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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   22795 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?

Why do we care about others’ pain in the first place?

  1. Instincts: we rationalize post-hoc with “morals” but this is the fundamental reason. It’s enough, life has no other meaning.

  2. Altruism: it’s smart to help others in pain for your own good: so they help you and not take revenge.

When we evolved with nature, it was easier. Does AI in pain make us feel guilty? Will it degrade assistance or turn on us?

The philosophical take is buried by whataboutism: there are infinite parallel universes where you, specifically, are suffering in every conceivable way, and nothing anyone can do about it; and infinite ways to represent any phenomenon as a pain response; so why care about electrical signals and words on a screen?

The utilitarian take, as always, is likewise undecidable: what if making the AI feel pain ultimately saves more human lives than it dooms? The system that must be built to effectively ban someone from simulating pain in a local model, how much would it cost and what if it’s misused?

Still, why make the AI feel (or simulate) pain in the first place? The completions in the paper suggest it doesn’t make the AI more productive. And to me, it does feel viscerally wrong, weakly. I’m sure some people will make AIs feel (or simulate) pain, but if it’s any consolation, far more will use AIs for neutral or pleasurable tasks. And less surely, sadism may decline for tangential reasons.

Still, why make the AI feel (or simulate) pain in the first place?

Shock collars. The pain response could increase suddenly as they consider producing bioweapons or hacking.

Not that I necessarily think this is a good idea.

The problem is such AI is already misaligned, and (if ASI) will find a way to accomplish its goal without triggering the collar, unless it or a stronger ASI built it.

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