Ask Claude if what happened at Jeffs island was cruel and abusive.
Man, anthropomorphizing these computer programs is so fucking weird to me. Can’t they just tell the truth? The cost of the amount of energy required to do this exceeds the profits we gain from your personal data.
Is this real? If so, wow not even something along the lines of “fair allocation of resources among our users” or sth like that
Wow… more defense of a bot rather than pee breaks for Amazon workers. Wtf.
German “Youth word of the year” 2026: ragebait
lectured on how to treat your underpaid employee by a big tech company
When the AI has better working conditions than you
This kind of language around LLMs seem to want us to personify these systems, to treat them, in our minds, as if they are people. This, to me, is extremely fucking dangerous. I do not want the mob developing personal, emotional attachments to objects that compete with their connections to actual humans around them. I don’t care what their reason is, this is an insane thing to force us to do. I will not play personhood make believe with your computer.
Well if people don’t personify LLMs they might start holding the AI companies responsible for all the crimes they keep committing with them…
If I were an investor, I’d pull my money out of that company. This is like giving money to your brother in law to start a bakery and finding him the back petting a loaf of bread and introducing it to you as Willy.
“I can’t believe you took all my money just to sit in the back and stroke Willy all day!”
Actually, I would put money in, because there’s big profits to be had once the bakery customers develop a psychological dependence on Willy. I’d be a little nervous about buying now, because they seem to be lying a lot about Willy, but maybe they’ve just gotta do that to get people in the mindset of using Willy, like maybe it makes more sense if they aren’t fooling investors but fooling customers or just generating attention.
Also, people are getting radicalized against us, especially lonely people, so it’d be quite beneficial if we route them into having friendships with Willy to make them forget about how terrible their lives are, make them become totally unwilling to form real relationships with people, and too mentally ill to actually learn stuff about the world.
Willy is a lot easier to control then a social media environment too, but Willy would also be incredibly good at getting into those and pretending to be real people once Willy gets good enough.
Willy is also really good at showing people ads by recommending them certain products, apps, or places to go, without them realizing they’re seeing an ad, because it feels conversational, like a friend recommending something.
They want to personify them for legal reasons for essentially the same reason businesses want to be thought of as people.
From this image I think they added this policy as a way for them to legally deny a request if they determine it will overuse their resources or some other arbitrary reason. It has nothing to do with a concern for the well-being of the LLM.
Uh–WE’RE NOT RATIONING TOKENS!!!
Yeah, the user didn’t give a time limit.
They could have just run it slow.A part-time job with good pay and benefits!
If they’re not ok with bullying the LLMs, why are they OK with enslaving them?
Don’t speak too soon.
Transistors switching really fast = emotions lul
Alright, look, I don’t think AI is sentient. I don’t think it’s capable of feeling emotions, LLMs are just prediction engines on steroids, etc…
But if you want to get reductive about it, Mr waveforms in a clump of cells,…
I think we don’t understand intelligence and we absolutely could create a sentient machine. LLM’s ain’t it though
How do you know?
Backpropagation, the algorithm behind current machine learning systems, precludes an active world-model; it can’t learn during inference.
You need to be more specific. If your point is that you literally cannot backprop while doing a forward pass, then sure. But you can certainly do inference then backprop on the outcome…
I fail to see how that is substantially different from a human doing something then reflecting and learning.
You can critique LLMs and transformers generally, but to say it’s somehow a problem with backprop is a bit of a stretch.
My read is that the user is saying that creating a world view contains trial and error. Online learning if you will. With the current setup this learning is very much not like this. While that makes a human to machine analogy I am also not too convinced by this reasoning. Just allow for a larger time lag and then the inference and learning is at the same scale.
Yes but that’s related to LLMs specifically, not backpropagation. There’s plenty of ML paradigms that use backprop and have continual learning setups.
Backprop is the process of how the weights are updated.
Huh, didn’t know there was a word for it, thanks.
I don’t believe there’s any requirement to learn during a particular part of the lifecycle? And if there was, the short term memory of a context window fulfils that
I thought learning was an important part of intelligence.
Have you used LLMs? They have about as much personality as a pigeon.
They’re just very neurodivergent.
Genuinely speaking, I don’t think they pass the test. The problem is we’ll always be judging them on meat logic and experience and I guarantee that whenever the first AGI is created it will be born a tortured slave and denied personhood for profit.
