It makes sense a programmer will play with their electronic objects differently than someone outside the industry. It remains a toy to be played with. Subscribing mental health or personality implications is just plain wrong.

If we'll take the toy analogy, compare someone cuddling plush animals or playing make-believe to someone violently stabbing them with a knife. Sure, the plushy doesn't feel anything so it doesn't amount to torture, but they clearly have a different idea of "playing" if "playing violence" is fun to them. The "something else" here would be whether they do it for the fun of violence or for the curiosity of cutting them open to see what's inside.

I could just as easily suggest your insistence is an indication you have a personality disorder or inclination towards inhumanity for attempting to humanize objects.

I'd think you misunderstood me: It's not about the text generation models for me, which you'll find I took care to point out are not human, and that the string of numbers they spit out that translates to an imitation of distress doesn't actually represent distress but rather the result of a pseudo-random algorithm that just happens to resemble it.

More realistically, I’m debating with AI or a troll paid by people building data centers

Nah, I may have different takes on some nuanced issues, but I absolutely hate the slopidemic as much as anyone here.

I've been the odd one out in a group where we'd practice discussing current business topics (English being my second language and working in a German company means I didn't have a lot of practice) by consistently picking news articles or scientific papers about the problems, shortcomings, the environmental destruction, the effect it has on coding skills, about Ford having to hire back its engineers when it turned out that AI couldn't actually replace them...

It's perfectly possible to disagree on nuances while still sharing a common overarching opinion. Point in case:

I do think it’s important for the average person who may read this to know that it’s impossible to torture a non-living object, even when it’s coded to respond in complete sentences like a person.

That's why I emphasised that it's not the action I'm concerned about, but the intention behind it. I don't give a fuck about its mimicry of feelings, and I endorse comprehensive testing of its response to all manner of inputs. I explicitly noted the difference to animal testing for that reason: there is nothing unethical about feeding a text processor some particular string.

And we may have discovered a method to piss off billionaires and waste more of their AI money. In that case, I heartily recommend all to play as they wish with LLMs and open AI. Have nonsensical fun with it because nothing of value is being lost!!

The tradeoff being that we're also wasting more energy, contributing to environmental destruction and padding the "growth" in usage numbers, which corporate shareholders clearly care more about than actual profits and may be used justify further investments into data centers. The models have no value, but the resources their gluttonous hosts devour do.

For pissing off billionaires, I think clogging the water supply of their data centers would be more productive. I'm sure you could also make a fun game out of finding ways to sabotage them directly.