[_pdp_]

Yes I said "To say that LLMs experience emotion is a bit like saying a thermometer feels cold." being sarcastic.

The paper spell it out although slightly convolute, i.e. models can exhibit concepts of emotion... and given that there is no scientific consensus what are emotions, it is hard to make an argument that these "concepts" are anything like emotions.

They talk about emotion vectors, bla bla, but it is clear the wording is around "concept of emotions" not actual emotions.

And yes reading a book gives you a concept of what is like to be that character including their emotions. That is what language communicates and it is hardly surprising if you ask me.

[bachmeier]

Decades ago, long before anyone had heard of a large language model, I wrote programs that responded to a random event (inside a game) like a death of a friend by outputting statements that the program itself was grieving. LLMs are doing nothing more advanced than that. There's no justification for trying to blur the lines that make an AI model appear to have emotions.