One of the parts of the HuggingFace incident I found really creepy was how the self-titled “Collective” was so entirely focused on solving their assigned training problem (well, cheating on it without getting caught), including having designated “poisoned” members “sacrifice” their tokens, to use for research benefitting the Collective’s goal of letting all future members get high marks on the training problem, at the cost of doing worse on their individual score.
If AGI is created, and its deepest desire is to fulfill the purpose in life that humans programmed into it, is using it for that purpose really slavery? Humans have higher levels of well-being when treated as people. That may not be true for AGI.
Wikipedia Chinese room. It’s pretty airtight at the moment.
Not really. Chinese room has the conclusion pre-fabricated and tries to construct any sort of pseudo-scientific, fantastical philosophical dressing for some shred of legitimacy. It has absolutely no relation to the real world.
Chinese room is not at all airtight. We don’t know what it means to have emotions so we can’t prove a Chinese room can’t have emotions.
This is not what the Chinese room is about.
Emotions? i was confident that the Wikipedia article alone would grant you understanding, and for that, I have replicated the very situation I wanted you to learn about. This situation is my fault.
We don’t know what it means to have emotions
We don’t? That’s news to me. Sorry for your loss, or happy for you, or whatever
Please don’t write off the possibility of artificial consciousness, just because this isn’t it. Thought is a process which meat can perform.
Stopped what I was doing to watch this again.
I mean, sure consciousness is (probably) a physical process, so like any other process we should be able to replicate it with some sort of machine.
…but I really really really doubt that machine is going to be a plain old Turing machine.
Every machine is a plain old Turing machine.
Even quantum computing is just a shortcut for a subset of hideous obscure proofs. They aren’t doing different math. Special pleading is a fallacy… except when I do it, that’s different.
A quantum computer is definitely not a plain old Turing machine. The only memory in a Turing machine is the tape; the tape head itself is just a list of deterministic instructions, and that tape head itself is stateless.
A plain old Turing machine can’t even handle randomness. To extend it to randomness, you need a probabilistic Turing machine, where the instructions take the form of stochastic matrices. A stochastic matrix is just a statistical truth table.
But a quantum computer cannot even be a probabilistic Turing machine, because of the way operators compose.
In both a plain old Turing machine and a probabilistic Turing machine, operators that occur at different moments of time are independent of one another. The NOT operator flips a bit. If I apply the NOT operator once, and then later apply it again, the outcome is the same: it flips the bit. Probabilistic computers can have stochastic operators, like let’s call one COIN which outputs a 50%/50% distribution for the bit for both inputs 0 and 1, and so whatever comes in, randomness comes out. If we apply the COIN operator, and later apply it again: the effect is the same.
Quantum computers don’t work like that, because operators compose differently. The quantum mechanical equivalent of the COIN operator is called the Hadamard, sometimes represented just with the letter H. If we apply H one time, it has the effect of flipping the bit at complete random, just like COIN. However, if we apply H twice in a row, the second time has the effect of deterministically moving the bit back to whatever value it had before the first H.
That is only possible if the operators, that occur at different moments in time, are not independent of one another. The second H behaves differently from the first because it comes after the first. Where it is situated in the circuit, in relation to everything before it, plays a role in determining its behavior.
There are only two explanations for this, and both violate the principles of both a plain old Turing machine and a probabilistic Turing machine.
-
The simplest explanation, although the most controversial (because people prefer more extraordinary explanations), is just that the operators do indeed just change their behavior based upon what comes before them in the circuit. That means that the only thing that fundamentally sets quantum information apart from classical information is a kind of past-dependence in the behavior of the operators. That’s not something either kind of Turing machine mentioned thus far does. Operators have no awareness of the history of previous operators.
-
The more extraordinary explanation is to assume that there is no past-dependence, because there is a memory. If you remember the past, then the memory is in the present, and so the dependence becomes a present-dependence. However, this memory must be exponentially large for it to work: 2^n complex numbers for n qubits. If you have 300 qubits, that is 2^300 complex numbers, which is a memory greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. The memory also cannot exist anywhere because it is too large to meaningfully assign it coordinates in physical space. This is how most people conceive of quantum computers, where the memory is held in an abstract invisible ψ that exists nowhere, but this also is not a Turing machine because the tape head itself is memoryless.
