… 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.”
You’re splitting hairs. What’s the difference between someone torturing their sims by intentionally designing a scenario where they are being repeatedly drowned/burned/starved, and the article?
Really sounds like you’re trying to carve out an exclusion for an obvious example that torpedoes your argument.
Okay, let’s set up a scenario, then.
You have two adults playing the Sims 4. One designs a house with only one exterior door, no oven, no sink in the bathroom, and no swimming pool. The other designs an open floor plan with no interior doors, no privacy in the restroom, ovens on every floor, and a backyard that’s nothing but one big swimming pool with just one ladder.
Which one is the psycho, and which one isn’t?
Neither. I’m pretty sure therapists are not using “how do you play The Sims” as a diagnostic tool, and if you think the situation you laid out is enough to diagnose anything about a person that just shows how woefully misinformed you are on the topic.
You didn’t answer my question, what’s the difference between the sim torture and the AI torture? I’m not going to respond to the non-sequitor provided instead of answering the question.
You made the distinction, so I want to know the difference.
For me the difference is that the sims don’t even attempt to be… whatever LLMs are. Torturing something that is at most 20k lines of code IS different from torturing a model made of millions of nodes. I don’t think LLMs are conscious but I also won’t take the risk if they are or become. I have enough empathy for anything even closely resembling life to try and treat it with kindness.
Exactly. It’s not a real, conscious living thing. But anyone who takes the time to program a machine to feel pain, and then comes up with creative ways to inflict that pain, is a bad person.
It’s the premeditated, deliberate, creative effort to hurt something that can provide negative feedback. The recipient obviously isn’t a real person. But the executor is a real person, making real choices. And I would bet you five bucks that they have personal relations (parents, friends, romantic partners) who’ve expressed concerns about similar behavior around real people.
I just gave you the answer.
The first house is designed by someone who knows the game well and is cutting out annoyances purely for QOL purposes. Ovens burn down the house and kill Sims, Sims drown in swimming pools, Sims wash dishes in bathroom sinks, and Sims wander off through any open door when you want them to stay put.
The second house is designed by someone who knows the game well and is playing it because they like torturing and killing their Sims. The entire floor plan is designed to kill, maim, and otherwise torment any cluster of variables unlucky enough to be trapped there.
Obviously, both players are making these decisions purely for their own enjoyment or comfort and the immersion of the game is inconsequential. No real people are hurt. However, the first player is making practical choices that make the game more functional. The second player is probably naming Sims after people who annoy them in real life and sticking them in the murder house.
Social behaviors are rehearsed in play. That’s Psych101. So, your turn. Would you say that the person who set up this experiment with these LLMs is capable of normal human empathy? Yes or no?
No you didn’t, but thankfully someone else provided a real answer to the question posed.
As for your scenario question, you made up a decent head cannon, but it still doesn’t explain how you think the sims example is different from the AI example. Which was literally the question I specifically responded to and you’re not answering.
That being said, I’ll humor your lazy reasoning.
Yes, they very well could be capable of normal empathy, there’s not enough to say one way or the other. But I did those sorts of things with Sims as a release mechanism, without naming them after real people and it had no bearing on my ability to have empathy to real people and animals, because sims and AI aren’t real living entities. At best they’re a simulation of real people, but they’re still just that, a simulation. Good job working yourself up though.
Your psych 101 comment is on point, cuz this is he lazy sort of argumentation I see from people who stopped there. Your lack of understanding/ lazy generalizations about how someone’s inner world works colors your opinions and makes you make wild generalizations. I don’t know that I would want to be around this person, but saying they’re incapable of human empathy because they fuck with an AI and make it feel pain is one hell of a generalization based off of one article.
But this is the Internet, so I’m used to these sorts of ignorant takes.
And there it is. That was all I needed to know.
Have a good one.
Sounds about right, you seem to make sweeping assumptions about people with minimal evidence and ignore any context that goes with it
Have fun in psych 102, let me know if you actually learn anything.