How much of this post was written by LLM?
If the NN outputs deviate from a target value, its states is going to be modified. If the weight are (sufficiently) modified, future inference will be different. It's behavior will be different.
This trained the NN to avoid some behavior, and toward some other.
Why on earth would you relate this to torture though, rather than to (say) the everyday experience of looking at a thing and realizing that it's different from what you expected? The ordinary activity of learning?
Out of all the billions of possible kinds of experience that could happen to a mind, and change that mind, you chose "torture" as an analogy for LLM training.
And I'm saying, no, it's less like torture than it is like ten thousand everyday things.
Why torture?
I assert that it is not similar to torture; it is similar to reading.
I assert this just as strongly and with just as much evidence as you have offered for it being similar to torture.
What evidence would we collect to decide which of us is correct?
If this were true, then all perception and cognition would count as pain. Are you asserting that? Are you and I torturing one another right now?
What leads you to believe that there's "a process akin to torture" going on anywhere in LLM training?
Here's a sequel hook:
The "demon world" isn't the demon world; not originally anyway. It's the world of memory; of individual and cultural remembrance. Its landscape is full of old and significant things. It was largely taken over by Gwi-ma (at root, a recursive shame-trauma loop) due to how many shameful traumatic memories humans have generated.
But putting up the Golden Honmoon turns out to be a bad idea, because it cuts people off from memory and history. On the "demon world" side, the demons are indeed starving: but on the Earthly side, the humans are, too: starving for meaning, as they fall into anomie, alienation, numbness, rootlessness, and increasingly vapid lyrics.
Our kkachi horangi (tiger and magpie) friends show up mangy and tattered ...
Think about this from a far-future perspective. For a few short generations of human history, photography and then film and video were evidence. Before that time period, they weren't because they didn't exist: the only way to get a picture of something was to make it by hand, drawing or painting. And after that time period, they weren't because they were too easily faked.
This seems like it should have knock-on effects for Eliezer's "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs", which relies on When Prophecy Fails as a source.
Seems like a lot of the low-hanging fruit would be in preventing (or healing) disfiguring diseases and injuries.
Really, it's all downhill since Canter & Siegel invented commercial spamming back in '94.