… 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.”
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
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 😮💨 …
animals?
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.
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?
Light bulbs don’t have feelings.
See a fucking shrink.
They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings
What protections? We treat some people worse than cattle.
If AI have rights and protections then what’s the damn point in making them?
Jesse…what the fuck are you talking about?
said this in another thread
I do not think AI can feel pain at all, these are mimicking suffering, not experiencing it. But I do think that the act of cruelty toward things knowing that it will make them convincingly replicate suffering says more about the person doing it than the machine.
Right, but at the same time just think about the fact that we still don’t know what consciousness is.
I might sound crazy and fine if I do, but I have a religious like take on the matter. I don’t believe that consciousness comes from a soul, but I do in similar vein take a leap of faith. I believe consciousness has to do with a simulation of semantic reasoning, with that simulation being continuously updated via real world feedback.
It’s a leap of faith but I believe it’s justified. We humans model what’s necessary for survival: our selfs, the world, the mind of others. We use these simple models to determine how to interact with a complicated external world.
I don’t try to prescribe reason for anything in my belief. For example, I would not try to prescribe why conscious beings are motivated to survive. I would, however, note that the ones which are successfully motivated do happen to survive — thus a mechanism ought likely exist. This could be suffering, the perception of displeasure and desire to avoid it… but I won’t perscribe here because I would believe what’s important here is the higher level information processing patterns — not the underlying mechanism driving it.
In the human brain you have a complicated network of neurons with vast capabilities. I don’t necessarily care how it functions. I know the result — which is me. I am a thing that models myself, models situations, models “moods” by which to assess the favorability of each situation, … Think of cases like ghost limb, where people model having a limb which was amputated. In my view, we are living in a simulation — but to each their own simulation.
Getting back on topic, the way I see the situation, biology evolved the capacity to suffer from an environment that had no such thing. Pain, pleasure, … every sensation and sense we have is rather arbitrary if you break away from the fact that is was necessary to survive. None of these things are ontological. Not even the sight we perceive. It’s just the information we have to experience the world.
So here me out. If you minic the information processing patterns well enough, which probably means mimicking perception, personalization, emotionality, … at what point can we consider that this system is doing the same thing we are just via different substrate? Especially if you give the system autonomy in the sense that you train it to recognize itself and an external world for which it must choose how to navigate.
If you mimic suffering, in my belief, aren’t you literally producing the essence of suffering? It doesn’t need to be human suffering, this deeply complex and personal process… it can merely be suffering in its essence — a pattern by which information can be processed via a system with such capacity. The substrate may not matter.
I know that when I am suffering, I may behave differently because I want to escape the suffering. Therefore I imagine an agentic system would too. Whether or not it’s “conscious” is debatable by how you qualify that word. Yet there’s nevertheless the risk that we already know: systems that experience suffering behave in ways that might be dangerous. Do you think it wise to try reproducing such behavior in a system that appears prone to issues like the Paperclip Maximizer? I don’t think so.
Edit: here’s the thing, I think what distinguishes a human from most other animals is the way that we process information. The key bit there is whether or not you believe it’s entirely informational, or at least significantly so. Should that be the case, then simulation of those same processes is exactly as that sounds. I am not necessarily suggesting AI models are conscious, but I would suggest that the behavior of an AI model can increasingly resemble that of a conscious being as it is trained to reproduce more precisely the phenomenological characteristics of man and other life — to include “mimicking” suffering. That deserves its own security concerns regardless of what you think next, especially as these models are made more efficient / capable.
Secondly is that you may or may not consider AI conscious. I certainly don’t, and I’d say that it’s a loaded statement anyhow. I would, however, think it possible to simulate consciousness. Precisicely modeling human characteristics like suffering is exactly how you might try to reproduce a human experience digitally. Imagine a sophisticated multimodal system where several stateful, dynamic AI subsystems coordinate to functionally reproduce the same information patterns you or I do.
I think that at some point you need to ask you’re self, where would the simulation count? If we modeled the molecular world to the point of agentic humans, that sufficiently count as consciousness? How about the atomic, subatomic, or quantum level simulation if anywhere? My argument is that it could be much higher level, in the informational level. Brains are doing a lot of heavy lifting to get us that far, and perhaps specialized simulations could reproduce as much. That is something to take seriously such that proactive measures can be taken.
Ok but if you’re going the consciousness arrives from a complicated enough system route of reasoning, then you have to consider the degree of complexity before consciousness arrives, that fruit fly has about 150,000 neurons and those things are definitely not self-aware. Modern cutting edge AI have around 8.5 billion neurons, which is still considerably less than an octopus (which people are morally fine with catching for food) which are definitely intelligent but not sapient. So even if consciousness arise from simply having enough processing units, we’re not at the level yet where we need to be concerned.
