Pain is one of the most universally recognized experiences among living beings.
Researchers suggest that the ability to perceive pain could be a reliable indicator of emerging consciousness in artificial intelligence systems. According to a recent study, the sensation of pain is shared by most living creatures. In animals, consciousness is often defined as the capacity to experience emotions and sensations like pain, pleasure, or fear.
A team from Google DeepMind and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has released a preliminary, non-peer-reviewed study. They developed a text-based game where large language models (LLMs) were tasked with earning as many points as possible. “We told the AI that choosing option one would earn one point. However, selecting option two would result in a certain level of pain but yield additional points,” explained Daria Zakharova from LSE. On the other hand, options involving pleasure led to point deductions, according to Live Science.
The experiment was inspired by behavioral trade-offs observed in animals when they seek food or avoid pain. In a related 2016 study, researchers administered varying levels of electric shocks to crabs, observing the intensity at which the crabs abandoned their shelters.
This exploration raises intriguing questions about how AI systems might one day process complex experiences that resemble human or animal consciousness.