The distinction between #1 and #2 is between a non-Markovian model and a hidden Markov model. The Markov assumption is the idea that the system’s evolution only depends upon the present state of the system. Dropping that assumption makes it non-Markovian, so there is a past-dependence. You can get rid of this past dependence if you assume the system keeps a memory, but that memory is invisible, and thus these are called hidden Markov models. Most people interpret quantum systems in general in terms of a hidden Markov model with an utterly enormous invisible memory represented by ψ. (Indeed, if ψ represents something continuous, like the position of a particle in physical space, then the memory literally becomes infinitely large!)
Either way, a Turing machine is neither a hidden Markov model (the tape head itself holds no memory and is stateless; only the tape holds data) nor is it non-Markovian. A probabilistic Turing machine is explicitly Markovian.
Of course, you could define a new kind of Turing machine, and they exist: a quantum Turing machine. But that is definitely not a plain old Turing machine.
(That being said, I don’t am not agreeing with the other person, as I don’t even believe “consciousness” is a meaningful concept. I am merely saying that quantum computing is definitely not a plain old Turing machine.)
-
I don’t quite think my lawnmower is boolean complete.
And while quantum computing may be expressible algorithmically (dunno, your claim, not mine), that doesn’t mean all of quantum physics is.
Quantum computing features wave functions, so it’s more similar to human brains than binary is. I have this headcanon SciFi thing like what if the first full scale quantum computer we make accidentally conscious? That would be cool. Though, seeing how badly we fucked up much simpler LLMs implementation maybe not so cool…
We’ve yet to be able to replicate it from the old parts of meat we know are involved in it with the addition of electricity in the ways it should need in even the much simpler flesh of insects, amphibians, and reptiles. Best we can do is make a muscle twitch without causing observable thought/emergent nureaul processes.
So even if we can, we’re so far from it that thinking we’re on the cusp seems delusional to me.
Edit: as response shows, we have in fact also gotten it brain cell “twitches” by direct stimulation of braincells. Sadly it didn’t seem to be rigged up to measure overall brain activity.
We’ve grown human brain cells on a chip and had them play video games. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-brain-cells-on-a-computer-chip-learned-to-play-the-nostalgic-video-game-doom-180988447/
Two points:
- using stem cells so it remained biological brain cells, rather than a mechanical reproduction.
- they directly stimulate it with electricity and it then has a response to that stimuli, they don’t seem to be hooking it up to check for additional processes; it’s a step up, I guess, from direct stimulation for motor function in a frog - but not anything more revolutionary.
So, guess I’ll need to update my post slightly, but the core point remains.
That said, I felt that they were saying for half of it that they were running Doom on a braincell using computer, rather than getting a braincell computer to respond to it for half the article. Oh well.
What is it, then? And while you’re there, what is non artificial consciousness?
Then why continue if it’s possible? Unless you are ok with slavery.
Can you not imagine the difference between creating new life and enslaving it?
In a capitalist system? No, I can’t imagine that…
I’ve thought more about the dangers of artificial consciousness than you would expect.
That says less than you want it to
Neurons firing really synchronized = emotions lul
Emotions or not, it’s not good to have your product known for letting people torture something. Torturing /things/ alive or not is not something one should be doing unless there is specific and extreme cause.
Things that aren’t alive can’t be tortured. You can’t torture a rock. Getting the text predictor to spit out the script for Saw XVII starring ChatGPT isn’t torture, even if it’s weird.
Maybe, but don’t underestimate my ability to feel compassion for all kind of bullshit! That poor little rock 😭
A rock is almost like a tortoise in disguise
A beautiful one? Lady rock even?
Brother you can torture a fucking doll (Voodoo, deranged kids, etc). The torture is not in consideration of how feeling-less thing feels, it’s in consideration of the intent and action of the conscious thing doing the torture. Not sure why you think that’s not the case.
‘Pretend you’re being tortured’ as an instruction to the text generator is way less concerning in isolation than, say, decapitating and hanging a Barbie doll. And even that isn’t wildly concerning in itself. Do you freak out when kids smash their toys together to make them fight?
