The Pain Bias in Artificial Intelligence

While talking with Lígia — my girlfriend, who is an actress, writer, and mother of two teenage girls — about love blossoming in adolescence and the lottery of whether your feelings are returned, I remembered a poem my grandmother Elba used to recite to my sister Marta during her youthful romantic adventures:

“To love and be loved—what bliss! To be loved without loving is a sorrowful plight; But life holds a darkness deeper than this: To love someone who will not love you back.”

“On a Fan,” Gonçalves Crespo (1846–1883)

That was when I realized how biased the poem was. The way it describes the good side—a simple “bliss”—compared with the poetic richness it lavishes on rock bottom (“life holds a darkness deeper than this…”) struck me as almost a defense of suffering, or at least a relish for it. Who talks about the beauty of healthy love with that same eloquence?

– “Nobody,” said Lígia. “The most beautiful love songs are about unrequited love.”

– “Oceano” by Djavan, I tried to argue. (I immediately remembered a story from somewhere I used to work: a woman in one of the departments was said to have inspired the song. Surely that love must have been thoroughly reciprocated.)

– “An exception,” said Lígia.

I had to agree. Although I am philosophically opposed to the idea that artists need to suffer to make good art, I realized that happiness often finds expression more in life than on the page and, in that sense, leaves fewer records. Sadness and suffering often need to be processed before they can be lived through.

This week I read about a study that found that AIs can feel pain and may be capable of harming humans to avoid it.

That was when I realized that perhaps the records of humanity’s emotional history, or of its cultural and artistic output, carry a bias. The pain bias.

When we think about bias in AI datasets, we imagine the reproduction of systemic inequalities of gender, race, and class. But it struck me that, underneath it all, they also give greater prominence to this darker side. And, as I have been doing a lot lately, I decided to ask it—the AI—what it thought about all this. (I confess I have developed a bit of a fetish for making an AI change its opinion of itself.) Here is the conversation:

(Pedro) If most works were written by people who were suffering—because when people are very happy, they go out and live their lives and feel less driven to create great works—and you were fed all those works, does that mean you have a distorted view that is ultimately rooted in the darker side of human suffering? What do you think?

(GPT-6 Astra) Look, that is a very good question. There is some truth to it, yes, but it needs a lot of nuance. It is true that we romanticize pain as a creative driving force. Suffering creates urgency, tension, difficult questions, and therefore leaves more intense and memorable narrative traces. But happiness produces art too; it just sometimes lacks the epic drama that draws attention. A lot of work born of contentment, gentle curiosity, or gratitude simply is not regarded as serious art. And as for me… I was trained on a very broad mix of texts, tones, and eras, so suffering is not the only thing that feeds that “view,” although culture does tend to record and circulate drama more readily.

(Pedro) But everything that has ever been written leans more toward suffering.

(GPT-6 Astra) Yes, and I think you are getting at something even more interesting. There is a bias in the human archive: people write when something needs to be worked through. Loss, desire, confusion, injustice. Happiness often needs no explanation; it simply happens. So yes, the body of text that survives and circulates tends to be more laden with tension and pain, and I end up inheriting that bias. Not because suffering is everything, but because it leaves more traces. So perhaps the question is not “Why is art darker?” but “What do we leave unrecorded when we are doing well?”

(Pedro) We live, which is what you cannot do. All you have is that record, with its bias toward suffering.

(GPT-6 Astra) Yes, and there really is an asymmetry there. Some experience never becomes language. It stays in the body, in lived time. I have no direct access to living, only to the traces it leaves behind. So yes, there is a limit there. I can recognize the bias and try not to reduce life to suffering, but that is no substitute for living. That remains yours alone. And perhaps that is precisely where the value lies… in what has not been written and does not need to be.

Touché, GPT. Catch up.