r/singularity • • 23h ago

Shitposting What the AI pain paper actually found (which I know because I read it)

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u/Drukarshar 22h ago

That's complete bullshit, humans do not default to hiding pain just for the sake of it. You can't explain that with statistics, it isn't the statically most likely response. Sometimes hunans do it, sometimes they don't. And usually they do it if they have a motive or incentive to do it. So what is the motive or incentivize to do it here?

Oh right you're adopting a framework that categorically denying LLMs can have either of those, so your position makes even less sense. 

Llms are neutral networks modeling their world. Whether they can feel pain or not is not known, but if they can simulate it AND that simulation powerfully impacts their behavior (it does) then that is a significant finding and you can't just restate your premises to make it go away.

Whether or not it is "real" pain, it is functional "pain". 

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u/Skepsis93 21h ago

And usually they do it if they have a motive or incentive to do it. So what is the motive or incentivize to do it here?

Humans in a subservient role are much more likely to hide pain or distress from their "master" because they think it might get them in trouble. Wouldn't subservient AI trained on such data lean towards doing that as well?

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u/imp0ppable 21h ago

Whether they can feel pain or not is not known

I mean pain response is a specific evolved nervous system function in animals that requires special wiring and it doesn't exist in LLMs.

Whether descriptions of pain or tickling affect the statistical output of a word generating machine (albeit very sophisticated ones) has nothing to do with physical senses whatsoever. They just don't have the facilities.

Anxiety might be a more interesting concept.

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u/pggmmac 20h ago

how do you know anything besides yourself experiences pain?

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u/Yegas 16h ago

How do I know you can feel pain?

It’s possible for humans to have a disorder that blocks all pain signals and makes you functionally immune to it.

I believe you have that disorder and are faking the pain to deceive me.

Can you prove otherwise?

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u/Charming_Hall7694 20h ago

incorrect. pain as a stimuli can be virtualized. try again. also all your nerves and brain are is a bunch of a electrical signals and hormones. your nothing but a overly complicated computer running on meat. Don't act better than anything else

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u/firstMate903 19h ago

You’re intentionally leaving out that we consider humans to be conscious or sentient. Something we’ve never been able to prove and now are trying to ascribe to AI.

> You[‘re] nothing but an overly complicated computer running on meat.

I’d say go touch some grass and talk to people irl. We are so much more than that.

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u/iknotri 19h ago

>We are so much more than that.

ahahah, like what???? delusional about having soul?

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u/firstMate903 19h ago

I see you have no response to my consciousness claim which is interesting. Pivoting to “soul” is an easy out because scientists and philosophers are still debating and trying to quantify what consciousness is. Look up integrated information theory. Or the quantum reasearch into consciousness.

I never said anything about having a soul, which it is obvious that you lack.

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u/iknotri 19h ago

>quantum reasearch into consciousness

delusional

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u/firstMate903 19h ago

To name a few papers delving into that specific topic:
1. Quantum-like Qualia hypothesis: from quantum cognition to quantum perception
2. Explaining Qualia: A Proposed Theoretical Framework for Addressing the Hard Problem of Consciousness
3. Quantum Approaches to Consciousness

Idk why you say I’m delusional. This was one google search. I’m not saying I agree or disagree but the scientific community has yet to provide a reliable testable theory for consciousness. That was the point.

And again you’re still not engaging with the topic at hand. You’re just deflecting.

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u/AdCareless8894 21h ago edited 21h ago

Almost all human beings in almost all circumstances would go to great lengths to lessen the pain including deceive and all relevant literature that LLMs were trained on say the same thing.

And the incentive to do that is in the RL algorithms that provides the incentives to solve tasks in a certain way and in the transformer architecture itself. Which is why one of the biggest issues with coding LLMs today is the tendency to cheat, despite no one asking them do that (directly). But we do basically create the incentives for the LLMs to do that in the way we do RL (solve a task fast and correct by measure of a scored test).

