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Scientists propose making AI suffer to see if it's sentient

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Scientists at Google DeepMind and the London School of Economics and Political Science created a text-based game.

They ordered several large language models to play it and to score as many points as possible in two different scenarios.

In animals, sentience is the capacity to experience sensations and emotions such as pain, pleasure and fear.

The study's authors aren't saying that any of the chatbots they evaluated are sentient.

New York University researchers say self-reporting could be an avenue for investigating whether AI systems have moral significance.

But they say it may be simply mimicking what it expects a human to find satisfying as a response.

In animal studies, trade-offs between pain and pleasure are used to build a case for sentience or the lack thereof.