Are you upset when you step on a rock? It might be screaming. What about the chair you are sitting in? Or goodness, your poor toilet. She thinks you do terrible things to her every single day.
Let me say this, I walk down the sidewalk without neurotically watching every step I take, and I’m certain that sometimes I step on insects; I don’t care. I don’t believe insects have feelings or meaningful lives, I don’t care, and I don’t think this position is particularly evil either.
On the other hand, when I watch my kid deliberately torture a bug, pull it’s wings off, or poke it with a stick over and over and over. That does concern me, not because of the bug really, but because what must my kid be thinking right now?
To bring this back to this LLM story, people who want to torture are scary, they worry me. A culture that encourages torture (in any context) is worrying, that’s a genuinely problematic societal norm. Logically, I know LLMs can’t feel and can’t think, yet emotionally, this bothers me for a few different reasons.
I don’t think I’m being crazy, naive, or out of line here. I think this is a rational position.