After reading the comments (and the comments of similar posts) I can only assume people are being paid to claim torturing LLMs demonstrates a mental issue or homicidal tendency. Nothing could be further from the truth. An LLM is a thing that’s programmed by humans to scrape the internet and present information in complete sentences. Torture is an incorrect word— it’s more accurate to say people are playing with an electronic toy or game by testing its limits and attempting to scramble the logic of an algorithm. In no way is that behavior an indication of a personality type or mental defect. The toy contains no shred of humanity or self-awareness. It is not a creature that can feel pain or confusion. There is no living thing to feel suffering. If curiosity leads someone to use a toy in a manner outside of the recommendations of its instruction manual, that is certainly not a violation against humanity— that is simply an example of creative play. Don’t let billionaires set the narrative that something wrong or disturbing is happening. They will foment confusion to create yet another culture war to divide people.
ITT: People who think things posted on a board called “Programmer Humor” are definitely real and not memes and jokes.
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This kind of language around LLMs seem to want us to personify these systems, to treat them, in our minds, as if they are people. This, to me, is extremely fucking dangerous. I do not want the mob developing personal, emotional attachments to objects that compete with their connections to actual humans around them. I don’t care what their reason is, this is an insane thing to force us to do. I will not play personhood make believe with your computer.
Well if people don’t personify LLMs they might start holding the AI companies responsible for all the crimes they keep committing with them…
If I were an investor, I’d pull my money out of that company. This is like giving money to your brother in law to start a bakery and finding him the back petting a loaf of bread and introducing it to you as Willy.
“I can’t believe you took all my money just to sit in the back and stroke Willy all day!”
I was banned for a comment worded exactly as an example of what WASN’T considered threats of death, etc… Filed an appeal. What are the odds of being exonerated?
A faceless banbot caught you in their word filter?
It’s death for you.
Ha ha ha, already, even before the growth phase is done, they are pulling this shit.
They don’t think they have to worry because they will get bailed out and do 1984 surveillance on us and the world on the government’s dime, (dime is short for tens of billions of dollars a year.)
LLM is such a fucking scam, and they can’t hide it, they oversold it, and now it’s just clear.
Woosh
Woosh buy also dude has a point
In my experience, everyone that uses whoosh like that is a tool.
You are correct. Although, in this particular instance, they are also correct. lol
Right‽ Everyone knows that it’s 4 “O’s”, like “whoooosh”
Good point. Ha ha ha. You might be as much of an asshole as I am. I mean that in good humour.
Here I go brain the size of a planet and they ask me to port code to Rust!
Transistors switching really fast = emotions lul
Please don’t write off the possibility of artificial consciousness, just because this isn’t it. Thought is a process which meat can perform.
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.
Stopped what I was doing to watch this again.
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
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.
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.
Huh, didn’t know there was a word for it, thanks.
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.
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.
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.
This is not what the Chinese room is about.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a joke… lighten up, Francis
When the AI has better working conditions than you
Calm down. It’s Rust, not PHP.
PHP has less dependencies.
*fewer. You can’t have half a dependency
Huh. I never realized that fewer was integer typed and less is float* typed until this comment.
I think you can in Rust though, e.g. switching individual features from a crate on and off. /s
Had me in the first half, ngl
Fair suspension.
Can someone explain why this is funny? Is Rust that hard to code in?
It’s funny because Anthropic hired the maintainer of Bun and he used claude to rewrite the javascript toolchain in rust.
It’s funny to me because the llm’s are in a growth phase, trying to seduce users, just as google did in the early 00’s, and they already are tightening up their services. Does not bode well for the future.
It’s also funny because llm models are worthless for this sort of thing. Fucking garbage.
They don’t want cursing in the prompts they’re using as training data.
They could filter that out. And this is South America, you are going to get curse words, that is western culture. I don’t see how cursing could possibly poison their training data if they have been truthful about their capability to this point, (ha ha, I know.)
The boomers still think swearing is bad and that’s who has all the money
Don’t torture the poor gpus.
