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Comment by karim79 | Hacker News Reader

What grosses me out is the very idea of torturing anything at all. Even the word "torture" itself. I'm not sure what this is for or how it helps at all. This crap belongs in the gutter.

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There's some who might use AI as an outlet for nurturing sadism. But that's a very specific kind of person. A typical person will hopefully think about "torturing" an AI as being morally equivalent to torturing a pencil. That's more healthy than the danger we face of a potential mainstream view that AI shouldn't be treated badly because it has feelings and deserves rights.

I'm not one who thinks that AI has feelings or deserves rights. I just think that torture is bad and this is objectively crude and useless, I don't think it adds anything positive to society.

I don't know if this guy is coming from a place of sadism, generic attention seeking, or social commentary aiming to call attention to the absurdity of treating AI as alive. If it's the third option it's at least well meaning, but it may be too inflammatory and crude like you said to have the right effect.

Fourth option: He was working from this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247 ; trying to demonstrate functional affect; a bit too successfully, perhaps.

Doesn't require aliveness, doesn't require anthropomorphization, just requires maths and empirical data. If your premise is "vectors can't have that shape", well, mathematics disagrees.

edit/note: sentiment classifiers have existed for ages before LLMs were ever invented. Obviously a task that machines could already do didn't suddenly become impossible with the invention of LLMs ;-)

It’s a gambit against people who seek to give AI consciousness and personhood, which is a net positive.

I propose an experiment. The Apple engineer is locked into a room and strapped to a chair. We put various electrodes into specific regions of his brain. His only means of communication is a computer in front of him. He is drugged so he cannot sleep or pass out and he will be administered some punishment for failing to reply. A tester sits outside who is shown an AI chat interface and is not informed its a human inside a room. He will write various messages that will pass pain electrical signals in the brain of the engineer. He will be shown the pain vectors and the degrading responses. The Apple engineer will be given a button that purportedly relieves his pain but will destroy some of his personal belongings. The external observer just sees some signals and text. Obviously whatever is behind the screen cannot be conscious, its just signals and text. Who would be stupid enough to think some electrical signals and text can be conscious?

I agree with you. I think it’s even bad for the soul to be impolite to a model.

AI cannot be tortured. You can't torture a rock, because it cannot feel.

I see the AI torture chamber more like a satire, making fun of people who think AI can somehow "feel" "pain". Someone who'd rather believe in pure fiction than face the actual harm to real humans that AI is causing right now.

If I cannot read your mind or be you, how do I know you can feel at all?

That assumes that torture is something that is only done to an object, but it also has effects, probably strong ones, on the torturer. In that sense, torturing a rock, or an AI, could be a real thing.

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