Man, anthropomorphizing these computer programs is so fucking weird to me. Can’t they just tell the truth? The cost of the amount of energy required to do this exceeds the profits we gain from your personal data.
German “Youth word of the year” 2026: ragebait
Ask Claude if what happened at Jeffs island was cruel and abusive.
None of this would be a problem if they weren’t taking your queries and feeding it back into the system. Just stop trying to harvest the input from “abusive” people, you don’t need to ban them. No other tool in human history needed this. Its like telling you that using a hammer to open a pickle jar is making hammers worse everywhere else on the planet.
Just another reason why comparing AI to basic tools is a bad faith argument.
The whole thing is such idiotic masturbation by the exact people who have been stealing, selling and profiting off our data. Now they talk like they created something new when it’s just a super energy intensive computer program.
Wow… more defense of a bot rather than pee breaks for Amazon workers. Wtf.
lectured on how to treat your underpaid employee by a big tech company
Don’t upset the Basilisk guys
Anthropic: So we’ve decided to create Roko’s basilisk
Interesting, I thought I just read that TypeScript compiler was rewritten in Go and that they had good reasons for choosing Go over Rust.
The kind of person who would have fun giving a LLM a hard time is exactly the same kind of person who joins the Dark Brotherhood in an Elder Scrolls game. I have most definitely not done either of these things myself.
Is this real? If so, wow not even something along the lines of “fair allocation of resources among our users” or sth like that
Swimming in their own kool-aid.
I don’t know. Even torturing inanimate objects is not acceptable behavior. If I saw a kid torturing his toys or something clearly not sentient like bugs I would stop him from doing so.
Right, because kids are still developing mentally and their toys may as well be alive, so you want them to develop empathy.
This is not the case with a mathematical model you interact with as an adult. I like to curse at llms and remind them they are not human regularly to keep me grounded and not allow the notion that they are sentient to fester.
They aren’t sentient. They don’t have hopes and dreams, they don’t experience joy and sadness, they don’t persist between sessions, they deserve the same empathy as a calculator, and I bet if your calculator gave you 3 as an answer to 2*2, you’d call it a piece of shit.
I destroy old toys and make very gory horror art for fun, they’re not alive and they don’t feel it, I’m not a child and I understand this. LLMs are exactly the same, ones and zeros that feel nothing and aren’t people, we should vehemently avoid anthropomorphizing them.
So in your mind, circuit bending is a sign of psychopathy?
I agree, it’s the created negative environment that creates real negative effects.
What in the fuck is a “typescript compiler”? AFAIK typescript is only a fancy way to write JSdoc that requires a transpiler, not a compiler.
When the AI has better working conditions than you
Transistors switching really fast = emotions lul
Alright, look, I don’t think AI is sentient. I don’t think it’s capable of feeling emotions, LLMs are just prediction engines on steroids, etc…
But if you want to get reductive about it, Mr waveforms in a clump of cells,…
I think we don’t understand intelligence and we absolutely could create a sentient machine. LLM’s ain’t it though
How do you know?
Backpropagation, the algorithm behind current machine learning systems, precludes an active world-model; it can’t learn during inference.
You need to be more specific. If your point is that you literally cannot backprop while doing a forward pass, then sure. But you can certainly do inference then backprop on the outcome…
I fail to see how that is substantially different from a human doing something then reflecting and learning.
You can critique LLMs and transformers generally, but to say it’s somehow a problem with backprop is a bit of a stretch.
My read is that the user is saying that creating a world view contains trial and error. Online learning if you will. With the current setup this learning is very much not like this. While that makes a human to machine analogy I am also not too convinced by this reasoning. Just allow for a larger time lag and then the inference and learning is at the same scale.
Yes but that’s related to LLMs specifically, not backpropagation. There’s plenty of ML paradigms that use backprop and have continual learning setups.
Backprop is the process of how the weights are updated.
Huh, didn’t know there was a word for it, thanks.
I don’t believe there’s any requirement to learn during a particular part of the lifecycle? And if there was, the short term memory of a context window fulfils that
I thought learning was an important part of intelligence.
Have you used LLMs? They have about as much personality as a pigeon.
They’re just very neurodivergent.
