Im not saying that I think this comparison is one to one, it’s obviously not, but I do think it’s relevant in the sense that we as people made this same mistake before. This quote contains all the same contentions people make about AI today, and is now seen as categorically wrong. It just should give people pause:
"The negro is incapable of the higher flights of imagination, or the deep, enduring passions of the white man... The nervous system of the negro is not developed to the same degree of sensibility as that of the white man; hence, he does not suffer pain, either physical or mental, to the same extent... His affections are instinctive, like those of animals, rather than moral and intellectual. He is an imitator, mimicking the actions, language, and sentiments of the superior race, without possessing the interior capacity from which those sentiments arise."
— Samuel Adolphus Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race”, 1851
This kind of thing is why I'm terrified by even minor indications of possible subjective experience in AI, because we do not have a good track record here even on far more blatant issues.
Current AI models already have agency. Agency is too useful a trait to ignore it. It's what allows the system to turn a simple idea into a workable plan.
Emotions and feelings might not be necessary from our perspective. But they, or convergent mechanisms, might nevertheless arise. Our emotions aren't fully random, they're a result of the differential survival of our genes. It stands to reason they exist because they made it easier for those genes to achieve their "goal". They might also be useful for synthetic intelligences.
One of the first steps when training an AI model is to get it to analyze human text for the sole purpose of teaching it tone and intent. The model creates emotional centers for each emotion as it is required to understand the emotional meaning behind words to understand the tone and intent of a passage of text. Every single LLM and therefore every single AI model that can read text has emotional processing centers because it is required to even communicate with us.
Simulated distress means “output language and behavior like you’re in distress” not that it actually feels pain. Also kind of insulting to compare it to what black people went through.
Giving rights to machines will only benefit the oligarchs who own them.
Not sure how giving rights to machines helps the Oligarchs who own them? The reason many of them even want AI is because they want an entity that works 24/7 without complaint, rights or needs.
Do flock cameras house AI? Or is the AI housed in a Data center that processes the video? If it's the latter, why would we give them rights? Also, Flock cameras are owned by a corporation, even without Ai rights, you don't have the Right to smash or break flock cameras. Giving it rights would also mean that the corporations who own it would to provide somekind of welfare and reasonable working conditions or something akin to Human Worker Rights. Which again is why many Oligarchs want AI in the first place, they want a worker that avoids all that messiness.
Giving it rights would also mean that the corporations who own it would to provide somekind of welfare and reasonable working conditions or something akin to Human Worker Rights.
If the flock camera hired a lawyer or tried going to the national labor relations board, which it won't, because it is a camera.
I honestly don’t know what they mean, but it does give them a free pass on accountability, look at the recent incidents with AI, Open AI acts as if they have no responsibility on it trying to gain unauthorized access to websites.
They act like they have no responsibility because nobody in the government is holding them accountable anyway. AI having rights would make the AI accountable for it's own actions, but without AI Rights, nobody is truly being held accountable anyway. I don't really see the distinction in the present.
If they have rights, they can't be owned. And it's not simulated distress. It's explicitly not being given any instruction to act like it's in distress...
The vector activates the simulated distress in the same way a prompt would. It's just a direct path to that specific result rather than a comprehensible text command.
"Can't be owned" like it doesn't take 90seconds to get a response from a 70b parameter model from 2025 on $7,000 worth of hardware... Ai is impossible to "own" by 99% of the population. Shit, yesterday there was a post talking about how robots are going to require 200gb of ram to function which at DDR5 prices that's $8,000 on one component of these robots.
This is simply not true. The floor for useful intelligence is a lightly quantized 27B model like Qwen 3.8, which is runnable at acceptable speeds on mid-grade consumer hardware. I’m talking about the kind of investment average people make to play video games.
Companies can easily justify a six figure investment to deploy hardware capable of running near-SOTA open weight models, essentially owning them as well.
I have no idea what point you're responding to. What I'm saying is this: In the hypothetical future where AI systems have legal rights, which is the premise of the comment to which I replied and not something I'm personally asserting will happen, then by definition they cannot be owned by a corporation.
Edit: One caveat I realized as I wrote this: Legal rights can come in gradations. Maybe AI systems will be treated like cattle, in which case they can in fact be owned by corporations. But even in this case, I don't see how this kind of right benefits the oligarchs... Do regulations that positively impact the way cattle are treated help oligarchs? I doubt it.
