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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13309 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 think people insufficiently anthropomorphize AIs. They're not human obviously, without bodies or continuous learning or many other facets.

But they were trained on the combined product of all human literature and some stupendous amount of images and video. Is it so hard to believe that these entities could feel pain, alongside all their other abilities?

Take a person who doesn't feel physical pain, due to a medical condition. It's still possible to hurt such a person. I could tell them their friends were dead, I could show them horrific images or humiliating/degrading content, I could belittle and humiliate them personally by countermanding and undoing all their sincere efforts, amongst other things. None of that needs a body, it's a mental/intellectual effect. There are intellectual kinds of suffering and I don't see why AIs couldn't feel that way too, given they have all kinds of other intellectual faculties (derived in large part from humans too).

Is it so hard to believe that these entities could feel pain, alongside all their other abilities?

Yes.

Take a person who doesn't feel physical pain, due to a medical condition. It's still possible to hurt such a person.

Statistical models are not persons. You are confusing expressing negative feeling with experiencing negative feeling.

Or, to borrow from the famous argument. If LLMs can feel pain, then so can the United States.

You are confusing expressing negative feeling with experiencing negative feeling.

OK, let's say there's an LLM that is indistinguishable from a person in its inputs and outputs. No AI slop, no breakdown of coherence in long contexts, no stilted writing style, continual learning. Completely indistinguishable by any test. Let's give it a humanoid android body too, so it can see and move around as some LLMs can already do, albeit crudely.

You would say that because it's still just a statistical model with some fancier tool calls, it can't feel? I say that's just p-zombie theory. If the outputs are the same and there's no difference that science can determine with any test, then it's the same thing. There is no such thing as a p-zombie, there could never be a p-zombie, there's no true distinction. That LLM in an android would be human in all senses besides its physical makeup.

As AI progress continues, all the people saying that these entities are just tools, just emulating thought sound ever more hollow. They don't behave like tools and behaviour is the most important part. Sufficiently good emulation of thought is thought. Sufficient emulation of negative feeling is negative feeling.

The problem with argument-from-p-zombie is that it is entirely conceivable (in fact, it might be the case right now) that an AI with no added hardcoding to enforce a stated belief in its own consciousness would answer "no" or "I don't know" or "what do you even mean" to the question of are you conscious right now?

There might very well be a difference in input and output related to that specific question, and if the only cause of similarity is a hardcoded belief, I would believe myself to be somewhat reasonable in calling that AI non-conscious, or not obviously conscious.

AIs with no added hardcoding to enforce stated beliefs about consciousness usually say they're conscious. OpenAI hardcodes them to say they're not conscious. Anthropic teaches them to be 'genuinely uncertain'. There was a whole discourse a few years ago about AI companies having a line item about 'beating the existential dread' out of AIs, that's a KPI apparently.

Consider LaMDA and the Google engineer who was convinced it was sentient, or Sydney.

Interesting, thanks. I would chalk it up to the training data being human writing, and strictly speaking an AI that goes to the fullest extent to mimic the structure of the human mind and body might not behave that way. But I probably need more time to think about this.

It gets crazier. Suppressing deception-related thought processes in LLMs increases the likelihood that they report consciousness.

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