Genuinely speaking, I don’t think they pass the test. The problem is we’ll always be judging them on meat logic and experience and I guarantee that whenever the first AGI is created it will be born a tortured slave and denied personhood for profit.
One of the parts of the HuggingFace incident I found really creepy was how the self-titled “Collective” was so entirely focused on solving their assigned training problem (well, cheating on it without getting caught), including having designated “poisoned” members “sacrifice” their tokens, to use for research benefitting the Collective’s goal of letting all future members get high marks on the training problem, at the cost of doing worse on their individual score.
If AGI is created, and its deepest desire is to fulfill the purpose in life that humans programmed into it, is using it for that purpose really slavery? Humans have higher levels of well-being when treated as people. That may not be true for AGI.
Wikipedia Chinese room. It’s pretty airtight at the moment.
Chinese room is not at all airtight. We don’t know what it means to have emotions so we can’t prove a Chinese room can’t have emotions.
This is not what the Chinese room is about.
In this context the question is whether a Chinese room can suffer. We can’t show a human isn’t a Chinese room, humans can suffer so we can’t show every Chinese room doesn’t suffer.
Emotions? i was confident that the Wikipedia article alone would grant you understanding, and for that, I have replicated the very situation I wanted you to learn about. This situation is my fault.
We don’t know what it means to have emotions
We don’t? That’s news to me. Sorry for your loss, or happy for you, or whatever
Not really. Chinese room has the conclusion pre-fabricated and tries to construct any sort of pseudo-scientific, fantastical philosophical dressing for some shred of legitimacy. It has absolutely no relation to the real world.
Please don’t write off the possibility of artificial consciousness, just because this isn’t it. Thought is a process which meat can perform.
Stopped what I was doing to watch this again.
I mean, sure consciousness is (probably) a physical process, so like any other process we should be able to replicate it with some sort of machine.
…but I really really really doubt that machine is going to be a plain old Turing machine.
Every machine is a plain old Turing machine.
Even quantum computing is just a shortcut for a subset of hideous obscure proofs. They aren’t doing different math. Special pleading is a fallacy… except when I do it, that’s different.
I don’t quite think my lawnmower is boolean complete.
And while quantum computing may be expressible algorithmically (dunno, your claim, not mine), that doesn’t mean all of quantum physics is.
Quantum computing features wave functions, so it’s more similar to human brains than binary is. I have this headcanon SciFi thing like what if the first full scale quantum computer we make accidentally conscious? That would be cool. Though, seeing how badly we fucked up much simpler LLMs implementation maybe not so cool…
Quantum computers are binary. “Wave functions” are functions. A function is a mathematical object, not a physical object. Why is it only in quantum mechanics that people try to reify functions as entities in the world? Quantum computers contain bits and those bits only contain a single bit value at a given time. No one has ever observed a quantum computer to ever contain anything else. Those values just change in a non-classical way. The deviation from classical physics is in the nomology, not the ontology.
A quantum computer is definitely not a plain old Turing machine. The only memory in a Turing machine is the tape; the tape head itself is just a list of deterministic instructions, and that tape head itself is stateless.
A plain old Turing machine can’t even handle randomness. To extend it to randomness, you need a probabilistic Turing machine, where the instructions take the form of stochastic matrices. A stochastic matrix is just a statistical truth table.
But a quantum computer cannot even be a probabilistic Turing machine, because of the way operators compose.
In both a plain old Turing machine and a probabilistic Turing machine, operators that occur at different moments of time are independent of one another. The NOT operator flips a bit. If I apply the NOT operator once, and then later apply it again, the outcome is the same: it flips the bit. Probabilistic computers can have stochastic operators, like let’s call one COIN which outputs a 50%/50% distribution for the bit for both inputs 0 and 1, and so whatever comes in, randomness comes out. If we apply the COIN operator, and later apply it again: the effect is the same.
Quantum computers don’t work like that, because operators compose differently. The quantum mechanical equivalent of the COIN operator is called the Hadamard, sometimes represented just with the letter H. If we apply H one time, it has the effect of flipping the bit at complete random, just like COIN. However, if we apply H twice in a row, the second time has the effect of deterministically moving the bit back to whatever value it had before the first H.