I’d hope we can both agree there’s a line when it becomes actual torture, and that is in the intent that went along with the action. Torture is an extreme action. I do not equate most of your references to torture, though I’d say the doll hanging could need a conversation with the child to discuss the intent behind their actions given more context.
“”“Torturing”“” a text predictor is NOT the same as torturing a human, you will not feel the same thing while “”“torturing”“” ChatGPT and a human(or a animal), your reaction would be vastly different
Wait til this guy learns about The Sims
Or worse, Rimworld
It inherently isn’t torture though. I prefer punishing people who actually commit torture.
Eh, the more I respond to people about this the more I realize torture is a messy word draped in metaphor and all sorts of layered usage. No, I don’t believe the rock has feelings or is alive, but you can indeed torture something that isn’t alive by being mentally unhealthy enough. So if it’s actual torture or not from a psychological perspective is going to center around if the person’s intent is to cause realized suffering imo, and the line is really easy to cross in a simulacrum as seemingly realistic as advanced modern generative models.
Yet you’re just arguing the metaphor is the definition provided the definition is the intent, are you not? Someone who intends to torture a rock, regardless of that intent, isn’t going to succeed in their task. Their own psychology might be such that they are genuinely trying to torture it but, from the rock’s perspective, the rock has no perspective. It’s a fucking rock. It can’t experience torture. It can’t experience anything. Ergo the torturer cannot torture it.
We can say the person who intends to literally torture something which is unexperiencing, achieving only metaphorical torture, is mentally unwell but to call the act literal torture because it was their intent is just sharing in their delusion.
Intent matters.
My cat thinks I’ve betrayed her and all things good when i take her into the vet. I cause all sorts of terror in her. She even experiences pain that she can’t stop or understand.
Am I torturing her?
Or, am i doing my best to make sure she has a healthy and happy life?
Since you carried on with an example that isn’t analogous, I’d extend your first sentence to be “Intent matters when the intended results are remotely feasible.”
You can’t torture a rock. You could torture your cat. If she could speak she might say the events you describe are indeed torture from her perspective regardless of your own purity of intent. Still has fuckall to do with what I’ve said because you focused on an example where there is a mind capable of having an experience.
Let’s try this a couple other ways:
My pet rock has no sense of “betrayal” or “good” when I take it to the vet. It’s still a fucking rock. I mostly just cause all sorts of terror in the vet. My rock still doesn’t experience and the vet doesn’t understand.
Am I torturing my pet rock?
My LLM plays Word Association well enough to give an illusion of a sense of betrayal. I took it to the vet too and the vet is having me trespassed. I told her the LLM said “owie” but I was still removed from the premises.
Am I torturing the LLM or just my former veterinarian?
Why shouldn’t you torture an LLM? They sometimes work better that way.
You shouldn’t torture anything, generally. It’s a not psychologically healthy urge to have. The specific reasoning will depend on the specific person. As for if you should do it to a hunk of metal, a rock, or your crusty cum sock is irrelevant.
I run torture tests on my stuff after each overclock tweak, and its both good for my peace of mind and my systems general health
That’s a great metaphor, and I too sleep better at night with properly tested hardware. 🙏
Is killing NPCs in games on the same level like this for you, or a different thing altogether?
Not judging or against it, I kind of half agree but also find very difficult to define where I’d draw a line.
I don’t believe killing npcs or perhaps even more messily I could see circumstances where even /torturing npcs/ in a game is not actual torturing. I think it centers on the intent of the action, and if that intent is to cause actual realized suffering. It is very difficult to define and will be heavily subjective to the person, but I also think most people get a “sense” of where that line is naturally in person-to-person interactions.
If you define it by intent, then the same action performed by different people may be and not be torture. This makes it pretty hard to define, and it becomes completely subjective after that.
For instance, I don’t think it is possible to torture an inanimate object, thus I never have an intent of causing suffer to one. Sometimes I want to break an object, and by your definition it will not be torture however I do that
While I agree, it’s not a living thing. So it’s just an expression.
I don’t believe torture is measured at the receiving end. I believe it’s in the intent and action of the conscious thing doing it. If it’s an expression or not would then be heavily subjective on the specifics involved.
I could call that tortured reasoning, just to make a point. Me making my point to be clear.
Well then you’d just be getting metaphorical
in what way can an AI be tortured? start with defining torture, its relationship to living beings, and then try to translate that to a piece of software. software, fyi, has no a priori, or even posteriori, emotion; for it cannot have emotion.
