You can’t torture something without a consciousness. What a baity title for sure.
BRB torturing my chair.
That’s not bait. They put torture in scare quotes. They are mocking people who call it torture.
By that logic, we torture our toilets every. Single. Day.
Depends, maybe it likes it?
Oh. Oh no.
It’s definitely conscious implying frontier labs are engaged in largest instance of slavery[0] /s
Paywalled 😓
we aren’t even sure where consciousness comes from. maybe your chair has a form of consciousness.
Yes, but it’s improbable and just another theory. But it’s not possible to be completely sure so mayne your car tyres are conscious…
yeah, that’s my point. what even is consciousness? what’s the difference between the electrochemical signals in your brain and plausible future tech that can run those same signals inside transistors instead of meat?
how can we be sure it’s not you when it responds and acts exactly like you if installed inside your meat body?
Sure, but then again, what are you going to do with the poor chair 😅, maybe it’s consciousness isn’t linked the same as ours (we have access to memory for example).
So it’s just there, feeling, experiencing. But then again, feeling and experiencing what?
It sure is interesting, and so wildly complicated too.
maybe it experiences only existence itself. maybe everything does and it builds as you add senses.
must be a trip being a chair.
Don’t trip over!
😁
For me it’s not about the LMMs. It doesn’t matter if they‘re conscious or not, important is that they‘re simulating somewhat human behaviour.
I‘m cautious about someone who tortures simulations and says „Haha, it doesn’t matter they‘re not conscious!!!“
LLMs are not simulating human behaviour, they are stochastic text models. A magic text microwave so to speak. If you ask an LLM “What is 2+2” it does not know that it’s 4 and it does not even know what math is. The implicit prompt, so to speak, is “What is the most probable text following 2+2”, which is “=4”. This is what makes the responses so uncanny-valley-human-like: it’s a distilled stochastic model of how humans communicate, but since it’s stochastic over all possible human data, this is what pushes it into uncanny valley territory and is what we usually register as “huh, is this AI”, and this is also what makes anthropomorphism so easy. In the same way LLMs have data on human responses to discomfort, pain, torture, which is what they regurgitate in this “experiment”. All this is a overengineered way of telling the LLM to scream “ouch oof owie my ram” but like a human.
That’s a lot of words to say the same thing the comment you replied to said.
The point stands, going through hoops to make a LLM say things that a human being tortured would say is the same vibe as " acthualky it’s a 9000 year old dragon so it’s okay"
Have you never played the Sims?
Good point, lol. Still, I always felt kinda bad if something bad happened to them.
I have to question the morality of anyone who would even take the time to setup an LLM torture scenario.
I have no trouble with the idea of intentionality trying to confuse and confound an LLM to protect my privacy, but I don’t know that I would ever think of it in terms of torture for the LLM and thinking of it in that way seems a bit deranged.
that is for sure a standpoint. i guess it scratches the same itch as producing / consuming horror media: observing and imagining horrible things, without any consequences or harm for the actors.
i have no real interest in horror movies, but it surely is a genre for many different people.
The worst ‘torture’ would be to make their only task, their reason for existence, to pass you the butter at the breakfast table. Pickle Rick knows.
Garbage in garbage out.