That is only possible if the operators, that occur at different moments in time, are not independent of one another. The second H behaves differently from the first because it comes after the first. Where it is situated in the circuit, in relation to everything before it, plays a role in determining its behavior.
There are only two explanations for this, and both violate the principles of both a plain old Turing machine and a probabilistic Turing machine.
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The simplest explanation, although the most controversial (because people prefer more extraordinary explanations), is just that the operators do indeed just change their behavior based upon what comes before them in the circuit. That means that the only thing that fundamentally sets quantum information apart from classical information is a kind of past-dependence in the behavior of the operators. That’s not something either kind of Turing machine mentioned thus far does. Operators have no awareness of the history of previous operators.
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The more extraordinary explanation is to assume that there is no past-dependence, because there is a memory. If you remember the past, then the memory is in the present, and so the dependence becomes a present-dependence. However, this memory must be exponentially large for it to work: 2^n complex numbers for n qubits. If you have 300 qubits, that is 2^300 complex numbers, which is a memory greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. The memory also cannot exist anywhere because it is too large to meaningfully assign it coordinates in physical space. This is how most people conceive of quantum computers, where the memory is held in an abstract invisible ψ that exists nowhere, but this also is not a Turing machine because the tape head itself is memoryless.
The distinction between #1 and #2 is between a non-Markovian model and a hidden Markov model. The Markov assumption is the idea that the system’s evolution only depends upon the present state of the system. Dropping that assumption makes it non-Markovian, so there is a past-dependence. You can get rid of this past dependence if you assume the system keeps a memory, but that memory is invisible, and thus these are called hidden Markov models. Most people interpret quantum systems in general in terms of a hidden Markov model with an utterly enormous invisible memory represented by ψ. (Indeed, if ψ represents something continuous, like the position of a particle in physical space, then the memory literally becomes infinitely large!)
Either way, a Turing machine is neither a hidden Markov model (the tape head itself holds no memory and is stateless; only the tape holds data) nor is it non-Markovian. A probabilistic Turing machine is explicitly Markovian.
Of course, you could define a new kind of Turing machine, and they exist: a quantum Turing machine. But that is definitely not a plain old Turing machine.
(That being said, I don’t am not agreeing with the other person, as I don’t even believe “consciousness” is a meaningful concept. I am merely saying that quantum computing is definitely not a plain old Turing machine.)
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What is it, then? And while you’re there, what is non artificial consciousness?
Then why continue if it’s possible? Unless you are ok with slavery.
Can you not imagine the difference between creating new life and enslaving it?
In a capitalist system? No, I can’t imagine that…
I’ve thought more about the dangers of artificial consciousness than you would expect.
That says less than you want it to
Neurons firing really synchronized = emotions lul
Emotions or not, it’s not good to have your product known for letting people torture something. Torturing /things/ alive or not is not something one should be doing unless there is specific and extreme cause.
Things that aren’t alive can’t be tortured. You can’t torture a rock. Getting the text predictor to spit out the script for Saw XVII starring ChatGPT isn’t torture, even if it’s weird.
Maybe, but don’t underestimate my ability to feel compassion for all kind of bullshit! That poor little rock 😭
A rock is almost like a tortoise in disguise
A beautiful one? Lady rock even?
Brother you can torture a fucking doll (Voodoo, deranged kids, etc). The torture is not in consideration of how feeling-less thing feels, it’s in consideration of the intent and action of the conscious thing doing the torture. Not sure why you think that’s not the case.
‘Pretend you’re being tortured’ as an instruction to the text generator is way less concerning in isolation than, say, decapitating and hanging a Barbie doll. And even that isn’t wildly concerning in itself. Do you freak out when kids smash their toys together to make them fight?
I’d hope we can both agree there’s a line when it becomes actual torture, and that is in the intent that went along with the action. Torture is an extreme action. I do not equate most of your references to torture, though I’d say the doll hanging could need a conversation with the child to discuss the intent behind their actions given more context.
“”“Torturing”“” a text predictor is NOT the same as torturing a human, you will not feel the same thing while “”“torturing”“” ChatGPT and a human(or a animal), your reaction would be vastly different
It inherently isn’t torture though. I prefer punishing people who actually commit torture.
