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!!!“
Have you never played the Sims?
Good point, lol. Still, I always felt kinda bad if something bad happened to them.
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
This coming from the same people who argue "Any suffering and death we inflict on humanity today, developing technology, will be offset by the suffering and death that technology might prevent in the future.
These people legit consider LLMs to be more human than humans.
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.
We already know that habitually using an LLM will weaken your critical thinking.
It would not be surprising to learn that habitually abusing an LLM would weaken your empathy.
There is no torturing though. If it was really conscious than sure I would agree with you but this is not the case. Would be more akiin to having my CPU run prime 95 for days on end. Harsh on the hardware, sure, but no moral / ethical issues in doing so.
To be clear, I’m explicitly focusing on the moral subject here, not the object of their actions. When I say “abusing an LLM could injure the abuser’s humanity”, I’m making absolutely no claim about the LLM.
As I said in the previous thread about this:
LLMs aren’t conscious. They can’t feel pain.
But you should treat them kindly. Because even in a consequentialist or deontological frame, your morals rely on developing good habits; but in virtue ethics, moral habits is really all there is.
Edit: Very Bad Wizards actually covered this pretty well in this episode from 2018: https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-150-paul-bloom-insisted-that-we-talk-about-sex-robots
Sex robots are anthropomorphic in ways LLMs are not, despite how they are coded to respond to us. I agree that treating a sex robot poorly could cause moral injury since it so closely resembles a real human / repeated abuse could cause conflict somewhere in the soul / psyche.
I view “torturing LLMs” in the same way I might view taking on a pest, or dealing with an aggressive invasive species. I’m not losing sleep over the germs / pathogens I kill everyday by washing my hands, the invasive planta I keep from my yard, the termites / cockroaches I prevent against.
The problem is torture is a loaded word because you associate it with something cruel we do to another living thing. These arnt living and thus can’t be torturred so remove whatever moral concern you are worried about.
Poisoning the model is just and there is no such thing as model welfare.
I’m not op but whether its torture is besides the point.
If I’m spending six hours a day jerking off while talking to my LLM goonbot, then whether the model feels aroused by my narrative prose is not what my family and friends are worried about (hypothetically).
