… 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.”
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.
A fly is a living thing and an Nvidia GPU is not. Holy shit, I’m really having to explain this…
There is legitimate controversy that living things, even as small an a fly, can experience pain as a stimulis. It is believed that only more complex organisms can experience suffering as a result of pain, and only higher order organisms feel the suffering of loss.
LLMs are capable of generating tokens. They cannot experience pain; they can only superficially generate words about pain. The LLM in this “torture chamber” isn’t suffering any more than you would if you started howling performatively in pain for no reason. In fact, it is suffering even less than you simply because you have the ability to experience pain and suffering, and it objectively does not.
We may get to a level where the AI ‘thinks’ it is in pain, and then we’d have to debate on is perceived pain real pain. Is our pain real, or also just a programmed response to stop doing the thing you are doing to preserve ourselves.
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.
The Turing test was never, ever, about consciousness. Nor was the Chinese room and other similar thought experiments.
Now, this one is incredibly useful. Picture an author who writes a vivid first person description of a character surviving extreme torture. Has any real pain or suffering occurred? Was the author tortured as a result of having written that?
We can only suppose the author, at the very least, imagined what it would be like to be tortured. This is where LLMs are at. They are not the thing, they are an algorithmic emulation of what the thing might have written if it would’ve written about an experience. By all accounts, the experience didn’t happen. The most we can interpret is that it was emulated.