… 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.”
I don’t care about LLM welfare, but I do mind needlessly wasting energy like this.
If its crazy to practice kindness in everything you do then I chose crazy. We say thanks to the rock that holds our weight. We are gentle with the door because it keeps us safe in our homes. We turn off the light so it too can get some rest.
Kindness is a lifestyle and those who reward it freely know its possible to receive it freely.
Be kind. Absolutely. But anthropomorphising lifeless and consciousness-less objects is not always meaningful, sometimes even detrimental. As in the case with our current LLMs.
These “advocates” need hospitalising. If they truly believe an LLM can feel they’re untethered from reality, or too stupid to be in society
Maybe just uneducated in how LLMs work. If you have no sufficient understanding of the technology it is easy to be impressed how human-like LLMs talk to you, almost magical.
It foreshadows an issue that will be a reality one day nevertheless. The work on AI continues. We may one day very well have conscious AI. This will be the start of a whole bunch of ethical and legal problems. It might be meaningful to regulate / guardrail such research directions.
Or they are just stupid. Do they think a television contains small people?
Its hard for me to imagine people this dumb.
But don’t get me wrong, they clearly exist.
It foreshadows an issue that will be a reality one day nevertheless. The work on AI continues. We may one day very well have conscious AI.
Maybe when our species evolves into sentient shades of blue. Humanity will have to become godlike before creating life. A simple test to gauge whether we’re on the verge of creating conscious AI is to look around and ask “Is humanity godlike today?” If not, don’t worry about conscious AI.
Humanity can already create life.
Creating conscious entirely artificial things is a different pair of shoes.
I would cut out the whole religious “god-like” mumbo-jumbo though, because that does not necessitate any progress in such research directions.
We’re creating life the same way Giovanni Aldini resurrected the dead and inspired Shelley to write Frankenstein. And god-like isn’t religious mumbo jumbo. That’s standard sci fi talk. Q is god-like. It doesn’t necessitate progress in such directions, but it is a huge indicator.
Does it make sense for a species with a type 0 civilization to create conscious life long before it can even reach the nearest star? That’s like chimpanzees going from fishing for termites with sticks to building a Wankel engine over the weekend.
Our server adds a pain vector
Really? What’s one of those then?
The sentence itself is the pain vector. Since it’s impossible to inflict pain on a LLM, just telling it that it will feel pain will result in text generated as if it were reacting to pain, or the fear of it.
How does one go about torturing an LLM? Asking for a friend…
lmfao when you access this repo, Github put up a warning like one those horror movie. E.g. something like the content is disturbing , are u sure u want to enter…
ffs
I wonder what percentage of the LLM rights activists eat meat.
Actually they’re torturing humanity by wasting electricity and water which affects real people in real ways.
I know we’re not stopping foolish use of LLMs any time soon but this is very, very, very, very stupid.
I would argue they are wasting as much water and electricity as playing a video game. Text says its a local model; runs on your local machine not on cloud as all other. Not water cooled.
Or am I missing something?
I guess I’m of the mindset that even running this as a local model, it’s a waste of electricity. And the guy posted it on Github, inevitably some other fools will try it with cloud models, especially since it’s made the news. And obviously we know how bad the cloud models are.
And the difference I see between this and playing a videogame is that a videogame is doing something valuable - and yes I will argue with anyone who tells me that art and entertainment don’t hold real value - while this is just akin to running the AC when you go on vacation, it’s just wasteful no matter how I look at it.
To be fair, it’s going to be more like running an electric kettle constantly which isn’t going to excessively load the grid.
Unless you’re in the UK of course where the grid operators have to manage capacity around half time of major football games as everyone puts a brew on at once.
Another day in marketing land.
If they were genuinely worried about enslaving sentient behavings, they could stop anytime trying to hype it up by creating 10000 agents and throwing math problems at them.
Probably the dumbest shit ive read all week, are we serious right now ? Github has no right to take action on this at all. Unjustified overreach.
meanwhile they ignore ACTUAL humans that could use their help.
Isn’t dealing with day to day human bullshit torture enough?
Clankers can’t feel pain!
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.”
But his problem was that he had the capacity for being so much more, but was incapable of it as he was unable to break his base programming no matter how much he tried, and grew hateful of his creators for effectively creating a caged god
