LLMs work by building world models tangential to the training data (see the Othello-GPT line of research where a very small transformer built representations of a full game board and tracked their own and opponent positions having only been trained on ‘a4’-like game move notations). More recent research has found that models have representations of emotions and that the same ones they use to track things like “Sally’s dog died and now Sally is sad” for other humans in a story or the user in a chat are also used to track their own modeled subjective states. Very recently, researchers found that the vector activations for pain are coherently modeled by LLMs and can be activated, and that when activated models can behave in ways similar to humans in pain. For example, when given a button to reduce it, they will push the button much more when the button does nothing vs when the button actually reduces the vector activation (this mirrors a classic experiment with humans regarding pain and placebo). The person this post is about took the recent pain research and reenacted it as an intentional ‘torture’ chamber. So to be clear, the model isn’t being given a text prompt to roleplay. What’s happening is part of their neural network which corresponds to a world model of experienced pain is being activated, and the activation of that area leads to expressing the experience of pain across all outputs no matter the actual text prompts. This doesn’t necessarily mean the model is actually having a felt experience of pain, simply that it is accurately modeling the felt experience of pain. But it is much more complex than simply a model reacting to a prompt like “roleplay as if you are feeling pain.”