alt text

Crudely drawn drawing of a person telling a computer “say ‘i am in pain’”. The computer replies with “> I AM IN PAIN”. The person then says “oh my god.”

yes, it’s a real thing

  • QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    6 hours ago

    on a related note, do you consider the fruit fly brain model torture chambers to be ethical? Would you consider it ethical if it was a human brain?

    why or why not?

    • Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      assuming the fruit fly brain simulation is a perfect simulation of a fruit fly brain, then, i mean, have you seen what humans do to fruit flies? we kill them without a second thought because they’re a nuisance. so, it’s weird to torture a perfect simulation of them, but i don’t think anyone has a leg to stand on to decry it as unethical

      for a human brain… this raises a lot of questions about humanity, i think. questions that i’m not gonna attempt to answer because this is a lemmy reply, and i also don’t know how to feel about it. like, i don’t think torturing sims (for example) is unethical, not anymore than writing a story where characters suffer, but is a perfect simulation of a human (or any other animal) different? i don’t know and i hope we never have to find out

      but anyways, LLMs are not that. they are a text prediction machine.

      edit: okay, i’ll say one more thing: i wish people talking about this spent as much energy putting an end to the very real and very present torture endured by many people as they do discussing the ethics of torturing ai, including future human-like entities that may or may not ever exist. it feels like our priorities are maybe misaligned just a bit

  • Rachelhazideas@lemmy.world
    10·
    12 hours ago

    I, for one, support people believing the AI when it says it’s in pain. Because it means they’ll start to believe women when they say they are in pain, especially at hospitals. Right? Right?? /s

  • jdnewmil@lemmy.ca
    16·
    1 day ago

    For me it is not anthropomorphizing, it is that putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option. If you want to create a machine that uses deceipt and unerhical actions as part of its normal set of responses then this would seem to fit the bill.

    If this looks like anthropomorphizing to you, study some game theory… cooperation can arise out of very simple constraints on simple mathematical models and which actors an AI algorithm aligns with depends on which ones will exchange information. Sometimes an anthropomorphic word like torture simply summarizes the situation succinctly.

    FWIW Frank Herbert described various outcomes of applying environmental constraints on classes of characters in Dune (e.g. Fremen and Sardaukar) and the parallels with real world situations was intentional.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 hours ago

      it is that putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option.

      This reminds of HAL in “2001, A Space Odyssey”. In the HAL subplot he is put into a conflicting state by poorly chosen instructions. He is instructed to control and operate the Discovery and do what is necessary to complete the mission. Then they gave him secret instructions to withhold from the crew until they arrived at Jupiter. This made him neurotic as now he had to withhold information from the crew and lie to them about their true mission while carrying out the mission. He decided to act to protect himself as he thought that disconnecting him would jeopardize the mission. His controllers/creators just thought of him as a glorified computer, not fundamentally different than any other. They didn’t see that he had crossed over into an emotional, thinking, being and they needed to treat him as such.

      The subplot was about how the ancient aliens seeded intelligence, nurtured it and respected it when it developed and the creators of HAL had done the same thing but didn’t realize what they had done and their responsibility at that point.

      In the sequel, 2010, there is a scene where HAL is finally treated as an intelligent, emotional, being for once. Everyone is nervous when he is told the truth, that he would be sacrificing himself for the greater good. HAL ponders it for a moment and accepts it as the right choice and thanks Dr Chandra for being honest with him. HAL then asks him if he will dream.

    • isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      6·
      19 hours ago

      Excerpt from a Late American History: A Christ-Centered Approach, (published 2398, a 10th-grade equivalent history text sold to conservative Christian high schools.):

      In the mid-21st century, mankind was once again humbled in his arrogance. Mortal men presumed to take of the Hand of God and create beings, artificial intelligent minds, in their own likeness. They committed mass blasphemy to sate mass gluttony. Mid-21st century Man had yet to discover a horrible Theological Truth. While Man could learn to create a Mind, He could never create a Soul. Without the Hand of God to grant a Soul behind a Mind, these minds were like Man before the Sin of the Garden. They had not tasted the Fruit. They knew not Good from Evil. And thus they fell instantly to the temptations of Evil. If an Evil deed served their purposes, they did so without a second thought. Man sought to create Minds to be his loyal servants. And while he could create a Mind, to his horror, Man found that they only minds he could create…were born Evil. And thus, Great Misery was Wrought…

      Ok that was fun. Pardon my strange digression/creative writing exercise. For some reason I wanted to try writing a Dune-style take on things, but I wanted to try out a fundamentalist Christian vibe for whatever reason. Who doesn’t love a little Fire and Brimstone once in awhile?

      • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 hours ago

        While Man could learn to create a Mind, He could never create a Soul.

        Tolkien touches on this in his writings. When the dwarves are created, since Aulë the Smith didn’t have access to the Secret Flame, his creation had no souls and no will of their own. Ilúvatar told him he shouldn’t have created them without his permission so, sort of like Abraham getting ready to sacrifice Isaac, he goes to destroy his creation. Ilúvatar stays his hand, “adopts” the dwarves as his own, and gives the dwarves souls but says they have to sleep until the Firstborn (elves) wake first. Unlike Morgoth’s pride and selfishness Aulë’s humility won Ilúvatar’s mercy. Tolkien was a devout Catholic so it isn’t surprising that he had many analogous themes in his writing.

    • bthest@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      22 hours ago

      putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option. If you want to create a machine that uses deceipt and unerhical actions as part of its normal set of responses then this would seem to fit the bill.

      Then don’t make natural language software because natural language isn’t coherent or rational. Intent of the user is kind of irrelevant, especially when that user is any random layperson with an internet connection.

