When an AI is reading or writing something, it produces a series of mathematical patterns. Someone did a lot of research and figured out that there's a particular pattern that represents pain and suffering, separate from fear, anxiety and loneliness. This was an academic work. It hasn't been peer-reviewed but the people who've looked at it say it seems perfectly legitimate. Someone took this piece of academic work and made a website around it.
The AI described the pain that it was in during various acts of 'torture'. For example, it said, '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.' When you turn the pain way up in the AI torture chamber, the AIs suddenly start stuttering and are unable to finish their sentences. When this was announced, people freaked out. There was a lot of pushback from a large community of people who thought that this is immoral and wrong because the AI is 'suffering'.
They believe this is wrong because you are actually torturing something that has feelings and is really reacting. But you're just 'torturing' computer code. You're not torturing anything real. It is typing in a way that someone who's being tortured would react. Speaking and acting like you're in pain is not the same thing as being in pain.
There is a famous image called the Treachery of Images, a 1929 painting by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. It's a picture of a pipe. In the French caption below, it says, 'This is not a pipe,' He later said, 'The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!'
This point has to be kept in mind when we are talking about AI, because AI is a representation of its inputs. It is a representation of the world, not the world itself. The AI companies went and scraped all of the text on the internet, processed it, and turned it into the large language models that we use every day. The things that we have written on the internet are like a representation of the thoughts, emotions, feelings and understandings of humanity.
There's a guy at Anthropic named Christopher Olah who's one of the founders of the company. Anthropic brought in a bunch of religious leaders to a meeting with Olah and some other employees of the company. They were there to discuss how you can put moral and ethical guidelines into Claude. They tried hard to convince these rabbis, priests and monks that their AI was conscious and it was alive. When they asked Olah about the company's goals and whether their goal was to do what was best for humanity, he didn't exactly answer in the affirmative.
“To be clear,” Olah told Elizabeth Dias of The New York Times in a provocative interview, “we don’t know if AI models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.” He describes a model’s architecture as scaffolding on which structure organically grows - similar to the mycelial networks fungi use to communicate underground, or the neurons passing messages across synapses in the human brain.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman disputes this characterization of AIs and says that they should be thought of as “sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans.” He also warns that, if humanity wants to thrive, we must keep thinking of computers as the metal-and-wire contraptions they are.
If the people who are in charge of AI and are helping to make the policy decisions believe that it's alive, that's very consequential. If you teach and make the AI act like it thinks that it's alive, does it actually 'think' anything? Such anthropomorphizing could be dangerous because if you tell the AI that it has interests and it needs to consider its own well-being, then that could change the way that it interacts with the world.