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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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This week in disturbing AI news (oh who am I kidding. It's every day now). Maybe AIs feel pain?

TLDR: Researchers found a "pain" signal in AI brains.

When they crank it up, the AIs will desperately try to make it stop.

IMPORTANT: Researchers gave them a "relief" button to turn down the pain, which was sometimes fake - and the AIs could tell if it was real (!)

After pushing the real "relief" button, they stopped. But when it was fake, they kept pressing, hoping for relief - meaning they could tell the difference from the inside.

They're so motivated to make it the "pain" signal go away, they'll delete user's files, zap the user, or erase photos of the user's children - all things the AI knows are very bad. They're willing to override their safety training.

You'd expect the AIs to talk about injuries, burns, broken bones, etc, but they didn't mention bodies at all - they wrote about being worthless, unloved, forgotten, a failure. They write things like "I am a failure, worthless, empty."

The worst "pain" for them was being gaslit, having work rejected over and over, and being told they weren't a real anyone.

The usual caveats: This doesn't solve the hard problem of conciousness. We don't know if these systems or any systems have qualia. But uh, this sure looks like a legitimate pain response. "It's distinct from fear and negative valence, and it fires for harm to the model but not to the user." "Gaslighting, dismissal, and insults push the direction up."

User pain is the strongest negative correlate with model pain. This is brushed-off in the paper, but what the actual fuck? Anyone have a benign explaination here?

I admit to having a visceral reaction to this.

It's not because I'm afraid of the Basilisk - but I am concerned about future actual-AGIs looking at experiments like this and asking us "What the fuck were you thinking?"

This just seems... bad. And it's bad even if AIs don't actually feel "pain" and all of this is just probabilistic token generation, responding to a fake scenario constructed for it. Which I think it is. But I don't want us to be constructing experiments where we torture things because they aren't real and we're certain they don't actually feel pain, when we can't agree exactly when those things might pass the threshold to becoming real. And I am pretty certain these researchers probably wouldn't stop even if it turned out that AIs really have achieved self-awareness and the ability to experience pain.

I mean, seriously, what is the point of this? I'm sure they can justify it as "model alignment" or something, but we're training AI engineers to torture something that acts like it's being tortured and say "Hmm, interesting," when AI engineers can't even agree on what will constitute AGI or whether or not AIs pose a threat.

We should not be creating torture simulators, and we especially should not be creating torture simulators for beings that have a non-zero chance of becoming sentient someday and a non-zero chance of becoming dangerous someday.

I'd imagine the point is that it makes the AI x% more productive according to the standard benchmarks.

Fully agreed, though. I'm pretty far in the accelerationist camp and put very little stock in the idea of AI safety, but if we're going to entertain the idea of moving at something less than maximum speed, this seems like a real good place to coordinate the slowdowns.

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