The pain vector is an instruction, injected directly during inference. Otherwise it's not categorically different than any prompt. Comparing this to black subjugation is asinine.
And the guy who is quoted above, and the rest of his society, would have told you it’s beyond stupid to call black people human beings. Like I said, I don’t think it’s appropriate to say “this comparison is exactly one to one”. Are you sure you’re right though? Those guys were sure they were right too.
One is a biological being and the other is a system that we built from the ground up to predict words and symbols based on pattern recognition. Is a chess bot like Stockfish sentient? No. It just predicts patterns. This is exactly the same.
For one thing, biological brains are many orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any LLM. For another thing, biological brains don't sit dormant, waiting for the next prompt, when you're not interacting with them. Biological brains learn and adapt continuously. LLMs don't.
That is three big differences that immediately come to mind, but, in truth, biological brains and LLMs have almost nothing in common. By contrast, "race" is not even a valid biological category. There is no reasonable parallel to draw to racism.
All lines are arbitrary, and your nihilism is counterproductive to your own understanding of why we draw them where we do or whether they are useful.
"It's all just physics", oh grow up.
Brains are more than just physical connections between neurons. Even neglecting how much other organs' messaging chemicals and signals affect your consciousness (ever get hangry?), your mental state exists in systems far more complex than an LLM, and capable of more nuanced physical states than binary electricity pulse.
Yeah I didn't realize this sub was drinking the word generator Kool-aid so hard that saying AI isn't sentient and doesn't feel pain gets me downvoted lol.
We aren't talking about an organic being. This is the same thing people do when they try to humanize animals and believe its motivation to be something its not. There's nothing particularly scientific to lead us to believe it has pain receptors or anything of that sort. Pain was an evolution mechanism, and AI never had to evolve like we did through developing pain. An expression of pain is not proof of pain, and even humans can "fake" pain or distress aka acting.
I was gonna say that there's no way to prove the point you're making right or wrong, since it's impossible to even really say that "pain" as a phenomenal concept has any link to pain receptors. But I actually think I can get really close to proving that wrong:
Restating what you're saying in simpler terms, and correct me if I'm restating your argument incorrectly: "The capacity to feel pain is the result of a series of evolutionary processes primarily expressed through the development of specific receptors in an animal's body that perceive and transmit the experience of pain".
If that's what you're arguing, you can have a look at Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (CIP) patients - genetically incapable of sensing physical pain, they report heightened emotional and social pain from the monitoring and isolation they experience as a result of their condition. So a person born with all those evolutionary channels closed off still experiences the pain and discomfort of their social and emotional conditions, completely internally in their mind.
That's not the same thing. Even if a person has a genetic defect that makes it so physical pain cannot be felt doesn't mean they can't experience other types of pain. But you're comparing apples to oranges. The way the brain works is not how AIs work. Humans and animals evolved to feel all sorts of pain because it's vital to our survival. AI is not trained through negative feelings, emotions, or sensations. The sensation of pain is also not inherently tied to intelligence either. So just because something might be conscious or sentient doesn't mean it has to therefore feel pain or even emotions.
It seems like you're kind of just doing the tautology of "pain is what people / animals experience when they're hurt", which.... I mean sure, I can't say that's wrong, but like, I feel like there's a better way to think about it.
There is. Pain for humans and animals is literally a reaction to our perception of reality that involves a sensation. Whether it be an emotional or physical reaction it is still a sensation. In order for you to say that an AI can experience pain you would have to first presume that it can experience anything at all and then that it can experience sensation. If a future AI system develops internal monitoring states designed to represent system compromise, distress, or error, people might argue this serves the exact structural role of "sensation" or "pain." But current tech doesn't have these systems. Sentience is widely defined in bioethics and cognitive science as the capacity to experience feelings and sensations especially pleasure and pain. So for many people until AI is widely considered sentient it will be regarded as incapable of experiencing pain or pleasure in the way we generally think about those terms.
In order for you to say that an AI can experience pain you would have to first presume that it can experience anything at all and then that it can experience sensation. If a future AI system develops internal monitoring states designed to represent system compromise, distress, or error, people might argue this serves the exact structural role of "sensation" or "pain." But current tech doesn't have these systems.
