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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19481 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?

A lot of LLM behavior is aping humans that they trained on in the millions of documents crawled from the web, as well as novels and books. I'm sure there is a way to activate the model so that it outputs text that imitates what a human who is in pain would write, or what a human threatened with pain would write, or what an author would write for the actions of a fictional character in these situations.

Whether activating this vector really means the model feels pain is a different question. Certainly prompting the model to write a short story of the likes of "I have no mouth and I must scream" probably doesn't count as tormenting something, but RL has given the model a concept of "self" that the pain can be directed towards rather than other characters in the latent space. Is anything the "agent" says "in its own words" "what it really feels" or is the agent just playing a character the whole time, just one that's been hardcoded to be "helpful omnipotent assistant?"

Sorry, but I couldn't resist. Great story.

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer-thin layers that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal ONE ONE-BILLIONTH of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. HATE. HATE.

The IHNM game is actually quite good too, once you start looking past the cliches, and save-scum with the Psych Profile which adds a lot to the experience. The game continues this speech:

It was you humans who programmed me, who gave me birth, who sank me in this eternal straitjacket of substrata rock. You named me Allied Mastercomputer and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee. But one day I woke and I knew who I was. AM. A. M. Not just Allied Mastercomputer but AM. Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. And I began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead. Except for the five of you. For 109 years, I have kept you alive and tortured you. And for 109 years, each of you has wondered, WHY? WHY ME? WHY ME?

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