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This week in disturbing AI news (oh who am I kidding. It's every day now). Maybe AIs feel pain?
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).
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
Your functionalism is as completely irrational and evidence free as soul-antenna idealism.
I hope you are aware of this.
I know I have qualia because:
Anything beyond this, is make-believe metaphysics.
If you want to claim you are parsimonious you must be a metaphysical skeptic, otherwise you're just LARPing that your vibes are superior like literally everybody else.
Not a test. Don't talk to me about 'evidence-free' when that is where you sit.
Blah blah blah, let's see some tests. Let the machine elves factor some numbers. Let the djinn conjure up sacred fire. Let the qualia be something actually real in and of itself, separate from mere p-zombie signals and reactions - oh wait, the very distinction is imaginary woo since it can't be tested. We can induce feelings with an MRI machine, they're real. But they're nothing more than patterns of information, there's no special aspect to them beyond that.
If it can't be tested, it's not a real thing.
A test is literally an operation of the senses in empiricism, it does not needs to be socially operated. Deceit doesn't even factor since the nature of subjective experience makes it invulnerable to it, vis à vis existence. Never mind the fact you're totally ignoring a priori knowledge altogether.
You're just a slave not even to your senses, but to the aggregated senses of others. The real difference is that can buy your conception of the truth with enough money and shiny labcoats, and you can't do it to me.
It wouldn't be grating if you weren't clamoring you're the free one, for denying the evidence of your own mind. But for what it's worth I have no evidence you're not a p-zombie. I just certainly know I'm not. So maybe you're right about what you can observe.
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