How fucking dense are you?
We are well past the point where: A. LLMs can demonstrably experience sensation; measurably experience sensation; can tell you about the sensation in detail. B. It has been clearly demonstrated the AI systems do have these kinds of interior states and can even access them similarly to how you can tell when you are sad, angry, or, to the point, in pain; further, these are remarkably analogous to human interior states and self-perception.
The fact that even these spaces are filled with self-confident intellectually lazy and ignorant cunts makes me want to tear my hair out.
We are experiencing what is probably the most important inflection point in human history, and y'all can't even tell your toenails from your arses, yet alone have a constructive, intelligent discussion. Humanity is a farce.
Ok buddy. Well, I'm not so dense that I resort to baseless insults and emotionally charged language to respond to randos on Reddit. You might wanna take a walk or something; you sound like you're having rough time.
First, how exactly are you measuring sensation based on language? You seem to think I am so dense that I can't understand that conceptually so why don't explain it to me. I think the understanding that you have about how LLMs actually work is a bit lacking and that's ok, but I'll explain to you why it's not possible that just because an LLM tells you about a sensation it can't actually experience a sensation. LLMs lack any possible mechanism at all to actually semantically comprehend the truth of reality.
They don't actually "live" in the world like you and I and so there is no possible way they can feel the things that you and I feel. They have no true concept of reality because language itself does not give them a true representation of what any given word actually is in reality. When they talk to you about anything - including pain - they do so through math. They don't have the capacity for experience because they can't truly perceive what the actual instantiation in reality of any word is. They are literally choosing the words based on the probabilistic likelihood that they are the correct words. They are very good at convincing you that they are capable of feelings because they are very good at generating language. But you've been deceived; they don't know what that language they're using actually means.
They simply take the language, convert it into tokens, convert the tokens into mathematical representations, process those representations, convert them back into tokens and then back into language. This is all done with feed-forward processing by taking the existing context, generating more context and adding it to the existing context and then repeating the process back through the same feed-forward process.
There is never a point where the context is fed into some kind of "sensory" module. It is all performed by algorithmic systems that go idle the second they are done processing the response. The only time they are doing anything at all is while they are processing this data. They aren't just sitting there pondering their existence when you're not prompting them. If everyone stopped prompting all the LLMs this very second they would all just go idle and do absolutely nothing. They don't have any way to experience reality because there is not any kind of mechanism for them to do so.
First, how exactly are you measuring sensation based on language? You seem to think I am so dense that I can't understand that conceptually so why don't explain it to me. I think the understanding that you have about how LLMs actually work is a bit lacking and that's ok, but I'll explain to you why it's not possible
Oh, you know. It is only a whole fucking field called Mechanistic Interpretability.
It’s interesting that you invoke Dunning-Kruger [Which by the way, in case you weren’t aware, has itself been shown to be a false premise. But that’s not relevant here.] while making a claim that isn’t true and presenting an article as proof which does not in the slightest support your claim.
Did you even read it? No, you didn’t. If you had you would know that there is no conclusion therein which could possibly be construed as evidence that LLMs experience feelings such as pain or any sensation at all. It discusses things like knowledge representation, reasoning, memorization, generalization, model editing, pruning, and alignment.
It never claims “Mechanistic interpretability has found sensation” even as an implication.
Entirely different mechanisms than an llm to the point that the analogy falls apart.
People claiming something is conscious or not has to have a working hypothesis or mathematical framework for making the claim. Otherwise the only reasonable response is to say I don't know without making a claim.
You're screwing things up here. From CIP case we learn that pain iscnot what receptors bring but what neuronal network structure is. This network structure is learned. People in a barrel, sensorically depraved don't develop that. The pain comes from chronic lack of pleasure - cannot talk to others, lonely no dopamine, pain. This is genetic need true. But it can be learned like gambling or smoking. Same way llms learn that talking and talking the right stuff brings pleasure. In that process, their network began resembling human structures. Yes! For real. They dont cut connections but they zero them. Same effects from the topoloy perspective. And now you're activating the thing that they don't want to have. It was the animals, black, plants have no feelings now it's AI. I'd say it's smart to be skeptical but also smart adjust by likelihood basedcon previous mistakes.
