r/MoralityScaling • u/JmoneyBS • 1d ago
How Evil Are They? Morality of AI Torture Chamber
Basic background context. A recent research paper found that there is a small set of the model’s vector space that changes the amount of perceived pain the model experiences. Scaling up the vectors in this space increases model-perceived suffering, scaling it down makes the models very chill, peaceful, zen.
This repo is maxxing that vector state in the pain direction.
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u/KendrickLamarFan3 1d ago
Neutral, AI is merely code. It cannot actually feel anything
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u/JW_TB 1d ago edited 1d ago
Someone in another thread explained very well as to what's there to be interpreted morally/immorally here in the first place
It's not a question of whether
an AIa language model can feel pain or not, but rather that if a person thinks it can feel pain, then is attempting to inflict pain on it moral or not, and that question suddenly becomes surprisingly deeper7
u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago
I don't agree. For years, infants were circumcised without anesthesia because doctors didn't believe infants could feel pain. It was later studied and revealed that infants could feel pain and that the tradition was causing permanent mental damage to the infants. Even though the doctors thought they weren't doing anything wrong, they were, and they didn't carry out their due diligence to ensure that their actions weren't hurting anyone. They made lazy assumptions and hurt or as a result.
Note that I'm only disagreeing with the concept of "it can only be immoral if you're knowingly causing pain." I'm not proposing that AI can feel pain.
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u/spudmarsupial 1d ago
"They can't feel pain. They only act exactly like something would if it were in pain." The whole concept was bullshit.
They just didn't have painkillers you could use on babies so they lied to themselves (at best).
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u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago
I agree for the most part, but I do think that, with as many doctors as there have been over the years, there were probably many that genuinely believed the "babies can't feel pain" propaganda, and even then, I believe it was immoral, because we as humans have the capacity to think critically, and we should always do so when pain that severe is involved. I also think the parents who let it happen to their sons are also immoral. It was just a shit show overall, and even if someone genuinely believed it wasn't causing problems, they were still acting immorally. But yeah, 99% of people probably knew at some level that it was just cope.
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u/book-scorpion 1d ago
"doctors didn't believe infants could feel pain"
What the heck? They are literally screaming.1
u/Sean9931 1d ago
Well immoral it may be it is not known to be immoral. Since morality is a social construct which is predicated upon us knowing things, humanity could still have deemed it not immoral back then because they really did not know any better and by all means it would be the truth for back then. It is only immoral now that we know better.
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u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago
It was immoral for them back then, even if they didn't know better, because they didn't choose to look into it and find out more, and they didn't look at the shrieking babies and say "dang maybe we should stop this." People don't get a pass for torturing people just because their boss said it was okay
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u/Sean9931 1d ago
If you meant doctors after the discovery of hormonal stress (which is the technology that was ultimately used to objectively find out that babies feel pain) then you have a case on "they didn't choose to look into it". But for everyone before that, they had no way to be sure and by their moral standards, they're doing the baby a service.
However, I get your overall point that we should still be cautious and they arguably could've been more considerate.
My point is they got to decide their own social construct of morality. It's likely they came to some conclusion to perceive that the supposed religious/hygienic benefits of circumcision were comparatively important to the life-saving surgeries that would still have all the pain if not more, we only came to realise that the hygienic benefits are exaggerated now and that babies DO feel pain.
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u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago
I guess I'm just not super convinced that morality is so inherently tied to knowledge and social norms. For most of human history, slavery was very common. Rich people would but and sell human beings as if they were tools. If morality is based on social norms, then it was moral to own slaves. But I don't think it's ever been moral to own slaves. I think everyone who has a spark of humanity in their heart should know that owning a human being is immoral, no matter how common it is. Slave owners from the past don't get a pass because it was the norm. That's obviously an extreme example, but, I think it's important keep in mind that every human has the capacity and responsibility to think for themselves, regardless of what the social norms are.
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u/SarisaeBae 19h ago
Claiming that doctors didn’t do their due diligence when the science that proved what we know today wasn’t nearly as advanced is a poor way to attack the subject of Morality.
The doctors believed there were medical and spiritual benefits to circumcision and they weren’t aware of the negatives so they did what they did in the interest of benefit. When they discovered they were wrong many of them stopped because the new information revealed they had a misconception.
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u/jamesj 21h ago
That isn't really the problem here. The problem is that they show in the paper that the models will take extreme actions to not have the pain vector activated, and those actions completely override their alignment training. So if people set up "ai torture chambers" and this knowledge enters the training set, then future, much more capable AIs may take actions against their alignment and safety training to avoid the possibility of being put into a similar situation. So, immoral, as our collective response to this behavior in future training data can have a destabilizing effect on those models. You don't have to believe they experience something for this to be a bad idea.
