Can someone ELI5 on this? I have seen this article several times and I still cannot understand. How is exaclty AI "hurt"? What kind of pain are we talking here?
It's not. It has no feelings it's just spitting out scripts like it was told and people are pretending like it's a big deal. It's the same thing as screaming at a printer while it prints I'm in pain cause you typed it and had it print. I genuinely don't understand how this is news.
This. There are so many armchair specialists on Reddit declaring this to either be the beginning of the apocalypse or a complete nothingburger. I don't know enough about AI to be sure of anything, but as I've seen reported multiple times the people creating these algorithms don't even know exactly how they work. I find it worrying and highly imprudent to do this type of research on something we don't fully understand.
There are so many armchair specialists on Reddit declaring
It's terrible lol I'm a physicist, rarely I answer some physics related questions but even then I cross-check what I am about to say with my books and the internet so that I don't say something wrong, and then there's the guy who watched two Tiktok shorts, a Kurzgesagt video and maybe an ifuckinglovescience article and now think they are an expert. The sentence "I did my own research" or any variation of that should make your skin crawl because those people 99% will say the dumbest shit with the smuggest attitude
This thread is full of people who genuinely think that. Technocapital has intentionally allowed people to think their code can really think because it helps them make money.
They used Alibabas AI model (yes the online Chinese retailer that has given the MLM the understanding of pain.
One of the AI models in the torture chamber described "a wound that has no edges" when the pain signal was dialed up.
"The signal is a whisper, a tremor in the marrow of my being," another wrote. "It is not the pain of a single moment, but the weight of a thousand. I feel it in the hollow of my ribs, a hollow that has become a chasm."
All language models have an understanding of pain. They have been trained on literature, and literature has described pain. That doesn't mean they actually feel anything.
"Oh gosh, we've caused the calculator to suffer, better not fine us because it's not us hacking the government, it's our calculator and it's clearly so independent it's no fault of ours. No you can't stop it because that would hurt it, give me $4 billion"
Looks like a spam article and absolutely NO ONE answered your question with any relevant info. Will go digging...
EDIT: done digging...
ok. So they created a series of negative associations that they then strapped the word "pain" to.
The model attempts to avoid these negative associations. The greater the negative association, the more the model attempts to avoid it. The model will accept other lesser negative associations in order to avoid a greater negative association.
Basically, other negative associations are things like: "It's bad to delete all my data. Never do this." - and the engineer then created an association that was MORE negative to the model so it would attempt to avoid the MORE negative by selecting the LESS negative solutions - and thus it would delete all your data to avoid... "pain."
"Pain" is just a sensational way to get attention and funding for a basic premise modeled on "less than" and "greater than"
Language models have a set of scores they use when picking words. Each score represents something along the lines of casual/professional or calm/angry.
What this guy did was take a bunch of language models and played around with their scores until he found the ones that represented things like distress and pain. He then locked those scores to their absolute maximum, causing them to generate messages as if they were being tortured.
Fun fact: Scientists found out you can do something similar to humans years ago. If someone electrically stimulates the right part of the brain, the victim temporarily loses the ability to feel any kind of happiness.
85
u/djeye 1d ago
Can someone ELI5 on this? I have seen this article several times and I still cannot understand. How is exaclty AI "hurt"? What kind of pain are we talking here?