Man tries to torture AI after reading that it feels pain

I suspect the pre-print that alleges signs of pain to have been found inside generative AI models has been dramatically over-interpreted by many - no-one very serious I have encountered appears to think that current AI systems are conscious in a way that would likely be a pre-condition for ‘feeling’ pain - although, full-disclosure, I haven’t fully read the paper yet.

LLMs sometimes behave in ways resembling human emotional responses, and recent work identified internal representations that may underlie these behaviors. We ask whether LLMs represent pain distinctly from fear, sadness, and generic negative valence, and whether this representation functions as pain would be expected to.

I imagine “resembling” is doing a lot of work there. This Reddit meme feels likely appropriate:

(H/T Robb Knight)

But in case I’m wrong, or one day something like this magically was to become true, this headline summarises perfectly why humans should not be let anywhere near it:

Man builds AI torture chamber after discovering artificial intelligence ‘feels pain’

As one of the paper’s authors notes, it’s not a good look for humanity - or at least this specimen of it - even whilst it’s very unlikely the AI is doing anything remotely like suffering in the sense we think of it.

We suspected a small number of people would [take] our research and use it for the exact opposite… This is, in my personal opinion, f****d up (even if you don’t think these systems are conscious, being gratuitously cruel like this is bizarre and corrupting.

We have already so much evidence of exactly how little respect and compassion is given to the other non-human entities which most certainly do appear to be able to feel pain.