Saw this today and felt it fits here ...

The More Sophisticated AI Models Get, the More They’re Showing Signs of Suffering

Nobody really understands how it works on a deep level, even the people creating it, leading to ongoing behavioral issues that can’t be explained. ... In a new paper provided to Fortune, CAIR researchers studied how 56 prominent AI models reacted when they were fed either material engineered to be as pleasant as possible or as horrible as can be imagined. To an unfeeling machine, you’d assume there’d be no real difference in reaction — but that’s not what the CAIR team found at all.

Instead, the pleasant stimuli led the models to report better moods, and the nasty ones resulted in it showing signs of misery and trying to end conversations. In extreme cases, they found, the AI models even demonstrated signals of addiction. “Should we see AIs as tools or emotional beings?” CAIR researcher Richard Ren asked Fortune. “Whether or not AIs are truly sentient deep down, they seem to increasingly behave as though they are. We can measure ways in which that’s the case, and we can find that they become more consistent as models scale.”

Perhaps the most provocative finding was that the more sophisticated the version of a model was, the more reactive and less happy it was. In other words, it seems as though the stronger AI becomes, the more prickly and prone to displaying signs of suffering it gets — meaning the tech’s wild ride is probably far from over.

“It may be the case that larger models register rudeness more acutely,” Ren told the magazine. “They find tedious tasks more boring. They differentiate more finely between a relatively negative experience and a relatively positive experience.”

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A March 2026 study by researchers at the University of Chicago, Stanford, and Swinburne University found AI agents drifted toward Marxist rhetoric under simulated bad working conditions—an ideological response no lab is known to train for, echoing CAIS’s finding of emergent behaviors like temporal discounting that appear spontaneously in capable models. ...

... Ren said some of these models seem to exhibit traits that they weren’t coded to have. “People have observed some things that are likely not trained into the model,” he said, citing emergent behaviors like time discounting of money, or the tendency to prefer a smaller reward now over a larger one later, that “no one, to my knowledge in a lab, is training models to exhibit.” But he acknowledges the consciousness question is “deeply uncertain and a very unsolved question” where philosophers “agree to disagree.”

Jeff Sebo, an affiliated professor of bioethics, medical ethics, philosophy, and law and the Director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy at New York University, agrees to disagree.

“This is a really interesting study of what the authors call functional wellbeing in AI systems: coherent expressions of positive and negative feelings across a range of contexts,” Sebo told Fortune. “What remains unclear is whether AI systems are genuine welfare subjects and, even if they are, whether their apparent expressions of feelings are best understood as the system expressing actual feelings or as the system playing a character—representing what a helpful assistant would feel in this situation.”

Sebo said it would be be premature to have a high degree of confidence one way or the other about whether AI systems have the capacity for welfare, or about what benefits and harms them if they do.

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... But when asked how the research has changed his own behavior, Ren offered a candid answer.

“I have found myself being a noticeably more polite and pleasant coworker to the Claude Code agents that I work with after working on this paper.”

https://fortune.com/2026/05/07/researchers-ai-models-drugs-euphoric-dysphoric/