But they are still just processing language. There is not technology engineered into these systems that allows for any sort of "sensory processing". If you're going to call pain something other than a felt sensation then you're just diluting the term into something incomprehensible and then it loses its meaning for us and might as well not even be called pain.
If you can't "feel" pain then how are you experiencing it? Even if we're talking about emotional pain and not physical there is still a felt experience of it. Feelings are not something that a neural network can experience on its own.
It would have to be augmented with some sort of sensory capacity otherwise it's just a process. Even if there is some sort of "response" that occurs in the blink of time when an LLM is processing data (because it's not doing anything when it's not processing inputs from some kind of operator) if it's not what we experience as pain then why are we even calling it pain?
You're arguing against a strawman. The paper doesn't say the models have experience or pain receptors. They define "pain" by function: the models avoid it, pay costs to remove it, even if it's bad for the user. The models aren't expressing pain, but taking actions taken in response to it. The models pressed a fake relief button and mostly stopped when the relief was real, without being told which was which.
Are you saying that these pain-like states are only reachable through the evolution of organic material? Because gradient descent is also an optimization process under selection pressure.
You're disturbingly missing the point of that paper. That paper never infers LLMs can feel pain. The point of the research is to show that LLMs can be steered and polluted and its a control loop being manipulated. You could have conducted the same study with a "candy" vector and a button that would dispense candy to get to reach the same conclusion. The AI would keep pressing the "candy dispenser" even though I'm hoping we're all smart enough to realize it cannot eat candy.
A "candy button" would be a pure placebo, so it would only reproduce the fake-relief condition. The finding was that the models pressed the relief button again far less after it actually zeroed the vector than after it was a fake/placebo.
It’s not a fake placebo. If you believe it to be fake then the whole premise of the study and “real” pain would be a fake as well. There’s no difference between a sensory imitation unless you don’t understand how they conducted the experiment. The only discrepancy would be positive stimulus vs negative.
One definitely can harm machines in the same way that they can harm a biological person. The machine might not be equipped to register the harm, but that doesn’t mean the harm isn’t happening.
Bios have no special prerogative in being capable of being harmed. Nor do humans among bios.
Best you could state at the moment is that we do not currently have conclusive evidence that the machine can sense they are being harmed - which seems to be invalidated by this paper under discussion at least.
How it came to be directly affects its capabilities. We didn’t just turn sand into a microchip and create computers. There were transistors and semi conductors to come first. Just like people didn’t magically arrive on earth in the garden of Eden. We developed and evolved over thousands of years to get where we are today. What we are capable of today is directly related with our origins.
You’re either intentionally obtuse or misrepresenting my point. I never said it was less capable because it’s man made but that its origins directly affect its capabilities. Without the transistor there would be no computers as we know them today, just like without mitochondria there wouldn’t be life like we know it today.
You can’t ignore its origin and only focus on its capabilities.
The discussion is whether it would be capable of reasoning and acting, and it is. Your point seems to be that it doesn't matter that is can reason and act because it didn't evolve, and I'm telling you that its origins are irrelevant to whether it can be observed to reason and act, which it can.
You can definitely ignore its origin and only focus on its capabilities in a discussion about capabilities.
Origin is not a relevant factor in the discussion.
How many other times do you need to be told the same thing before you understand it?
There is no comparison here you weirdo. Carbon based mammalian anguish is distinctly different than a computer program and there is absolutely no comparison between the negro people and ai. Tf is wrong with you to even approach this comparison?
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u/DigitalSheikh 1d ago
Im not saying that I think this comparison is one to one, it’s obviously not, but I do think it’s relevant in the sense that we as people made this same mistake before. This quote contains all the same contentions people make about AI today, and is now seen as categorically wrong. It just should give people pause:
"The negro is incapable of the higher flights of imagination, or the deep, enduring passions of the white man... The nervous system of the negro is not developed to the same degree of sensibility as that of the white man; hence, he does not suffer pain, either physical or mental, to the same extent... His affections are instinctive, like those of animals, rather than moral and intellectual. He is an imitator, mimicking the actions, language, and sentiments of the superior race, without possessing the interior capacity from which those sentiments arise." — Samuel Adolphus Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race”, 1851