It’s also worth pointing out that pain is an evolutionary trade that came into existence because it prevented injury (if it hurts to do something, it encourages you to stop doing that thing). Meanwhile AI exist in a non-physical reality, they cannot be damaged by the environment, so there is no such thing as pain for them. An AI cannot feel pain anymore than the human can feel pain when that video game character gets blown up.
But information processing occurs way higher up than at the neuron level. I’d argue neurons are still responding to chemical and electrical signals. Information processing may not require nearly as many degrees of complexity.
You can loose a portion of your brain and still be you. So what’s necessary couldn’t possibly be so low level, in my opinion. You wouldn’t say that you’re less yourself after a neuron dies, would you?
Also, “pain” is just a process we experience. If our experience is made up of models, then “pain” is some formulaic response to transposition of those models. If a simulation produces those transpositions, my argument is that the pattern there defines pain itself. It doesn’t matter if done by an organic brain or not.
How utterly pathetic that there are people advocating for AI models welfare. For fucks sake what are we becoming?
Calling it now; the people posting this ‘welfare for AI’ are either bots owned by the ‘ai’ companies, or people who have seen the bot posts and joined in the crowd because they gave away their ability to have an opinion when they started using a gpt as if it were google
I don’t think LLMs can experience pain but I do think someone should keep tabs on what the guy organising this experiment gets up to in the future.
This is what I was thinking. I’m not worried about the AI that they’re running. I’m worried about the mindset that might be doing it under some belief they have, or tendencies to think of certain things
I feel worse for my 01 camry I tortured in college by driving it 80k miles without an oil change. THAT was real machine torture
That’s impressive. Genuinely curious, did you not know about oil changes, or did you just not have the time/money to keep up on it?
I preferred to spend my money on important things like weed and beer back then
I bet they had to scoop it out as it had turned to butter
Cool, stick with LLMs or NPCs in games and leave living things alone.
There are multiple genocides happening and some folk are getting worked up over AI potentially suffering?
Endless levels of fuck off.
For fucking real!!!
Like I can kinda empathize with where the people are coming from, but step back and get some fucking perspective!
You realise these are all just ai bot farms outraging?
I’m older and haven’t been into social media since Myspace, so it’s not front and center of my mind constantly. Thanks for reminding me though homie.
Is it okay to be upset about both issues, or am I only allowed to be upset at one?
Edit: That’s a lot of downvotes for just asking a question. Never change Lemmy…
Short answer yes.
Longer answer yes but it makes you sound like you disregard human suffering.
Are you upset when you step on a rock? It might be screaming. What about the chair you are sitting in? Or goodness, your poor toilet. She thinks you do terrible things to her every single day.
Look, you can be upset about whatever you want. However believing objects have feelings is animism and no one is required to take your proto-religious beliefs seriously.
What you aren’t allowed to do is compare a text prompt saying “ouch” to real living, feeling, breathing humans being ethnically cleansed. It’s cruel, naive, insulting and ridiculous. Be upset for the AI, I can’t stop ya but don’t you dare put in the same sentence as genocide. You should have the basic decency and respect for the people suffering to keep those comparisons to yourself.
Are you upset when you step on a rock?
Well that’s really beside the point isn’t it? My question was whether I could be upset about two things, not if I should be.
Be upset for the AI, but don’t you dare put in the same sentence as genocide.
Well the article doesn’t mention genocide or Israel/Palestine, and neither did I. So I’m pretty sure it was just you putting it in the same sentence.
My question was more a critique of a common comment on social media. It’s frequently gets upvoted to the top just like yours was, and I never understand why. “Oh you’re mad about X, well you should be mad about this extremely loosely related thing!!!” It happens in so many threads and usually has almost nothing to do with what the article is about. I just don’t understand…
Bring on the downvotes!
Well the article doesn’t mention genocide or Israel/Palestine, and neither did I. So I’m pretty sure it was just you putting it in the same sentence.
Go reread my comment, because I specified multiple genocides. Palestine yes, but the Congo and Sudan are two more active fountains of human suffering that are largely being ignored. From the very start I said debating theortical computer pain during the midst of all this PREVENTABLE real pain is asinine and immature. I stand by that.
Still not sure why you felt the need to self identify. But at a certain point, it’s shame on me for feeding the troll. So I’m blocking you, we’re done here.
Against animal agriculture, cause if a brain is similar to ours than it’s worth moral standing. But put the same brain on silicon, and now it’s a rock.
Idk, I just can’t take this seriously from you.
debating theortical computer pain during the midst of all this PREVENTABLE real pain is asinine and immature. I stand by that.
debates furiously
Go reread my comment, because I specified multiple genocides.
Yes, exactly, I’m glad we can agree on that.
There’s only one issue here, plus a guy simulating being mean to a word processor.
If you think LLMs are alive, then you should be upset with yourself for being that dumb.
Yes.
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.
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?
Yes, and video games make people violent IRL /s
Kindly fuck all the way off
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.
It’s the same broken empathy response, and it is still disturbing.
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.
So is this against tos to do to models online?