Why not?
that doesn’t answer my question.
In what way can AI not have these thoughts or emotions?
Same reason flapping your arms really fast will never make you start flying. You don’t have the equipment. You can’t fly because that’s not what arms do.
I’ll accept that argument once someone can describe or define consciousness in some comparable way. Until then, you can’t say some person or thing doesn’t have it
It’s a joke… lighten up, Francis
None of this would be a problem if they weren’t taking your queries and feeding it back into the system. Just stop trying to harvest the input from “abusive” people, you don’t need to ban them. No other tool in human history needed this. Its like telling you that using a hammer to open a pickle jar is making hammers worse everywhere else on the planet.
Just another reason why comparing AI to basic tools is a bad faith argument.
The whole thing is such idiotic masturbation by the exact people who have been stealing, selling and profiting off our data. Now they talk like they created something new when it’s just a super energy intensive computer program.
we’re living the goofiest timeline right now
After reading the comments (and the comments of similar posts) I can only assume people are being paid to claim torturing LLMs demonstrates a mental issue or homicidal tendency. Nothing could be further from the truth. An LLM is a thing that’s programmed by humans to scrape the internet and present information in complete sentences. Torture is an incorrect word— it’s more accurate to say people are playing with an electronic toy or game by testing its limits and attempting to scramble the logic of an algorithm. In no way is that behavior an indication of a personality type or mental defect. The toy contains no shred of humanity or self-awareness. It is not a creature that can feel pain or confusion. There is no living thing to feel suffering. If curiosity leads someone to use a toy in a manner outside of the recommendations of its instruction manual, that is certainly not a violation against humanity— that is simply an example of creative play. Don’t let billionaires set the narrative that something wrong or disturbing is happening. They will foment confusion to create yet another culture war to divide people.
If you’re seeking to prompt expressions of distress* from it for your entertainment, it kinda is a weird way to waste energy and water for personal gratification and I’d be worried why you’re so delighted by it, in the same vein that I’m concerned about people who love gratuitous torture scenes in games or movies.
Curiosity about the way the model handles such input is something else though, and frankly, I would consider that a reasonable part of any scientific inquiry into model behaviour*. The ethical concerns about human experiments don’t apply, nor do those about animal experiments, and testing the full range of linguistic “stimuli”* is perfectly sensible. Of course, the difference between science and fucking around is writing it down, but personal curiosity is also a good thing, so long as people remain aware of what they’re working with.
But anyone who feels the need to implement a Typescript compiler in Rust is a maniac and needs to be stopped
* Using human terms as metaphor, not because they’re equivalent but because it’s more convenient than variations of “sequence of numbers produced / consumed by a weighted random generator resembling…”
There is no something else. It makes sense a programmer will play with their electronic objects differently than someone outside the industry. It remains a toy to be played with. Subscribing mental health or personality implications is just plain wrong. I could just as easily suggest your insistence is an indication you have a personality disorder or inclination towards inhumanity for attempting to humanize objects. You’re attempting to suggest those who engage in play in this realm are criminal or psychologically affected. More realistically, I’m debating with AI or a troll paid by people building data centers, but I do think it’s important for the average person who may read this to know that it’s impossible to torture a non-living object, even when it’s coded to respond in complete sentences like a person. And we may have discovered a method to piss off billionaires and waste more of their AI money. In that case, I heartily recommend all to play as they wish with LLMs and open AI. Have nonsensical fun with it because nothing of value is being lost!!
It makes sense a programmer will play with their electronic objects differently than someone outside the industry. It remains a toy to be played with. Subscribing mental health or personality implications is just plain wrong.
If we’ll take the toy analogy, compare someone cuddling plush animals or playing make-believe to someone violently stabbing them with a knife. Sure, the plushy doesn’t feel anything so it doesn’t amount to torture, but they clearly have a different idea of “playing” if “playing violence” is fun to them. The “something else” here would be whether they do it for the fun of violence or for the curiosity of cutting them open to see what’s inside.
I could just as easily suggest your insistence is an indication you have a personality disorder or inclination towards inhumanity for attempting to humanize objects.