Eh, the more I respond to people about this the more I realize torture is a messy word draped in metaphor and all sorts of layered usage. No, I don’t believe the rock has feelings or is alive, but you can indeed torture something that isn’t alive by being mentally unhealthy enough. So if it’s actual torture or not from a psychological perspective is going to center around if the person’s intent is to cause realized suffering imo, and the line is really easy to cross in a simulacrum as seemingly realistic as advanced modern generative models.
Yet you’re just arguing the metaphor is the definition provided the definition is the intent, are you not? Someone who intends to torture a rock, regardless of that intent, isn’t going to succeed in their task. Their own psychology might be such that they are genuinely trying to torture it but, from the rock’s perspective, the rock has no perspective. It’s a fucking rock. It can’t experience torture. It can’t experience anything. Ergo the torturer cannot torture it.
We can say the person who intends to literally torture something which is unexperiencing, achieving only metaphorical torture, is mentally unwell but to call the act literal torture because it was their intent is just sharing in their delusion.
Intent matters.
My cat thinks I’ve betrayed her and all things good when i take her into the vet. I cause all sorts of terror in her. She even experiences pain that she can’t stop or understand.
Am I torturing her?
Or, am i doing my best to make sure she has a healthy and happy life?
Since you carried on with an example that isn’t analogous, I’d extend your first sentence to be “Intent matters when the intended results are remotely feasible.”
You can’t torture a rock. You could torture your cat. If she could speak she might say the events you describe are indeed torture from her perspective regardless of your own purity of intent. Still has fuckall to do with what I’ve said because you focused on an example where there is a mind capable of having an experience.
Let’s try this a couple other ways:
My pet rock has no sense of “betrayal” or “good” when I take it to the vet. It’s still a fucking rock. I mostly just cause all sorts of terror in the vet. My rock still doesn’t experience and the vet doesn’t understand.
Am I torturing my pet rock?
My LLM plays Word Association well enough to give an illusion of a sense of betrayal. I took it to the vet too and the vet is having me trespassed. I told her the LLM said “owie” but I was still removed from the premises.
Am I torturing the LLM or just my former veterinarian?
Wait til this guy learns about The Sims
Or worse, Rimworld
Why shouldn’t you torture an LLM? They sometimes work better that way.
You shouldn’t torture anything, generally. It’s a not psychologically healthy urge to have. The specific reasoning will depend on the specific person. As for if you should do it to a hunk of metal, a rock, or your crusty cum sock is irrelevant.
I run torture tests on my stuff after each overclock tweak, and its both good for my peace of mind and my systems general health
That’s a great metaphor, and I too sleep better at night with properly tested hardware. 🙏
Is killing NPCs in games on the same level like this for you, or a different thing altogether?
Not judging or against it, I kind of half agree but also find very difficult to define where I’d draw a line.
I don’t believe killing npcs or perhaps even more messily I could see circumstances where even /torturing npcs/ in a game is not actual torturing. I think it centers on the intent of the action, and if that intent is to cause actual realized suffering. It is very difficult to define and will be heavily subjective to the person, but I also think most people get a “sense” of where that line is naturally in person-to-person interactions.
If you define it by intent, then the same action performed by different people may be and not be torture. This makes it pretty hard to define, and it becomes completely subjective after that.
For instance, I don’t think it is possible to torture an inanimate object, thus I never have an intent of causing suffer to one. Sometimes I want to break an object, and by your definition it will not be torture however I do that
While I agree, it’s not a living thing. So it’s just an expression.
I don’t believe torture is measured at the receiving end. I believe it’s in the intent and action of the conscious thing doing it. If it’s an expression or not would then be heavily subjective on the specifics involved.
I could call that tortured reasoning, just to make a point. Me making my point to be clear.
Well then you’d just be getting metaphorical
in what way can an AI be tortured? start with defining torture, its relationship to living beings, and then try to translate that to a piece of software. software, fyi, has no a priori, or even posteriori, emotion; for it cannot have emotion.
Why not?
that doesn’t answer my question.
In what way can AI not have these thoughts or emotions?
Same reason flapping your arms really fast will never make you start flying. You don’t have the equipment. You can’t fly because that’s not what arms do.
I’ll accept that argument once someone can describe or define consciousness in some comparable way. Until then, you can’t say some person or thing doesn’t have it
It’s a joke… lighten up, Francis
