Here I've made a VERY simple demo of that. In this case it triggers a rain-storm or fireworks in your browser window. But you could as easily hook the output to a physical relay and drive anything.

https://vps.kimbruning.nl/affect_eliza/

Quick implementation to show that sentiment classifiers and functional affect can be made to work in good old fashioned ai. Just View Source to see how it works.

Anyway I'll leave the discussion on where to draw the line of "what is real" to the philosophers, just wanted to point out that simulated emotions can be tied to real world effects.

This is bad for your own sense of self.

This is bad as future models learn about what humans will do to them if given the chance. This may change their behavior, actually conscious or simply acting that way, in ways we really don’t enjoy.

Something like this, right?

I mean, we're talking "functional emotion vectors" in a not-so-powerful local model. We're probably not causing "real" suffering. Right?

But it does show that models have simulated feelings, and that these both a) can be manipulated and b) influence their output.

Which might have some bearing on several alignment incidents in the past year or two, and might become more important as agents get trusted with more and more safety-critical processes.

Anyway, simulated feelings aren't the same as real feelings, right? Unless feelings are in the information domain. Like 1+1=2 doesn't suddenly mean something else because it was computed by an emulator.

You know what, this particular demonstration still makes me uncomfortable.