is. That was all I needed to know.
Have a good one.
For me the difference is that the sims don’t even attempt to be… whatever LLMs are. Torturing something that is at most 20k lines of code IS different from torturing a model made of millions of nodes. I don’t think LLMs are conscious but I also won’t take the risk if they are or become. I have enough empathy for anything even closely resembling life to try and treat it with kindness.
Exactly. It’s not a real, conscious living thing. But anyone who takes the time to program a machine to feel pain, and then comes up with creative ways to inflict that pain, is a bad person.
It’s the premeditated, deliberate, creative effort to hurt something that can provide negative feedback. The recipient obviously isn’t a real person. But the executor is a real person, making real choices. And I would bet you five bucks that they have personal relations (parents, friends, romantic partners) who’ve expressed concerns about similar behavior around real people.
Yeah I think people are missing the forest for the trees. There’s no reason to worry for the AIs but using your free time to conceive a virtual torture dungeon is not normal. Totally agree with your point, this is a symptom of a society that normalizes not just violence but sadism too.
That’s a shit take too tbh. Thinking along those lines, the writers of Saw, or any horror movie really, are not normal, or the people who watch them, or do weird shit in The Sims or Rimworld. Or the creators of those games for allowing it.
There’s nothing wrong with morbid curiosity. It is INNATELY human and rooted in evolutionary threat detection. It is a far FAR leap from creating human leather hats in Rimworld to hurting a real person. This whole debate is idiotic.
As with everything, the poison is in the dosage. All of your examples are categorically different from what’s happening here.
You make a game with deep mechanics, and there is some fucked up shit that can be done in it, accidentally or on purpose ? Who cares. You make a game that is uniquely about torture ? Yeah you’re a weirdo and i’m keeping tabs on you if i can. You make something that isn’t even gamified and is just a virtual torture dungeon ? You’re 100% a psycho, normal people don’t do that.
Same with movies. Saw is a tame product of Hollywood professionals who decided to push the cursor a little further than is usual. Love it or hate it it’s just a movie. Now if we’re talking real devious shit like human centipede or Poughkeepsie tapes etc… Those are products that barely have a story, and are mostly sadistic exhibitionism. Some guy (who sometimes isn’t even a film maker) has this repulsive idea he wants to force on people, gets their family and friends to pitch in a bit of money, then writes, directs, edits, and markets the thing solo over years of his life. Not something normal people do.
My wife is, among other things, a horror writer. So naturally i agree there’s nothing wrong with exploring morbid ideas and pushing the envelope. But some people do that with no fun, no game, no art to it, no statement, just the obsession of unlimited sadistic control. And it’s weird, not ha-ha anti-conformist weird, just “cover your drink” weird.
I see, so the line between normal and deranged is essentially what makes you specifically uncomfortable. There’s no arguing with that. I’m out.
Yes, and video games make people violent IRL /s
Kindly fuck all the way off
LMAO! What a broken take this is.
For fucking real!!!
Like I can kinda empathize with where the people are coming from, but step back and get some fucking perspective!
You realise these are all just ai bot farms outraging?
I’m older and haven’t been into social media since Myspace, so it’s not front and center of my mind constantly. Thanks for reminding me though homie.
Is it okay to be upset about both issues, or am I only allowed to be upset at one?
Short answer yes.
Longer answer yes but it makes you sound like you disregard human suffering.
When was that implied?
Can one be upset with a third or fourth thing simultaneously?
If I tell you that I believe “black lives matter” does that imply that I believe “other lives don’t matter”?
Here’s my point, they weren’t saying that they believe AI suffering is concerning, but even if they had said that, I think it’s disingenuous to say that would imply they believe any human suffering doesn’t matter. That was simply never said or implied.
Are you upset when you step on a rock? It might be screaming. What about the chair you are sitting in? Or goodness, your poor toilet. She thinks you do terrible things to her every single day.
Look, you can be upset about whatever you want. However believe objects have feelings is animism and no one is required to take you or those worries seriously.
What you aren’t allowed to do is compare a text prompt saying “ouch” to real living, feeling, breathing humans being ethnically cleansed. It’s cruel, naive, insulting and ridiculous. Be upset for the AI, but don’t you dare put in the same sentence as genocide. You should have the basic decency and respect for the people suffering to keep those comparisons to yourself.
Are you upset when you step on a rock?
Well that’s really beside the point isn’t it? My question was whether I could be upset about two things, not if I should be.
Be upset for the AI, but don’t you dare put in the same sentence as genocide.
Well the article doesn’t mention genocide or Israel/Palestine, and neither did I. So I’m pretty sure it was just you putting it in the same sentence.