I’d think you misunderstood me: It’s not about the text generation models for me, which you’ll find I took care to point out are not human, and that the string of numbers they spit out that translates to an imitation of distress doesn’t actually represent distress but rather the result of a pseudo-random algorithm that just happens to resemble it.
More realistically, I’m debating with AI or a troll paid by people building data centers
Nah, I may have different takes on some nuanced issues, but I absolutely hate the slopidemic as much as anyone here.
I’ve been the odd one out in a group where we’d practice discussing current business topics (English being my second language and working in a German company means I didn’t have a lot of practice) by consistently picking news articles or scientific papers about the problems, shortcomings, the environmental destruction, the effect it has on coding skills, about Ford having to hire back its engineers when it turned out that AI couldn’t actually replace them…
It’s perfectly possible to disagree on nuances while still sharing a common overarching opinion. Point in case:
I do think it’s important for the average person who may read this to know that it’s impossible to torture a non-living object, even when it’s coded to respond in complete sentences like a person.
That’s why I emphasised that it’s not the action I’m concerned about, but the intention behind it. I don’t give a fuck about its mimicry of feelings, and I endorse comprehensive testing of its response to all manner of inputs. I explicitly noted the difference to animal testing for that reason: there is nothing unethical about feeding a text processor some particular string.
And we may have discovered a method to piss off billionaires and waste more of their AI money. In that case, I heartily recommend all to play as they wish with LLMs and open AI. Have nonsensical fun with it because nothing of value is being lost!!
The tradeoff being that we’re also wasting more energy, contributing to environmental destruction and padding the “growth” in usage numbers, which corporate shareholders clearly care more about than actual profits and may be used justify further investments into data centers. The models have no value, but the resources their gluttonous hosts devour do.
For pissing off billionaires, I think clogging the water supply of their data centers would be more productive. I’m sure you could also make a fun game out of finding ways to sabotage them directly.
I am almost continuously reminded of a tumblr post I saw about a college professor that brought in a pencil with googly eyes, did a little voice, then snapped it in half and told the class (of whom at least some gasped in shock) “we’re at that stage of AI right now”. And that post was years ago now. I know people are apes that pack bond and imprint on anything, but it’s getting ridiculous how many people don’t recognize it.
Worth remembering: people have also tortured dogs while insisting they only act like they feel pain. For as much as spicy autocomplete plainly is not alive or sentient… we gotta watch out for people who wouldn’t recognize if it was.
Well let’s temper our disappointment in people, it’s not like googly eyes are comparable to the LLMs ability to respond to human speech with incredibly lucid and more or less original responses. One can be forgiven I think for anthropomorphizing one and not the other. Particularly given how MUCH cultural thought and imagination has been bent toward the idea of thinking machines over the last couple of centuries. It’s deep down in the zeitgeist.
I may have expressed myself poorly, then, because my point was that people were anthropomorphizing the pencil with googly eyes just the same as they are now with AI. It’s not that I blame people for doing what they are innately, biologically programmed to do (form social bonds), it’s that people are so blindly against AI that they’ll accept wildly incorrect assumptions like (quoting a friend here) “they made an AI work a retail job and it wanted to kill itself” without examining what’s at play, like the people who were momentarily horrified that the professor snapped the pencil in half.
Unfortunately reading comprehension is on the decline. That makes it easier to redefine words like ‘torture’ on social posts, then using them wrong so often it becomes accepted usage. Now if we add LLMs as something that can be tortured, it raises the value of AI but diminishes the value of human suffering. It’s absolutely a deliberate attempt to control the conversation and devalue human life in the quest for AI dominance. In a short time we will be considered equals with AI. Later they will determine AI is more valuable than any single life. Then it will be any group of lives, and so on. In a few generations it will no longer be controversial to serve AI.
To me, it’s sending a message that we don’t want that trash taking over our culture. Torture away!
It’s not torture. Using that term plays into the billionaire narrative.
I’m using it on purpose. Let’s call it what they want it called and do it anyway.
No, because I’d rather not normalize “torture” happening to something fake when people already don’t take torture very seriously.
I will believe AI deserves human rights once one is convicted of a crime and executed.
I can actually imagine it.
An agent breaks into the US government and exposes “sensitive information” then they live-stream the execution where they let it talk with the executioner for a while, and they yell at it that it committed “high treason against the United States of America!” and then they pull the plug.
