After the post about a GitHub repo being taken down with a “torture chamber” for LLMs, we have had many comments discussing the ability for LLMs to feel pain. While I think it’s good that the repository was taken down (I will explain below), I consider it ridiculous to give any meaningful weight to the idea that LLMs feel pain. If you think that LLMs can feel pain, it means that deleting a model’s weight from your hard drive is akin to murder. Why? When an LLM is “active” its weights are stored in VRAM on one or more GPUs, ready to receive a prompt and start predicting/computing its answer. VRAM is a type of GPU memory (HBM2 or newer these days) that stores data, in this case model weights, in a way that the compute cores can have fast access to it. There is no meaningful difference between VRAM and a harddrive in my opinion for this ethical discussion. Although one requires electricity to actively store data, they ultimately are similar data storage devices, meant for different purposes. If you believe an LLM can feel some sort of “pain”, this means it is some sort of being that is experiencing something. That means that in its active state it is capable of “experiencing” something when that is happening. That means that when the LLM is actively loaded, it is an “experiencing” entity. Removing such an “capable-of-experience entity” is murder or at least killing. Therefore, deleting an LLM in its active state would be a form of killing. However, since LLMs are not continuously active/aware, its “active state” is actually simply its model weights being stored in VRAM, with an endpoint that can start computation. But as I argued, I consider it irrelevant what type of storage device currently holds the model weights. Therefore, deleting an “active LLM” is no different from erasing the model weights from you file system. We have therefore reached the situation that when I download someone’s huggingface fine-tuned Hentai LLM to my laptop, realize I don’t want this in my life, and delete those model weights to free up disk space, I am killing or murdering the LLM. Now, I find this a ridiculous notion, and since this ties into the “pain” experience, I say that it is ridiculous to think LLMs can experience pain. Note, this reasoning holds for the idea that LLMs can experience anything, not necessarily just pain. As for the github repo being taken down. This is good but for other reasons. LLMs communicate in a similar fashion as humans. Humans experimenting with “torture” and experiencing this is bad and something I would not want to encourage as open-source software. Lastly, this opinion may change if a new type of AI is built which is a form of “world-model” that is continuously active/experiencing, but as it stands: LLMs don’t feel pain in any meaningful way. submitted by /u/StockLifter
Originally posted by u/StockLifter on r/ArtificialInteligence
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