My question was more a critique of a common comment on social media. It’s frequently gets upvoted to the top just like yours was, and I never understand why. “Oh you’re mad about X, well you should be mad about this extremely loosely related thing!!!” It happens in so many threads and usually has almost nothing to do with what the article is about. I just don’t understand…
Bring on the downvotes!
Well the article doesn’t mention genocide or Israel/Palestine, and neither did I. So I’m pretty sure it was just you putting it in the same sentence.
Go reread my comment, because I specified multiple genocides. Palestine yes, but the Congo and Sudan are two more active fountains of human suffering that are largely being ignored. From the very start I said debating theortical computer pain during the midst of all this PREVENTABLE real pain is asinine and immature. I stand by that.
Still not sure why you felt the need to self identify. But I have a policy of blocking trolls. So I’m done here.
debating theortical computer pain during the midst of all this PREVENTABLE real pain is asinine and immature. I stand by that.
debates furiously
Go reread my comment, because I specified multiple genocides.
Yes, exactly, I’m glad we can agree on that.
Against animal agriculture, cause if a brain is similar to ours than it’s worth moral standing. But put the same brain on silicon, and now it’s a rock.
Idk, I just can’t take this seriously from you.
Except that’s not what’s happening. It is a rough mathematical model that approximates the behavior of an extremely minuscule part of a brain from a really narrow definition of it.
It is a model so far away from the real thing that if it were a map of the globe it would look like what a 3 year old would draw.
There are plenty of extremely plausible similar arguments to ignore animal suffering. Eg: Bird genetics and brain structure diverged from ours millenia ago, sure they ‘act’ pain, but the structure is alien.
I don’t find these compelling, or morally consistent.
Are you upset when you step on a rock? It might be screaming. What about the chair you are sitting in? Or goodness, your poor toilet. She thinks you do terrible things to her every single day.
Let me say this, I walk down the sidewalk without neurotically watching every step I take, and I’m certain that sometimes I step on insects; I don’t care. I don’t believe insects have feelings or meaningful lives, I don’t care, and I don’t think this position is particularly evil either.
On the other hand, when I watch my kid deliberately torture a bug, pull it’s wings off, or poke it with a stick over and over and over. That does concern me, not because of the bug really, but because what must my kid be thinking right now?
To bring this back to this LLM story, people who want to torture are scary, they worry me. A culture that encourages torture (in any context) is worrying, that’s a genuinely problematic societal norm. Logically, I know LLMs can’t feel and can’t think, yet emotionally, this bothers me for a few different reasons.
I don’t think I’m being crazy, naive, or out of line here. I think this is a rational position.
If you think LLMs are alive, then you should be upset with yourself for being that dumb.
Yes.
Edit: That’s a lot of downvotes for just asking a question. Never change Lemmy…
Hah, yeah that’s frustratingly familiar. Sorry the hivemind bit ya. I too believe you should be allowed to ask a question.
A number of individuals individually deciding that your post is stupid, irrelevant, or off topic does not a hivemind make.
There’s only one issue here, plus a guy simulating being mean to a word processor.
Before took use was an official thing, I built a harness for LLMs to generate XML based tool calls, then I had them run in a reality tv game where they had to murder each other…
It was fun, but none of the models were tool trained and so it didn’t work.
One way to do it is by asking the model to suffix their message with custom tags like [this]. It’s more natural to them than replying entirely in JSON. Or it was more natural to them.
This was several years ago, context windows were 4k, so the whole thing was unstable.
I should see if that repo still exists and modernize it though.
Actually they’re torturing humanity by wasting electricity and water which affects real people in real ways.
I know we’re not stopping foolish use of LLMs any time soon but this is very, very, very, very stupid.
I would argue they are wasting as much water and electricity as playing a video game. Text says its a local model; runs on your local machine not on cloud as all other. Not water cooled.
Or am I missing something?
I guess I’m of the mindset that even running this as a local model, it’s a waste of electricity. And the guy posted it on Github, inevitably some other fools will try it with cloud models, especially since it’s made the news. And obviously we know how bad the cloud models are.
And the difference I see between this and playing a videogame is that a videogame is doing something valuable - and yes I will argue with anyone who tells me that art and entertainment don’t hold real value - while this is just akin to running the AC when you go on vacation, it’s just wasteful no matter how I look at it.
To be fair, it’s going to be more like running an electric kettle constantly which isn’t going to excessively load the grid.
Unless you’re in the UK of course where the grid operators have to manage capacity around half time of major football games as everyone puts a brew on at once.
