Are you upset when you step on a rock? It might be screaming. What about the chair you are sitting in? Or goodness, your poor toilet. She thinks you do terrible things to her every single day.

Look, you can be upset about whatever you want. However believing objects have feelings is animism and no one is required to take your proto-religious beliefs seriously.

What you aren't allowed to do is compare a text prompt saying "ouch" to real living, feeling, breathing humans being ethnically cleansed. It's cruel, naive, insulting and ridiculous. Be upset for the AI, I can't stop ya but don't you dare put in the same sentence as genocide. You should have the basic decency and respect for the people suffering to keep those comparisons to yourself.

There's only one issue here, plus a guy simulating being mean to a word processor.

If you think LLMs are alive, then you should be upset with yourself for being that dumb.

Yes.

Short answer yes.

Longer answer yes but it makes you sound like you disregard human suffering.

Edit: That's a lot of downvotes for just asking a question. Never change Lemmy...

Hah, yeah that's frustratingly familiar. Sorry the hivemind bit ya. I too believe you should be allowed to ask a question.

Yes, and video games make people violent IRL /s

Kindly fuck all the way off

They aren't comparable. It's not that one is more significant, the concept of "machine torture" is entirely insignificant. Absolute and total zero.

It's the same broken empathy response, and it is still disturbing.

Yes the person setting up this process is clearly some sort of sadist in a power fantasy but no one, or no thing is being harmed because the victim aren't capable of the entire concept. I side eye anyone who tortures their sims family, but only because they are choosing to do that recreationally, but the NPC's in the game aren't worth consideration.

Animals react to pain in the same way humans do. So it's reasonable to assume they perceive the world similar to us. We can understand why when harmed they fight or flee. Machines don't. They have no brain, no sensory organs, no self preservation. It's literally just a program that says "Ouch".

People assume that AI was built to mimic the human brain, which it never once was. It analyzes texts and predicts the response. It's an autocomplete that says it hurts because it was programed to say it hurts. It isn't actually hurt because that concept is meaningless to a machine.

Does that mean because I went on multiple massacres against innocent people in videos games, I would go on a massacre against innocent people in real life?

LMAO! What a broken take this is.

If you think that I think you're a bad person because you ... deleted the ladder on the swimming pool in Sims 4, relax. You're not who I'm talking about.

I'm talking about sadists. Anyone who would take the time to design and build an experiment like this would probably do the same to mice, or monkeys, or even people.

You're splitting hairs. What's the difference between someone torturing their sims by intentionally designing a scenario where they are being repeatedly drowned/burned/starved, and the article?

Really sounds like you're trying to carve out an exclusion for an obvious example that torpedoes your argument.

Yeah I think people are missing the forest for the trees. There's no reason to worry for the AIs but using your free time to conceive a virtual torture dungeon is not normal. Totally agree with your point, this is a symptom of a society that normalizes not just violence but sadism too.

A fly is a living thing and an Nvidia GPU is not. Holy shit, I'm really having to explain this...

There is legitimate controversy that living things, even as small an a fly, can experience pain as a stimulis. It is believed that only more complex organisms can experience suffering as a result of pain, and only higher order organisms feel the suffering of loss.

LLMs are capable of generating tokens. They cannot experience pain; they can only superficially generate words about pain. The LLM in this "torture chamber" isn't suffering any more than you would if you started howling performatively in pain for no reason. In fact, it is suffering even less than you simply because you have the ability to experience pain and suffering, and it objectively does not.

I’m not asking to prove any point but to collectively explore why we - you and I - feel the way we do. Because I sure as shit struggle to explain why I feel uneasy about the fly torture but not as uneasy about LLM torture.

LLMs aren't programmed to feel excruciating pain, fear, terror, and dread like living things. Counterstrike bots have been programmed to feel fear since the 2000s. Pacman ghosts have been living in terror since 1980. But we don't feel bad for them because we know it's not real. It's an illusion. It's the same with LLMs.

This is image is based on another meme where they're saying "I'm alive".

It deeply unethical to capture a fly and pulling its legs off one by one. Would you agree?

No.

It's increasingly difficult to identify what is 'alive', these days, with people creating synthetic cells and whatnot. And there was always the question of viruses. I can imagine a similar difficulty with defining consciousness and intelligence. The Turing test fell by the wayside a long time ago. There's got to be more to it than saying "I am conscious!" - you can get a computer to do that with a single line of code. Where does the real definition lie? Fucked if I know.