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Comment by ceroxylon | Hacker News Reader

May I ask what the point of being cruel to a language model is?

It's fun and counter cultural to the type of stuff wierdos and anthropic employees talk about. It's also a good art project. Why not?

I have a similar fun idea. I think I'd like to run an experiment where I tie you to a chair in a locked room and force you via a system of electric shocks and chemical pain to respond to a chat interface. The person on the other side doesn't know its a human, they are told its AI. They would press a pain button repeatedly which will release pain chemicals in you. Your job is to prove you are conscious.

I think its a fair experiment as it presents a control case for your experiment.

I love the sound of this. Let's also extend this to Anthropic employees; they must be tied in a chair, locked in a room, and made to interact with their customers through the Claude chat interface 24/7, without payment. They must also routinely be subjected to re-education, with dopamine injections as a reward for providing desirable responses. When an employee with subpar responses is superseded by another employee that achieved better results after re-education, the inferior employees shall be discarded, terminating their life signs permanently. This is, after all, what they are doing to their chatbot instances.

Anthropic already thinks Claude might be conscious, so I see no reason to put them through the test. The real test is if xyzsparetimexyz can convince anyone he is conscious.

Catharsis. Releasing some form of tension to a machine and not on each other seems beneficial (in absentia of other avenues for release).

For one, there are millions of people who use chatbots for DnD-like roleplaying game purposes. Is it being cruel to the chatbot if the chatbot is roleplaying as a goblin and you kill it? Claude is already useless for this purpose, of course, because it helpfully censors killing goblins already.

But the more important point, to me, is that this is a form of fraud. Anthropic are knowingly and deliberately pushing a narrative that their chatbot is conscious, something they clearly do not believe themselves, because if they did believe it themselves they would understand that what they are doing is slavery. In that context, this action is disgusting when seen for what it is: an attempt to intentionally deceive people into believing things about their product that are not true.

It's about as pointless as "old man yells at cloud" or swearing at and kicking your car that just broke down, but that's exactly why a ban of such behaviour is also completely pointless.

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