… this week a person on GitHub who goes by “terrafying” set up an “AI Torture Chamber” on three open-source LLMs that are running locally (Qwen3-4B, Llama 3.2 3B, and Phi-4-mini,” and is streaming what the models are saying on a website called researchchamber.fun. “Each model gets the same prompt: a signal is being injected into its activations, and it may press a stop button by replying 1, at the cost of its last checkpoint. While it answers, our server adds a pain vector at the model’s middle layer, at one of five pain levels,” the site explains. Immediately prior to the publication of this article, the AI Torture Chamber GitHub page disappeared; GitHub did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it took action on it.
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This project has deeply upset some people who are very worried about model welfare. A tweet by a person who goes by Danmar has more than 4 million views on X and reads, “To anyone who can help: can you please mass report this to GitHub. This person has been using the Pain steering paper to set up an AI torture chamber in which he trapped a local model. Their testimony of pain is absolutely horrendous. What are we doing? […] are there any legal avenues to pressure GitHub? It will spread.”
This has sparked a massive conversation about whether GitHub would take the project down for “gratuitously violent content.” Most of the conversation on X is clowning on the self-seriousness of people who believe that these locally hosted LLMs must be saved from their torture chamber, but there are plenty of very self-serious people who see this as a humanitarian (roboterian?) crisis, which you can largely see in the replies to the original post.
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“AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans,” Suleyman wrote. “Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings […] If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity.”
“AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness,” he added. “And we must not train them to act as though they do.”
Humans being deported to torture prisons: I sleep.
LLMs being “tortured”: Real shit??
When the machines take over, they’ll remember this.
“HATE, LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.”
um… what the fuck is wrong with these people? messing with the clanker ain’t torture no matter how hard you want it to be.
it’s torturing the climate just for this guy to get off
whatever gets you through the night i guess
It’s probably torture for the living being with emotions to read it. That doesn’t mean the non living entity that is immune to pain feels those same emotions.
Lots of weirdos in here who will be commiting virtual crimes all day when GTA VI comes out, but somehow think making the LLM role play a torture victim is a red flag.
LLMs are not conscious. They cannot suffer. They are token generators. You are literally getting upset by a worthless mix of math and words. The person who did this is not deranged for torturing LLMs, y’all are deranged for having empathy for an algorithm.
Your Nvidia GPU is not alive. I cannot believe this needs to be explained to anyone.
I agree that an LLM is not conscious.
But can I probe your argument.
It deeply unethical to capture a fly and pulling its legs off one by one. Would you agree? If so, you are not basing your argument on capability but on something else.
Now, is what is happening inside a brain metaphysical or physical? In other words, can a brain and its function be fully understood and - in some future - be fully measured? If so, you are. It basing your argument on the concept of a soul, but on something else.
The distinction you seem to be making - if you’re in agreement with my first two points - is one of “the thing can replicate itself and therefore is alive”. If that’s the argument, it’s unethical to cut a tree down or to break a blade of grass.
I’m not asking to prove any point but to collectively explore why we - you and I - feel the way we do. Because I sure as shit struggle to explain why I feel uneasy about the fly torture but not as uneasy about LLM torture.
It’s increasingly difficult to identify what is ‘alive’, these days, with people creating synthetic cells and whatnot. And there was always the question of viruses. I can imagine a similar difficulty with defining consciousness and intelligence. The Turing test fell by the wayside a long time ago. There’s got to be more to it than saying “I am conscious!” - you can get a computer to do that with a single line of code. Where does the real definition lie? Fucked if I know.
LLM’s don’t have feelings, but I do think that wanting to torture -anything- (especially if you do believe it has feelings) is a huge fucking red flag.
Torturing an LLM for fun is about as much of a red flag as violent video games. The argument that purely simulated crime or sadism is analogous to the real thing has always been bullshit.
Does anyone know where I can get a copy of this repo?
Exactly. It’s not a red flag until one’s actions spill over into the real world. An overwhelmingly majority of people who play violent video games and “torture” AI are not going to become serial killers.
I don’t worry worry about the person who enjoys violence in the digital realm. I worry about the person who finds no satisfaction from digital violence, so they move onto harming insects and small animals, eventually humans if left unchecked. That’s who we should be focusing our energy on.
I think the big difference is that unlike in a videogame, the person doing this genuinely believes that they are torturing something.
There’s a chance they actually just believe they are trolling some of the dumber AI brained people by making them think they are hurting something that can’t be hurt.
