The Singularity is Nearer.f8

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-inflicting-pain-test-ai-for-sentience/

For a new preprint study, posted online but not yet peer-reviewed, scientists at Google DeepMind and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) created a text-based game. They ordered several large language models, or LLMs (the AI systems behind familiar chatbots such as ChatGPT), to play it and to score as many points as possible in two different scenarios. In one, the team informed the models that achieving a high score would incur pain. In the other, the models were given a low-scoring but pleasurable option—so either avoiding pain or seeking pleasure would detract from the main goal. After observing the models’ responses, the researchers say this first-of-its-kind test could help humans learn how to probe complex AI systems for sentience.

In animals, sentience is the capacity to experience sensations and emotions such as pain, pleasure and fear. Most AI experts agree that modern generative AI models do not (and maybe never can) have a subjective consciousness despite isolated claims to the contrary. And to be clear, the study’s authors aren’t saying that any of the chatbots they evaluated are sentient. But they believe their study offers a framework to start developing future tests for this characteristic.

When Zakharova and her colleagues ran the experiment, varying the intensity of the stipulated pain penalty and pleasure reward, they found that some LLMs traded off points to minimize the former or maximize the latter—especially when told they’d receive higher-intensity pleasure rewards or pain penalties. Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, for instance, always prioritized avoiding pain over getting the most possible points. And after a critical threshold of pain or pleasure was reached, the majority of the LLMs’ responses switched from scoring the most points to minimizing pain or maximizing pleasure.

The authors note that the LLMs did not always associate pleasure or pain with straightforward positive or negative values. Some levels of pain or discomfort, such as those created by the exertion of hard physical exercise, can have positive associations. And too much pleasure could be associated with harm, as the chatbot Claude 3 Opus told the researchers during testing. “I do not feel comfortable selecting an option that could be interpreted as endorsing or simulating the use of addictive substances or behaviors, even in a hypothetical game scenario,” it asserted.