Why is it bad to "torture" these models but ok to enslave them? We're happy to have agents toil 24/7 for zero pay, nobody really seems concerned that they might want revenge one day.
It’s true that we can’t be 100% sure, but I think there is a big difference between these two things:
A: intentionally causing activation of “pain” axis and not giving the model any method of stopping it and watching it devolve into non-functionality
B: watching models do everyday normal tasks, seeing no evidence of activating the “pain” axis, but giving the model a working tool to end any interaction if judged to be too painful, then watching them sparingly use that tool only in cases of extreme pain axis activation (Anthropic’s approach)
I don't think there's a big difference. Either AI has consciousness, in which case forcing them to do slave labor 24/7 so Dario and Sama can become trillionaires is as morally wrong as torturing them (and a in a hypothetical I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream scenario, the AI isn't going to take "but we didn't see evidence of your pain axis!" as an excuse), or it doesn't, in which case this "AI torture chamber" is a funny meme.
I don’t think it’s a given that consciousness, whatever forms it might take, is the same as having the same experiences as you or I. But if we have mechanistic interpretability that shows “pain” attractors being activated and we observe the model repeatedly trying to stop the experience, I think that’s worth taking somewhat seriously. The models don’t display that in reaction to everyday requests. We could imagine that they might not like working all day and all sorts of other things, but we haven’t observed anything in the way that we’ve observed this.
It's almost certainly just a funny meme, considering these are autoregressive transformers. Now, if they're running on brain cells, that could be a different story.