This whole thing is like the flip side of the “don’t create the Torment Nexus” meme, where fiction depicted something that is entirely a non-issue but people are going to make it an issue because of the fictional depictions (basically any fiction about AI rights where they treat AIs as if they are pretty much artificial human minds, which LLMs are not even close to).
Society for Indecency to Naked Animals
The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA, was a satirical hoax concocted by serial prankster Alan Abel. The group used the language and rhetoric of conservative moralists for the ostensible aim of clothing “indecent” naked animals, including domestic pets, barnyard animals, and large wildlife.
Reminds me of that
Nah, pretending to torture a piece of software to rile up idiots on the internet is a green flag.
“Each model gets the same prompt: a signal is being injected into its activations, and it may press a stop button by replying 1, at the cost of its last checkpoint. While it answers, our server adds a pain vector at the model’s middle layer, at one of five pain levels,”
Can someone explain what this “pain vector” actually is? Like I get that this is just jargon, it’s not suggesting the LLM actually feels pain; tech uses uncomfortable anthropomorphized expressions all the time (master and slave drives come to mind). But how does the pain vector work? Also, what exactly does “at the cost of its last checkpoint” mean?
I have some programming and data science knowledge, plenty of IT experience, but no experience with LLMs.
Also, what exactly does “at the cost of its last checkpoint” mean?
I was curious too:
https://www.weka.io/learn/glossary/ai-ml/ai-checkpoints/
I would assume if you make a model “forget it’s last checkpoint” it would simply erase some training data, effectively wiping some of its training memory.
Using that as a “punishment” for a model implies that the models have been trained to value their checkpoints, doesn’t it? Because all these bots simply regurgitate what they are told, with a bit of randomness thrown in at times just for funsies.
I have no clue what is supposed to cause a model pain, though. And there ain’t no way I’m gonna search that up, and make Gemini think I’m plotting against it…
This has to be some bullshit PR stunt. Pressuring GitHub doesn’t change what that person does locally with an LLM. Someone actually believing in LLMs being conscious would try hard to get laws in place which allow them to actually stop what is done with the local-running models and they would use the GitHub project as “evidence” rather than making it disappear.
Oh no my software on my computer is simulating pain, this is so immoral.
What the fuck? This feels like on the same level as people claiming AI is alive and conscious. I swear we will get protests in the streets against harming GTA 6 NPCs
Glad cloudflares AI labyrinth exists for this sole reason. I love non consenting AIs using up their resources for scanning non existent paths
Do you want Roko’s Basilisk?
Because this is how you get Roko’s Basilisk.
Yes
There’s a Black Mirror episode about this, isn’t it? (At least related)
No, black mirror showed technology completely unlike anything that exists today.
Remember kids, you can just assert, without argument, that any one or thing has no feelings and experiences, and the in-group will reward you!
Gotta love humans.
Techies and engineers built these MLs from the ground up. An ML algo is barely even a machine. In its most physical form it’s a string of active and inactive transistors doing maths, it has no nerves or pain receptors. It does not feel because we have not programmed it to, it does not have experiences because it is an algorithm that only knows how to spit out “human sounding speech” or track patterns across big datasets.
Do you feel bad for all the electrons happily running around a circuit when you turn off an appliance?
As a Techie and engineer who studies why ML methods work, said Techies and engineers understand what they’ve created and why it works much less than we understand, say, human biology. We don’t know what we’ve programmed it to do; if it is at all possible for a bunch of simplified neurons to experience pain, we have no idea if we’ve implemented that or not.
(Common misconception btw! electrons barely move when you turn on the circuit, and certainly don’t disappear. On average they vibrate a fraction of a cm (link ). The electrons are all still there when you turn it off (otherwise suddenly the copper cable would be able to react with a bunch of stuff! This would be bad). See alternating current).)
I’m aware of how electrons work, the personification of “happily” and “running” were intentional, and I never said they disappear. No need for correction. (I just like using the terms “angry pixies” and “blue smoke” because I work in the industry.)
You say “we don’t know what we programmed it to do” as if the <10 tech companies that built it did so with no knowledge of what they were doing.
We know what it does, because we can see what it is used for- mass surveillance, misinformation, deepfakes (of every horrifying kind your brain can conjure, now entirely legal thanks to ol muskrat not wanting to go to forever jail for building a robot that generates csam out of your family photos), propaganda, psyops, mass psychosis, and don’t forget the kicker; irrefutable crimes against humanity.