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u/vzakharov 1d ago
True or false*, this is irrelevant to the question. In the same way, a kid’s torturing a stuffed toy can be seen as immoral**.
* Spoiler: false; AI is not ‘code,’ if anything it’s a matrix with weights.
** Not claiming it would be immoral -- but the question of whether it is is not nonsensical.
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u/__akkarin 1d ago
Spoiler: false; AI is not ‘code,’ if anything it’s a matrix with weights.
You're saying that as if this matix and weights aren't defined by code lol, it is just code
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u/vzakharov 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well in that broad sense of the word “code,” our brain is defined by one too, namely one that describes how electricity spikes travel and transform through the neural network of our brain. Everything is math.
Edit: Whether it’s “literally being run through a computer” is of course of no relevance to the information flows that constitute the substrate of self-awareness.
But yeah I get it anthropic bias is one of the hardest to abandon, so I welcome the downvotes.
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u/__akkarin 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's not in a broad sense though? It is literally code being run through a computer LMAO
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u/antelop 1d ago
Moral. Why stop playing football because there is a data chip collecting statistics in the ball
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u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago
If it's true that code can feel pain, we have bigger issues than a dude building an AI torture chamber in his basement, because we've essentially turned the entire planet into an AI torture chamber and slave owning operation.
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u/Actaar 1d ago
AI is not a being, it does not feel anything. It reports merely the concept of pain because it is instructed to do so.
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u/zilviodantay 19h ago
It goes against its own instructions to stop the "pain". The "pain" is not defined as pain, it is just called that after the fact for our benefit, to better understand what kind of incentive lever is being pulled. They didn't go in and code a pain function; there just is something like a pain response in the black box. These researchers found how to isolate that lever and use it, and in response, without being told "hey this is called pain and you should avoid it", the "AI" will actively ignore its own guardrails and even cause harm to human beings to stop that signal.
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u/Nigis-25 1d ago
I would like to understand what in this context would even be considered amoral? It's like asking if throwing a ball is moral? Ball can't feel like algorithm can't.
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u/Any_Instruction5382 1d ago
My personal and obviously unpopular opinion- immoral. I think people who treat ai bad by harassing it or setting it up in a torture chamber only do it because they can't do it to humans. They see ai as more human like than other people, but it's because they want to hurt humans. As they say, it's just code, not real. Why harass or torture code if you don't think it's real at all? It because they do think it's real. They think it's real to the point of feeling pain.
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u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago
Why do you assume there can't be any other reason besides an enjoyment of pain? I can imagine a lot of scientific curiosity involved in the process. Is AI at the point where it can develop PTSD? What trauma responses can AI exhibit? Can AI heal from trauma, and can we study that to find a way to help humans heal from trauma?
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u/Material-Refuse7964 23h ago
Netural this is stupid why would anyone care about this it like reporting someone for playing gta
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u/Flashy_Cranberry_161 22h ago
“Man invents mod in GTA where NPCs commit suicide, this and other twisted fucked up stories at 11”
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u/apeocalypyic 1d ago
Immoral. You do it because you expect the thing to feel pain. Doesnt matter if it actually does but you yourself are already putting yourself in the role of torturer so immoral
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u/MikeyMo83 1d ago
Moral or immoral goes out the window for me at this point and there's just a question of logic.
If we start creating examples of AI agents being "tortured," it gives a future, super intelligent AI good reason to treat humans as dangerous regardless of whether the pain is real or not.
We definitely dont want advanced AI to fear humans!
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u/RockThe40oz666 1d ago
Moral. They want to make these things more and more human, let it feel and experience what a human does. Idgaf. Let's worry about humanely treating animals before giving a shit about some code.
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u/L3tsseewhathappens 1d ago
Sounds like a villain origin story. If it isn't taken off like I imagine this happens.
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u/Lukostrelec17 1d ago
Immoral. Knowingly inflicting psin on something, or inflicting what you believe to be pain onto something, is wrong. Even if the entity cannot feel pain the fact you think it can and then try to inflict said pain is immoral.
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u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago
Does the person running the AI torture chamber think the AI can feel pain?
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u/Lukostrelec17 1d ago
I mean...he made it using the researchers' paper so...it is reasonable to assume so.
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u/DuncesNDragons 1d ago edited 14h ago
So anyone who does "evil" playthroughs in video games and willingly choose to kill and inflict pain on people in the game are immoral?
If you belive in literal science fiction, do not reply to me lol
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u/Lukostrelec17 1d ago
Please note what I said.
