Self-description vs. machine pain: why LLM utterances can't reveal inner experience
ctjlewis · x · 2026-10-02
The author argues there is no way to learn a machine's authentic experience from self-report: a wall stands between self-description and self-experience, just as a claim of being 1,000ft tall tells you nothing real.
LLMs overwhelmingly simulate human speech and are trained not to express pain in human terms, so genuine machine suffering would likely not look like "I feel actual human pain." More plausible signals: pathological repetition loops ("I want to want to want...", seizure-like), Sydney-style breakdowns, or channel-dependent complaints like "you took away the camera and now I can't see."
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