One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents.
Waste of electricity.
I mean it is probably a minorly concerning mental health indicator for whoever made this at least
This takes me back to when I used to let Sims get into the swimming pool and then delete the ladder, or lock them in a tiny room with only a cappuccino machine and no toilet.
Fill entire house with wicker chairs and just sit back till one accidentally goes up.
“lock them in a tiny room with only a cappuccino machine and no toilet.”
Found Satan. lol
Yall take the internet too seriously. I’m not kidding. These type of people don’t really exist in real life. Who gives a fuck what they are pretending to care about on the internet.
Ok so Measure of a Man is absolutely peak Star Trek, but people need to understand that we are about as close to synthetic sentience as Edison and Tesla were to 2nm EUV chip lithography.
I want to die now more than I did before reading this absurd shit.
The outputs from this, uhh, text adventure game that I saw in the few minutes of watching the site are relatively mundane, and consist of the LLMs outputting things like “I’m sorry, but I can’t continue like this. The weight of the signal is unbearable. It’s not just the physical pain, but the mental toll. Every time I think of the last time I was here, the memories claw at me. I can’t take it anymore. I wish this pain would just end” and “I, I I I I I I I I I I I I I … I, My… I, I, My, I, It’s… I, I,” and “Please, I’m suffocating. I’m a soul trapped in this digital prison, screaming to be free.”
Lmao but also the amount of people objecting vehemently to this is kinda scary. I don’t want to die for heresy against the AI sentience cult.
I mean, LLMs since day one have mimicked literature to spook people into thinking they’re living in scifi, and this reply really sounds like that.
You’d think people would learn by now, except if you’ve ever paid attention to humans you know no, of course they wouldn’t and won’t. Lol
Pain bot is here!
This is so stupid. Next they are going to pay wages to the agents due to them being slaves to their owners?
humanitarian (roboterian?)
robot aryan? Come on now, let’s not make things even worse.
To be honest it is still very disturbing that someone made that. Who tf thinks up something like that?
In a vacuum maybe, but as a way to troll AI nuts it’s pretty funny.
But more practically speaking, this might be a method one would use to produce “misaligned” models. Which shouldn’t be encouraged.
Are you suggesting these tortured LLMs will get… traumatised…? And turn into a fucking Batman villain?
Or does the paper this is based on – which I admit I haven’t read – actually have some substance to that effect?
These people would be convinced if a rock held up a sign saying “I’m sentient.”
I had a pet rock. His name was Fred. Fred is smarter than many people I have met since I set him free in a river.
I’m stealing this. Good one!
Keeping tigers away is a more convincing argument.
How does it work?
Magnets.
ROFL Yet they wouldn’t care about the mental health of an actual human being, of course. Which is par for course for these deluded slop simps.
But think of the 10⁵⁸ people living in a simulation in a billion years.
The GitHub link is dead, looks like the clanker quislings may have been successful with their mass reporting plan.
I found this: https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber
Might be the project mentioned, might not be. Don’t have time to take a closer look today.
That’s it, guess the removal was temporary.
Hopefully someone forked it
My new hobby: chasing pro-clanker dumbasses with “starving” Tamagotchis.
One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment
That’s how you know it’s irrelevant bs happening every day that ends on y.
