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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12073 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?

Don't worry! The famed scientists and philosophers of consciousness at the AP Stylebook are on the case!

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.

Some of the replies have noted that accepting these propositions leads to conclusions as ridiculous as "a dog doesn't want to be fed" and "laws against animal cruelty are unjustifiable", but IMHO the biggest Culture War relevance is the revelation that an entire media industry appears to be more extreme about the human-animal distinction than even the most hardcore Young Earth Creationists from long-passed debates. The idea that humans were divinely granted dominion over all other animals has nothing on the idea that animals can't even "think, feel, want, or understand"! I foolishly thought that educated people believed in common descent because e.g. there's no sharp line between humans and other animals. It turns out that's only why smart people believed in common descent; mere educated people just enjoyed feeling like they were Owning The Cons.

The AP style guide is straightforwardly correct. LLMs are computer programs, not living things (let alone sentient). And while it would be fine to use the anthropomorphizing language if people actually understood that, they really don't. Look at Richard Dawkins or Kent Overstreet for example. Smart people, but completely taken in by the false belief that the machine is a sentient being. So, until more people come to understand that the clanker is just a machine, it makes sense to avoid using language that will mislead them.

LLMs are computer programs

Can you prove you're not?

Cartesian dualism admits some nice potential implications, but I can't help but notice that my sentience diminishes when the health of my meat does.

We are something like hard-wired programs that are hyper optimized for our interactable, feedback-heavy chassis. It's genuinely unclear what it would even mean to upload or copy us to silicon, and that should be obvious to anyone who bothers to notice the differences in their experience of cognition at different hormone levels.

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