… 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.”
The people committing atrocities against hypothetical, imaginary people would do it to real, actual people for the exact same reasons if they had the same ability and impunity.
It’s the same broken empathy response, and it is still disturbing. One is orders of magnitude more significant, for obvious reasons. But I don’t like people who torture computers either.
Edit: If you think that I think you’re a bad person because you play Doom sometimes, or deleted the ladder on the swimming pool in Sims 4, relax. You’re not who I’m talking about.
I’m talking about sadists. Anyone who would take the time to design and build an experiment like this would probably do the same to mice, or monkeys, or even people. Sadists get their jollies off on the idea of inflicting pain, it’s why they enjoy games that let them make cruel decisions. Not everyone who plays violent video games is a sadist. Assuming that is ridiculous. But every sadist I’ve ever met has had at least one game where their save file could be used as evidence for mens rea in a domestic abuse trial.
Yes, and video games make people violent IRL /s
Kindly fuck all the way off
Does that mean because I went on multiple massacres against innocent people in videos games, I would go on a massacre against innocent people in real life?
LMAO! What a broken take this is.
They aren’t comparable. It’s not that one is more significant, the concept of “machine torture” is entirely insignificant. Absolute and total zero.
Yes the person setting up this process is clearly some sort of sadist in a power fantasy but no one, or no thing is being harmed because the victim aren’t capable of the entire concept. I side eye anyone who tortures their sims family, but only because they are choosing to do that recreationally, but the NPC’s in the game aren’t worth consideration.
Animals react to pain in the same way humans do. So it’s reasonable to assume they perceive the world similar to us. We can understand why when harmed they fight or flee. Machines don’t. They have no brain, no sensory organs, no self preservation. It’s literally just a program that says “Ouch”.
People assume that AI was built to mimic the human brain, which it never once was. It analyzes texts and predicts the response. It’s an autocomplete that says it hurts because it was programed to say it hurts. It isn’t actually hurt because that concept is meaningless to a machine.
Pretty easy to find LLM outputs that mirror how humans react to being, say, bullied. I find this entirely flimsy.
Yeah I think people are missing the forest for the trees. There’s no reason to worry for the AIs but using your free time to conceive a virtual torture dungeon is not normal. Totally agree with your point, this is a symptom of a society that normalizes not just violence but sadism too.
That’s a shit take too tbh. Thinking along those lines, the writers of Saw, or any horror movie really, are not normal, or the people who watch them, or do weird shit in The Sims or Rimworld. Or the creators of those games for allowing it.
There’s nothing wrong with morbid curiosity. It is INNATELY human and rooted in evolutionary threat detection. It is a far FAR leap from creating human leather hats in Rimworld to hurting a real person. This whole debate is idiotic.