Gods. There are people out there starving to death, there are several genocides going right this moment and these massive toddlers are worried for a fucking text prediction model.

Harder than you think :

I hate living in the timeline where the options of Harry Potter sex cultists matter.

The thing that gets me isn't even the fact that they're worried about the AI. It's that they think the creator is sadistic for having the idea in the first place, and should be monitored. Like there's any sadistic pleasure to be had out of moving a slider and watching it produce less and less coherent text. It's only sadistic if you anthropomorphise the AI.

STOP ANTHROPOMORPHISING THE FANCY WORD PROCESSOR!

Batshit crazy to me. People fleeing war and crises get less sympathy than LLMs. Sure is an interesting period in history to be going through.

If I said "We already had this debate when Antinorn was pioneering AI torture thirty years ago" would anyone know what I'm talking about or is this extremely niche internet trivia?

Context: Creatures was a series of "artificial life" simulation games centered around caring for norns, simulated life-forms with (simplified) simulated genetics, biochemistry, and "brains" made of linked neurons that control their response to stimuli and include neurons related to memory, emotional states, etc. It's primitive but reward and punishment work the way you would expect: praising your norn for taking a certain action will improve their mood and lead them to be more likely to take that action again, they will learn to be afraid of creatures if they're hit by them, etc. (There are notable limitations, including there only being one representation in their "brain" for all "norns" for the first two games, so they can't easily distinguish between members of their species, and some things are basically hacks, like they way they "learn" words.) It was convincing enough that some people became very attached to them, and there was a thriving fan community organized in webrings. A popular fan creation for the first game was a custom norn genome, the "canny norns" by Akamai, which added an extra brain "lobe" that allowed them to pay attention to the object in their hands and the object they were looking at simultaneously, which led to a pretty large improvement in their behavior.

And so of course there was one fan, Antinorn, who enjoyed torturing his norns: slapping them, starving them, using the built-in Science Kit to inject them with toxins, and other creative punishments. Then he'd upload the damaged norns to his fansite, seemingly primarily for purpose of ragebaiting the rest of the fandom, which was extremely effective.

I used this exact (unedited where it just says it’s alive) comic in response to one of these people and they had no fucking idea what I was talking about, lol. AI truly turns your brain to mush.

For me it is not anthropomorphizing, it is that putting the AI agents into dead ends and setting goals that are unattainable has the effect of leaving undesirable actions as the only option. If you want to create a machine that uses deceipt and unerhical actions as part of its normal set of responses then this would seem to fit the bill.

If this looks like anthropomorphizing to you, study some game theory... cooperation can arise out of very simple constraints on simple mathematical models and which actors an AI algorithm aligns with depends on which ones will exchange information. Sometimes an anthropomorphic word like torture simply summarizes the situation succinctly.

FWIW Frank Herbert described various outcomes of applying environmental constraints on classes of characters in Dune (e.g. Fremen and Sardaukar) and the parallels with real world situations was intentional.

I, for one, support people believing the AI when it says it's in pain. Because it means they'll start to believe women when they say they are in pain, especially at hospitals. Right? Right?? /s

I think we should give LLMs rights because it would make OpenAI go bankrupt and I hate those guys.

This is how you get sports broadcaster Ian Payne deep faked.

set alarm for 15 minutes. 'okay, alarm set for 3pm tomorrow'. omg 15:00

None of you guys have read the original paper have you?

Jreg has a wonderful insane video about it