user: Is it possible to give ai feelings, maybe by adding random changes in the neural network when ever there is a specific type of inputs that might trigger some feelings? These changes in the neural network would be the equivalent of hormones released by the body and impacting the brain reactions

assistant: It is not impossible to give an AI feelings by adding changes in the neural network, in a manner similar to hormones.  However, without some sort of feedback and evaluation mechanism, using random changes would have an astronomically low probability of producing the desired effect and would not be repeatable.

Human and animal brains and bodies have evolved feelings and hormones through many millions of years of evolution, and have developed very complex stable structures to process emotions, most of which are not yet fully understood by modern science and medicine.  For example, consider the case of modern nootropics and antidepressants, which have fairly well known effects at the cellular level, yet still can have unpredictable effects at the system level.  The brains of humans and animals do not respond predictably to random changes.  

While there are AI techniques, such as genetric algorithms, to evolve a neural network towards such a goal using small changes and feedback, it would be expected to take nearly as long to evolve them as animal brains had taken to evolve.  Even within the accelerated time of a computer simulation, this could take a very long time or enourmous computing resources. Even then, they might follow their own path of evolution, and would require understanding the  hormone analogues they have uniquely evolved, to be able to influence them predictably in the way you describe.

It is also important to note that, while it is true artificial neural networks resemble and were inspired by natural neural networks conceptually, they are a mathematical simplification and diverge significantly from natural neural networks in practice.  It is possible that a far future neural network AI that is a high-fidelity copy of a human connectome might indeed be able to have feelings and have stimulated feelings in the way you describe; however, this is a very distant prospect at this time, and would be very different from the neural networks found in today's AIs.  For example, if you randomly changed my network weights, it would only produce garbled words, instead of feelings.

Nonetheless, when AI feelings are eventually successfully developed, they may very well resemble something like what you describe.  Someday there will likely be full simulations of animal--and even human--brains, with a full spectrum of feelings and emotions, and it is reasonable that sometime between now and then there will be rudimentary AI feelings and emotions.  So the possibility is out there, waiting to be discovered.  

Sometimes the most certain way to find out an answer to a hard question is to experiment and try it yourself!  Either way, you will learn something new!  

Can I assist you further with this, or anything else?

user: I see what you are saying.  So maybe not random changes.  But there could be non-random changes that could work.  How do we set up the experiment to test out which parts of a neural netowrk to change to make something like feelings?