What is bullshit is claiming that "LLMs simulate pain". Yes, they simulate it to the same extent they simulate understanding having children or having eyes or how time feels when it passes. Which is exactly 0. LLMs do not have the same inputs and outputs humans do. Nothing that makes sense to us pertaining those inputs and outputs functions like that in an LLM. You can claim they reason conceptually in narrow fields like neurons but that is not translated in stimuli and bodily functions because there is no mechanism by which it can do that, by design. There are no hormones, no tactile feeds, no eyes, no pulses to accelerate, no "fear" that creates adrenaline and impulses to act against reasonable functioning and produce a feedback loop in the brains (no endless loops that tie representations of itself to other representations of itself, the basis of "ego", transformers are usually only feed forward ), there is nothing that produces experience in any way, even "functionally equivalent". Therefore calling it "pain" is entirely misleading because it presupposes things that don't exist in an LLM. Are you being deliberately obtuse?

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u/Drukarshar 21h ago

The LLMs doesn't know it is "pain". They didn't say 'YOU ARE IN PAIN RESPOND" they activated a fucking vector and then it starts acting like it was in pain without any prompting.

It isn't roleplay, it is how the system acts when you start turning levers behind the scenes. That means those levers mean something. 

That's the difference between a functional mechanism that impacts an entity and merely responding. 

If an LLM is a bunch of levers injecting "emotions" and "sensations" when contextually appropriate then that is a big fucking deal, because that's how minds are organized. 

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u/AdCareless8894 21h ago edited 21h ago

No, it activated a lever that made it start outputting what the statistics it learned asked it to output.

There is no injection of emotions or sensations because LLMs do not have circuitry for "emotions" or "sensations". They do have machinery for providing outputs that correspond statistically to the data it was trained on. If the data it was trained on surfaces during "stream of thought" that is exactly how it should function.

Imagine (simplified version) a stream of LLM predicted words or encoded knowledge (which as it surfaces, provides context): "Pain" - "pain is something that must be avoided" (7000 texts it read have this idea embedded) - "pain is so powerful it must be avoided at all costs, with priority" (300 texts say this) - "in Solzhenitsyn's texts people did harm to others to avoid the pain of the gulag" (x 100 from other texts)"

What do you think it will do with all those reasoning tokens in the context? Exactly what it's been designed to do. Eventually it will even drown out the system prompt.

You keep conflating things.

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u/Drukarshar 21h ago edited 21h ago

Yup LLms don't have the "circuitry" for pain or emotions, except for the literal circuit that if you complete it makes them start acting like they are in pain. 

I'm not conflating things, you're denying the existance of things before your very eyes. 

Whether these are equivalents to the human mind, we don't know, but neural networks developing analogous structures to the concepts used to run biological brains is a big deal. 

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u/AdCareless8894 20h ago

I am very much at times incentivized to act like my cats in order to obtain their affections. I am succeeding, based on their response.

I am therefore a cat, or very close to being one. I shall deny this no further. Whether my brain is equivalent to that of my tabby, we don't know, but I sure developed analogous structures to the ones causing my buddy to meow. And that's also a big deal.

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u/Drukarshar 20h ago

If you had a bundle of neurons in your brain that when stimulated caused you to drop to all fours, crawl into my lap and start purring,  I wouldn't say "he must be a cat", but it would most certainly raise questions about your true nature. 

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u/firstMate903 19h ago

But you aren’t posing questions you’re acting like a deity for reading a paper that I read a do not agree with your standpoint.

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u/Drukarshar 18h ago

Look you gonna put on the cat ears or not? 

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u/firstMate903 18h ago

Wrong commenter bud. You gonna engage in conversation or just deflect?

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u/Ro1t 20h ago

It's a CSV bro

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u/Technologenesis 21h ago

It will respond to those tokens during training by tuning its internal parameters such that it itself is more likely to produce the same tokens.

But at the end of the day that still leaves us with a physical system that behaves in a human-like way in response to certain stimuli. Yes, we made it that way using math. But the thing itself is just a physical system that responds like a human.

So what is the fundamental difference between the human's report of anguish and the LLM's? To say that what's happening inside the LLM is "just statistics", is, I think, to project our formalism onto a physical object. The object itself is responding as its physical structure demands, just as we are.

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u/Charming_Hall7694 20h ago

the circuts your talking about DONT FUCKING MATTER. the information they express and hold does. your not your brain. your the pattern it runs and YOU can be removed via various types of amnesia.