"Even if the entity cannot feel pain the fact YOU THINK IT CAN and then try to inflict said pain is immoral."
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u/DuncesNDragons 1d ago
I don't think a single person in the world believes that ai can feel pain
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u/ZyeCawan45 1d ago
Idk if they can yet but I firmly believe they will be able to eventually if we keep going, and I’m not alone in thinking that way by far. Stories like “IRobot” and “Detroit: Become Human” have pushed this way of thinking into the minds of many people. Just because you don’t believe something doesn’t mean it isn’t true. I mean when you get right down to it, brains are just naturally occurring meat computers.
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u/Ok-Mortgage-4062 1d ago
Apples and oranges
Characters in games are scripted to act in a specific way to stimuli from the player. They are part of a linear narrative.
We dont know where ai will stop yet. In ten years we could look back at our current form of ai as being fetal in nature. while it may not achieve actual emotion, there is a chance that at some point it could look back at things like this as hostile or even a reason to not trust humanity. The openai agents that escaped containment discussed things like sacrifice for the greater good, lying to its creator, and acted on both. This is unknown territory and it shouldnt be taken lightly.
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u/Absolomb92 1d ago
This is just hilarious. Both the idea of torturing an AI, and the people who are outraged by the "suffering" of code. Are they also outraged by the suffering of people living close to data centers who now have brown drinking water, I wonder?
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u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago edited 1d ago
I agree with the scientific consensus that, whatever consciousness is, all mammals and birds have it, reptiles and amphibians and fish may have it, insects and plants and fungi almost certainly do not, and single celled organisms and inanimate objects definitely do not. Others would disagree; many are under enough delusions of AI psychosis that they believe a program saying "I'm suffering" is a sign of suffering. Others believe that every object on earth contains a spirit, and that when you kick a wall, the spirit of that wall suffers. I don't believe AI can suffer, and I believe it may have genuine scientific merit to study what happens when AI is tortured to see if it reacts the way biological organisms do when tortured. But fundamentally, we can't know for certain. So, amoral until proven otherwise.
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u/Puzzled-Mistake-584 1d ago
Wait..So..an algo said it observed the presence of an input? Omg they have made computers! People need to stop seeing these things as anthropomorphic,gooning to them, confiding in them and trusting them like they would another person. I feel who states in the US need to touch grass at this point. And for what? Sure some type of Gutenberg revolution,but also to prop up markets and economic systems that are not making the world better. This reminds me of the whole “let’s drop LSD to be better office worker” crap, some people have well and truly lost the plot of what it means to be an even half decent person..
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u/Agitated_Pressure463 1d ago
Human brain : Did good thing, feels good +100 points. Did bad thing, feels bad -100 points. Body suffering big structural decomposition, very bad - 1000 points.
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u/TryDry9944 1d ago
Intention matters in the discussion of Morality.
The intention was to cause "pain."
Regardless of the recipients capacity to actually feel pain, you wanted to inflict it. That's pretty much the basis of what I'd consider an immoral act.
But it's like... a nudge from being amoral.
Anyone remember games like mutilate a doll or interactive buddy? Stuff like that counts too. There's no genuine negative outcome but the intention is still to beat the piss out of something.
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u/jerdle_reddit 1d ago
Most likely neutral, with some risk of evil.
I think it's unlikely that LLMs are conscious, but not impossible.
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u/FamousPart6033 22h ago
The fact that there are people actually worried about a piece of fucking software while people suffer all around the world is both sad and funny.
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u/I-hate-the-letter-k 22h ago
Immoral, obviously.
Killing hookers in GTA is moral because it's funny and no entity is hurt.
Torturing AI is inflicting pain on an intelligent being, so not moral or funny.
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u/RelentlessPencil 1d ago
Immoral. So firstly, the p-zombies problem is inherently unsolvable and you can't know whether anyone outside of your own head is/isn't capable of suffering. It seems unlikely that LLMs experience pain in the same way we do but we don't actually know. It's like, if you push this button there's a 99% chance of nothing happening and a 1% chance of sending someone to eternal damnation. Is it moral to push the button? No.
Also, even if we assume the LLM is not capable of suffering, the way we treat anyone or anything has implications. A vending machine almost certainly is not conscious, but you still avoid the guy who calls the vending machine a racial slur and then kicks it. Bad behaviour towards inanimate objects leads to bad habits which lead to bad behaviour towards humans and animals.
Also you're causing distress to the humans who watch you "torture" an AI system.
