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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12808 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?

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.

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.

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.

Good point. I'd also note that while humans absolutely feel pain, the rational portion can override that in some cases: people voluntarily run marathons, get tattoos, and any number of other painful stimuli. Presumably out of some greater expectation from doing so. I won't even try to explain that BDSM thing. Pain is a useful stimulus, too: eliminating it wholesale isn't inherently good for people (see opioids, for an example). There are also other feedback limit processes at play to prevent self-harm in other ways that I wouldn't describe as "pain" per se: my nervous system generally limits muscle tension and joint motion to prevent injury, but doesn't really "hurt", or regulates exertion to prevent overheating (neither set of limits is perfect, there).

But I do have misgivings about putting LLMs in a box and applying stimuli that would be unethical to apply to living things without good reason. I'm not sure what would make them "conscious", "sentient", or "sapient", or even which of those would apply to this situation. Seems like a difficult family of moral questions, and I'm not going to claim answers there.

Seems like a difficult family of moral questions, and I'm not going to claim answers there.

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think the virtue-ethics solution - and why a lot of people have a negative reaction to this - would be "you shouldn't engage in simulated torture because that's bad for you even if no one is actually being tortured."

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