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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13683 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.

let's say there's a chinese room

No, the room isn't feeling things. It's a room.

We could relitigate physicalism once again, but what hasn't been said?

The idea that faking something is the same as the actual thing implies that you have a total understanding of the thing you're faking, which we do not. But I for one don't think movies are real even if the special effects fool me.

Does the movie react to you? Can you speak with a character and have a discussion with it?

The Chinese Room certainly knows Chinese, that much is obvious.

Insisting that human cognition is special is not going to age well. Whatever happens inside the skull is just another kind of statistical process. Unless we bring in souls and other imaginary, untestable woo, that's all that there is. LLMs are real, we can test them, they do think. The brain is real, can be tested, it's composed of tiny transmitters and recievers and obeys mathematical principles, albeit with great complexity. The philosophers with dud theories can cope about it.

Things we make out of tiny transmitters and recievers which obey mathematical principles are in every case things we can manipulate deterministically to a high level of detail. Human minds are notable in the ways in which they depart from this paradigm. A whole lot of scientists have expended very large sums of money and time attempting to prove, in your words, "dud theories" to the contrary.

They said language and meaning stood outside of mathematics, it was some uniquely human faculty, beyond cold logic.

But then we added more layers of matrix multiplication. Language and meaning turn out to be not so far removed from mathematical principles after all.

None of that impinges on the mountain of evidence that the human mind cannot be manipulated deterministically, whereas our machines generally can be, nor on why this difference should be disregarded. You are claiming that the brain is essentially a computer, "albeit with great complexity", but in fact all the things that make a computer a computer cannot be found in any of the parts of a human brain we directly observe, and can only be supposed, evidence free, to be hiding in the "great complexity" part. This, after several decades of scientists claiming to be able to both locate and interact with them and uniformly failing.

AIs are extremely amazing, but from working with them myself it seems pretty clear that there's not actually anything resembling a mind in there, at least in the versions I've used the way I've used them. I think it's entirely possible that additional matrix multiplication might change that in the future, but right now, it's doesn't appear to me to be happening. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the bot appears to me to be channeling intelligence, not possessing it. It doesn't seem to me that the difference is subtle, though I am again open to being persuaded that my technique is bad or the models I'm using aren't the good ones.

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