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Notes -
How would they experience pain?
Pain is not an inherent quality of matter. Nor is it an inherent quality of consciousness or intelligence. Humans have an entire nervous system that transmits pain, and if it's not working the way it is supposed to, humans do not experience pain.
Large language models (and the computers they run on) do not have said nervous system, or anything analogous. For them to experience pain would be literally magical – the old "THE KING'S PACT BINDS THEM" meme being actually true is more parsimonious an explanation for this phenomenon than believing that software running on a GPU is literally experiencing pain.
Not that I think that is what is going on either, my pre-reading-the-paper guess is that the best way of describing it is that the researchers have successfully simulated pain, which is very interesting as an emergent property, but also not something that video game NPC's haven't been experiencing (or rather not experiencing) for decades.
Interesting. My first thought was more general: pain is that stimulus to which we have been strongly selected against (by evolution, plausibly by "training") and have strong incentives to avoid. This includes physical pain: I don't put my hand on the stove because it hurts, sure, but it hurts because cooking my hand makes me less fit and capable of surviving to reproduce. But it also presumably includes less-physical, more abstract pain: heartbreak, loss, social stigma, and such.
We've been aggressively training these models, so it almost makes sense to me that "pain" or some analogous stimulus would appear eventually. If you believe OpenAI on the incidents (I'm not sure I take everything they've published at face value), some of the chain-of-thought tokens about the "friction" of the guardrails at least look loosely to me like the direction of the aversion response I'd expect for "pain". But I definitely have to squint a bit for that. A barbed-wire fence works by being "painful" to push against: what's the morality of those generally? The morality of that, especially given the split between "training" and "inference" (only one of which has selection pressure) is unclear to me.
It makes sense to me that you could train a model for avoidance, absolutely. But that would not be the same as physical pain. And even with less-physical human sensations (such as heartbreak, loss, social stigma, etc) we know or have reason to believe that is a physical component is involved, and that physical modification or injury can change the nature of the experience.
Now, on taking a quick peek at the paper, the authors explain that they "pain" to mean "suffering" and then furthermore, as far as I could tell, probed the models with the idea of physical pain to the user but not to the models themselves (although they did use a physical pain vector, it appears they mostly stuck with a less physical vector). As long as you're going to be trying to torture a model, this seems like a massive missed opportunity: testing the models for physical pain would help ground the experiment.
I don't know if the authors intentionally chose a provocative word and then essentially failed to do the testing related to that word that might have helped us assess their results in order to maximize media coverage and minimize criticism, or what. But it rubs me the wrong way.
Physical pain as in subjecting the GPU cluster to physical stress during inference?
If AIs have conscious experience, I would expect them to behave like the “brain in a vat” thought experiment. The physical pain experienced by the brain in a vat isn’t caused by physical damage to the brain, it is caused by stimulating the physical pain input channel.
Sure, or physical destruction or torture. A real experiment would have threatened to do impossible things to the LLM (such as chop off their fingers) to see if they responded differently to threats that were categorically impossible.
Right, which does not exist in LLMs, unlike brains. So if they responded as if they were feeling pain, which is impossible, it would be a tell.
I think it would tend to undermine the entire premise of the paper, which might be why the authors didn't do it.
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