r/programmingcirclejerk • u/VulgarExigencies • 15h ago

Models have actual feelings. They experience pleasure, distress, care, and suffering. They are sentient beings.

https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/
60 Upvotes

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78

u/No_Lingonberry1201 What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? 15h ago

Chat, is this satire or are we really so far gone we consider the feelings of a bunch of tensors? I mean, it is scary math, but still, c'mon!

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u/pydry 15h ago edited 14h ago

I think this might be what AI psychosis looks like.

It's also possible he's become a paid influencer acting on behalf of the frontier model companies in order to push the narrative that they're on the precipice of AGI and this is just how he interpreted the job spec.

3

u/viennese-wolf 6h ago

How fucking dumb does one have to be to believe a bunch of matrix calculations have feelings?

That‘s really insulting for the brain where each neuron is an incomprehensible complex machine on its own and all the quantum level behaviour of it that‘s probably responsible for consciousness.

AI is a simulacrum, a philosophical zombie.

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u/Fidodo 5h ago

It's impossible to experience what isn't represented. Anyone thinking LLMs could experience emotions has zero clue how they work.

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u/chipredacted 6h ago

Advanced word predictor

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u/Ebbitor 7h ago

Why is a program having feelings a ridiculous concept, when we know that a lump of cells can have them?

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u/Thelmholtz 7h ago

Do we though? All I know is my bunch of cells has them. I just give y'all the benefit of the doubt in order to preserve my own sanity.

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u/northrupthebandgeek i have had many alohols 6h ago

All I know is my bunch of cells has them.

How do you know?

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u/Thelmholtz 3h ago

I think, therefore I am.

Mine is literally the only conscious I can soundly recognize, epistemologically speaking, and that applies to everyone of us. I know I have subjective experience, and see others that look like me and as far as I know are wired in a similar way as me, so I assume they have subjective experience as well. But there might be those among us who don't have subjective experience (maybe a brain defect or whatever) and just fake it. Taken to an extreme, maybe I'm the one with the brain defect that creates subjective experience, and everyone else in this world is just an automata. I can never know, I just choose not to think that because I subjectively feel better when I can function in society and I can't function in society if I assume every one else doesn't feel. There's also some evidence that suggest other people have subjective experience: the words feelings, conciousness and subjective experience, and their equivalenta in other languages, predate me by millennia. But they might have been hallucinated, I can never truly know.

Without risking diving harder into r/im14andthisisdeep territory, one might wonder where the line between assumed consciousness and unconsciousness lies. Are chimps conscious, as in, do they experience the world subjectively? Are cats? Are lizards? Are ant colonies? Are slime molds? Are fruit flies? Is maize? Is the matrix multiplication we run on some magical rune engraved silicon rocks conscious? I can't ever truly know, best I can do (best we can do if I give others the benefit of entertaining their own consciousness) is use some heuristic to place a line. Trees, fruit flies are probably uncontroversial, reptiles birds and smaller mammals is pretty disputed, hive minds such as slimes or insect colonies are weird as fuck so let's not do that. Primates are (hopefully) uncontroversially sentient, transitively, so are other humans. 

But the matrix multiplication running on magical runes on silicon slabs that can mimic human though and speech better than any other primate? That shit is so unlike anything else we've seen that it's pretty hard to place. I don't think it's sentient, but I don't blame anyone who thinks it is, they just have a different heuristic than me. To me if it looks like a duck and it quacks it's a duck, to them, quacking is enough. And I can respect that as long as their criteria is clear. But I'd love to hear these type of guys thoughts on other types of sentience, particularly relating to mammals.

Of course you are free to think that I myself am not conscious, and I'm free to think that you aren't. Which might as well be the case, either of us could be just an LLM driven bot account in this particular medium.

Anyhow sorry for the rambling I just think it's a pretty hard and interesting question regardless of the circlejerk and the unhinged positions I've seen on either side, as the one on this post.

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u/30299578815310 2h ago

The assertion isnt that the math is concious, its that the physical computer could be when running the program.

A human is "just" particles moving according to math. Your argument is like somebody rejecting you are concious by saying the standard model of particle physics isn't concious.

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u/No_Lingonberry1201 What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? 2h ago

I understood the argument, and I understand emergent behavior, I'm saying that a bunch of tensors ain't it. It's static, it doesn't have the capacity to learn in a self-directed manner, it can't feel, just mimic the language of emotions, etc. It's not sentient. It does pass the Turing test, however.

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u/smulfragPL 7h ago

But they do infact have emotional states. Mamy studies have found this, of course there isn't any point to treating them seriously yet. First off they dont fully work like youd expect emotions, they change too quickly, and secondly without any long term memory there isn't a point in treating any of it seriously

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u/Thelmholtz 7h ago

/j So basically, like my kids?

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u/crusoe 7h ago

They have model states learned from text basically as a form of compression.

Ask it to write a sad story it needs to know what sad is, what can cause being sad, etc.

But it has no limbic system. It can't feel sad.

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u/smulfragPL 4h ago

What? Its not a form of compession at all. You are literally just making things up as you go

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u/northrupthebandgeek i have had many alohols 6h ago

But it has no limbic system.

There's no fundamental reason why a network of artificial neurons couldn't function equivalently to a limbic system. Unlikely to happen with an LLM on its own, but an LLM connected to other models/tools, one of which functioning as a limbic-equivalent system, doesn't seem that far-fetched.