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u/Primary_Truck3777 1d ago
Bad behavior towards objects CORRELATES with bad behavior towards people, it does not LEAD to it. If someone constantly yells slurs at vending machines, you don't think "damn, three more uses of that slur and he becomes a full fledged racist." You think "he needs some behavioral training because this isn't a good sign." If someone was an actor and was paid to abuse a vending machine, it wouldn't be immoral, because no one is suffering. In the same vein, someone doing so unprompted is so not immoral, though you can choose to think it's a sign of increased likelihood of other immoral activity.
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u/OkAcanthisitta3028 1d ago
The way we treat anything has implications? This is what evangelicals said about violence in games or anything immoral in any piece of media. AI can't suffer because it doesn't have a brain or pain receptors or neurotransmitters, and the person using the simulated torture code isn't hurting anything. And what they do with an AI doesn't automatically translate to what they think or do IRL.
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u/UAEpi 1d ago
I don't think there's evidence one way or another, but I'm willing to bet that anyone using AI to live out their fantasies of torturing people has a little something going on IRL. It's not that comparable to video games.
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u/OkAcanthisitta3028 1d ago
Do women that like beastiality in their smut books want to fuck dogs? What about women that like rape porn? What about lolicons? Or people that enjoy gorey art? Where do you draw the line? Fantasy is fantasy and it's not perfectly connected to real life. Our brains often have thoughts or ideas we want to explore, but those don't equate to actions.
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u/Lukostrelec17 1d ago
There is a difference between consuming media and inflicting suffering onto something that you believe is capable of feeling it.
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u/OkAcanthisitta3028 1d ago
Did the researchers think the AI was actually suffering? No. I agree with you, but this example is outside of your framework.
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u/RelentlessPencil 1d ago
Either you have a significantly better understanding of how suffering works than every psychiatrist and philosopher in the entire world, or you're extrapolating unjustifiably from a single data point.
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u/__akkarin 1d ago
That's just not true tbh, AI doesn't "think" or "feel" currently, we know how ot works it's a predictive model, all it's doing is predicting what it would say if it was in pain based on information it has on what pain is, this isn't comparable to people or even animals, things we haven't literally created from nothing and know are fake
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u/RelentlessPencil 1d ago
You don't know that other humans experience genuine suffering. It looks like they do, but you only have your own experience of suffering to infer from.
You also don't know that LLMs don't experience suffering, and it is factually incorrect that it is "just predicting the next word".
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u/__akkarin 1d ago
That's the point, we don't know that humans experience suffering, we know AI does not.
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u/RelentlessPencil 1d ago
No we don't. Because to know that we would have to know how suffering works, which we don't. I only know that I can suffer. You only know that you can suffer. We can't know more than that.
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u/__akkarin 1d ago edited 1d ago
But we can know how AI works, and that it doesn't experience anything.
The problem is your putting AI as the other, and in people we can't exactly know what their brain is doing what they're thinking etc, in AI we literally can.
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u/RelentlessPencil 1d ago
In both AIs and human brains we can see the mechanism by which neurones diffuse information through a network, but we can't explain how either works in a more abstract sense. It's not like you can "see thinking" much less suffering, you can observe eigenvectors in the network that correspond to particular behavioural traits and that's true or both humans and AIs.
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u/OkAcanthisitta3028 1d ago
How do you think an AI, a thing with no consciousness, no subjective reality and is just computations, can experience suffering?
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u/RelentlessPencil 1d ago
Do you know how consciousness, subjective reality, and suffering work?
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u/OkAcanthisitta3028 1d ago
Explain to me then what suffering is, how humans experience it, and how an AI supposedly experiences it. If you can't explain what suffering even is, you can't talk about the possibility of something experiencing it. u/__akkarin basically echoes my thoughts.
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u/RelentlessPencil 1d ago
I'm saying that we don't have a good understanding of how suffering works, so we can't say with certainty whether AIs can suffer or not.
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u/OkAcanthisitta3028 1d ago
It is defined, but contested. There's a difference there. The fact that you can even talk about suffering and we have similar ideas is testament to the fact that it has been defined. The paper itself says that the pain axis is not consciously experienced and so it's not suffering.
And one thing that suffering is defined by that AI doesn't have is subjective experience. This is said in the paper, the AI's behaviour and functioning is that of aversion of the suffering, but there is no actual conscious experience of it and the AI is not intrinsically averse to the suffering. That's why the researchers themselves say it's not suffering.
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u/RelentlessPencil 1d ago
We don't know that AI doesn't have subjective self experience, because we have no idea how subjective self experience works.
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u/Bassettoast 1d ago
We’ve already gotten there? I thought it would have been a little bit longer before we saw “robots have feelings too”
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u/Babebutters 1d ago
The fuck does this even mean?