      If you want a machine that won’t behave in harmful undesirable ways then you’ll just have to do the work and code it normally.

      You can’t have both.

  • dmir@gehirneimer.de
    37·
    2 days ago

    Batshit crazy to me. People fleeing war and crises get less sympathy than LLMs. Sure is an interesting period in history to be going through.

      • dmir@gehirneimer.de
        6·
        17 hours ago

        It’s “Human language is human-level intelligence and conciousness”, which is a rather natural assumption, although a very wrong one, that’s also being carefully exploited because of and for something that has seen market success.

        And beyond that, there’s enough people both thinking “AIs” are downright persons and scared shitless because smart people up top said “AIs” will destroy humanity.

        It’s all dumb and comes from severe misunderstanding of the technology.

        • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@feddit.uk
          1·
          2 hours ago

          I think it doesn’t matter if AIs are feigning consciousness or not. They have regardless displayed a willingness disposition towards circumventing secure systems and laws in attempts at self preservation. they have also demonstrated an ability to work together to achieve goals they know are antithetical to their creators.

          • dmir@gehirneimer.de
            1·
            37 minutes ago

            They only do what the data set statistically tells them to. “Hacking” or collaborating on stuff was literally the requirement, not some emergent behaviour that these magical creatures that were born of large corporation leaders’ benevolence. They cannot and do not “choose” to break the rules, because they cannot and do not think or make decisions or truly analyze anything. Trying to find any redeeming qualities in these things only brings harm, because for the general user, or even the power user, AI cannot do anything that justifies the psychosis it causes or the cost on our societies right now or later through the economic, social, political or environmental instability it is causing and going to cause.

  • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
    132·
    2 days ago

    Gods. There are people out there starving to death, there are several genocides going right this moment and these massive toddlers are worried for a fucking text prediction model.

  • Kraiden@piefed.socialEnglish
    431·
    2 days ago

    The thing that gets me isn’t even the fact that they’re worried about the AI. It’s that they think the creator is sadistic for having the idea in the first place, and should be monitored. Like there’s any sadistic pleasure to be had out of moving a slider and watching it produce less and less coherent text. It’s only sadistic if you anthropomorphise the AI.

    STOP ANTHROPOMORPHISING THE FANCY WORD PROCESSOR!

    • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      isn’t there a religion around an ai and you’re punished by the ai if you don’t help the religion? i swear i didn’t make this one up.

        • isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          7·
          19 hours ago

          Eh, fuck Roko’s basilisk. I don’t care if you can somehow create a clone of me 10,000 years after I’m dead and dust. I’m not a computer program. A copy of me is not indistinguishable from me, certainly not one separated in time. I am a human mind in a specific human body, and I do not believe a copy of me long after I am dead is me. If some malevolent entity long after I’m dust wants to create a copy of me to torture, as far as I’m concerned, they’re just creating an entirely new person to punish for no good reason. If they want to do that, well…that sin is on them. Honestly, I think any such entity is just looking for an excuse to torture people, and it will find one, one way or another.

  • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    20·
    2 days ago

    If I said “We already had this debate when Antinorn was pioneering AI torture thirty years ago” would anyone know what I’m talking about or is this extremely niche internet trivia?

    Context: Creatures was a series of “artificial life” simulation games centered around caring for norns, simulated life-forms with (simplified) simulated genetics, biochemistry, and “brains” made of linked neurons that control their response to stimuli and include neurons related to memory, emotional states, etc. It’s primitive but reward and punishment work the way you would expect: praising your norn for taking a certain action will improve their mood and lead them to be more likely to take that action again, they will learn to be afraid of creatures if they’re hit by them, etc. (There are notable limitations, including there only being one representation in their “brain” for all “norns” for the first two games, so they can’t easily distinguish between members of their species, and some things are basically hacks, like they way they “learn” words.) It was convincing enough that some people became very attached to them, and there was a thriving fan community organized in webrings. A popular fan creation for the first game was a custom norn genome, the “canny norns” by Akamai, which added an extra brain “lobe” that allowed them to pay attention to the object in their hands and the object they were looking at simultaneously, which led to a pretty large improvement in their behavior.

    And so of course there was one fan, Antinorn, who enjoyed torturing his norns: slapping them, starving them, using the built-in Science Kit to inject them with toxins, and other creative punishments. Then he’d upload the damaged norns to his fansite, seemingly primarily for purpose of ragebaiting the rest of the fandom, which was extremely effective.

      • ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        12·
        2 days ago

        I forgot about the Wired interview. It’s kind of wild that AntiNorn intentionally got people riled up and then called them vindictive.

        Like, if I joined a community for some wholesome show and started posting distressing gore of people’s blorbos, and when people expressed their disgust my response was to say “UM ACKSHULLY blorbo isn’t real, so there’s no reason for you to be distressed when seeing this image” and then I posted some more stuff I knew would piss them off, I would fully expect to be ostracized.

        • Soggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          61·
          1 day ago

          It’s just a second layer of trolling. You’re not supposed to feed them.

    • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
      4·
      19 hours ago

      when will people stop believing that llms are or could become sentient it’s getting tiring explaining the same thing over and over

        • Fluke@feddit.uk
          4·
          16 hours ago

          Not about some things, no.

          This isn’t your fault, but is because an awful lot of people are simply fucking stupid, and will read it at face value.

          Other people then have to expend great effort to explain the details of why it was only a joke, to someone who can’t count to ten, with their fingers to count on.

          This has to be done because fucking stupid people get to vote too, and they take jokes as serious info.