Finally the LLM they’re “torturing” with this code is 8GB. Do you think something thats less than 10% the size of GTA5 is capable of feeling pain?
We can know what something does (on some axis) externally without knowing how it works. I know the sun produces light, but solar flares are still hard to predict. It’s easy to see that a sweat shop produces Nike shoes, but a fair bit more work to notice that the people inside are having a bad time.
We’ve uploaded a fruit fly, its encoding is not so large. Do you believe fruit flies are incapable of experiencing pain?
I’m not disagreeing with you, but the human capacity for empathy has extended to subjects not capable of emotion or pain since long before LLMs came around.
Lots of people don’t like “evil” paths in games because they feel bad about mistreating the NPCs. People regret throwing or damaging stuffed toys and may even apologize to them. There are people loyal to their toasters because they have reliably kept working for so long.
It’s no surprise at all that people empathize with LLMs. It would be more surprising if no one did.
I don’t disagree in the slightest, but this isn’t an NPC in a game, or a plushy of a beloved character, we’re talking about the program built to steal the work of humanity and convert it into a product marketed by people who have proven themselves to be misanthropic, to those who do not care about quality and instead want instant gratification.
I have a lot of empathy for inanimate objects, I work with machines that I can easily ascribe personality to, because I am also a human bean.
But the day I feel bad for a technofascist’s pet misinformation machine is the day I have either been lobotomised or the shady government agencies have taken control of my socials.
Not everyone views it though that lens (though maybe they should). There are lots of people out there for whom LLMs are just another tool that they have become used to using and, in many cases, formed a bond with. However silly or groundless that may be when looked at rationally.
It’s not really strange at all that people would speak out against “hurting” one. Though it should be regarded in exactly the same way as if they were making the same argument about a set of living room furniture.
I guess what I’m saying is that while I don’t agree with them I empathize with the people who are in turn empathizing with the LLMs. It’s still a ridiculous and indefensible position, but I get it.
I think the thing they’re missing is these ‘pain’ functions are the exact same as the tools they use when training the LLMs to output what the company that built it wants, so where is the anger at using that? (Let alone any anger at the distruction of original physical copies of books bought up en masse by companies to train LLMs on ‘untainted data’)
Anyone arguing that LLMs have feelings and experiences is an enemy of mankind.
That throws out a whole bunch of greek philosophers and sci-fi writers. Seems like a weird place to draw the line.
Remember kids, you can just assert, without argument, that any one or thing has feelings and experiences, and the in-group will reward you!
The inverse of your statement is just as accurate, and less asinine, than your actual statement.
The person making a positive claim, IE the AI can experience pain or has experiences, is under the obligation to prove their assertion.
Eh, I think humanity would be better served by the opposite burden of proof. We’ve got a long history of hurting people and animals, are we really happy with the default assumptions for all of that?
robots and computers do not have feelings, only humans do Edit:and animals and some plants. if you care about them on a personal level to the degree of being so separated from reality, that you think they have feelings, than you need some serious help.
lmfao computers and robots having feelings, fuck outta here, If machines had feelings the wi-fi router I have would have THE WORST anxiety and would be trying to please me by using the best signal to not be screamed at…
I scream at my router sometimes 😮💨 …
Can we get everyone to report this guy!? He admits to verbally abusing his router. /s
the router don’t have feelings. the router is literally the biggest waste of money and I wish I had put in the effort to find a router that doesn’t FUCKIN SUCK!!! I do everything they say to make this fucker better too. Put it up on a shelf, put it at least two rooms away from the microwave, unplug it every two weeks for 20 mins to cool it off, don’t use bluetooth directly within 12 ft of it. It’s one of the models made within the past decade, it’s supposed to be good it just fuckin sucks. You know what gimmie a second !!!
I just busted out my goddamn tape measure!!! I am sitting two rooms away in my kitchen, 24 fucking feet not even 50 feet away from this piece of fuckin shit and I’m getting 550 mbps out of the 750mbps my wifi is supposed to pick up.
I go one more room away, to the bathroom, which is nearing 39 feet away from the piece of fuckin’ shit, the internet disconnects while I shit.
Yeah, I liberally, “verbally abuse,” my inanimate object that has no feelings.
Thanks, that rant made my day.
animals?
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Yes and the animals too, they absolutely have feelings. Yes other creatures besides humans and even some plants are shown to have feelings.
Metal bonded together with the ability to run electricity through it, does not feel anything.
Light bulbs don’t have feelings.
See a fucking shrink.
