… 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.”
LLM’s don’t have feelings, but I do think that wanting to torture -anything- (especially if you do believe it has feelings) is a huge fucking red flag.
Torturing an LLM for fun is about as much of a red flag as violent video games. The argument that purely simulated crime or sadism is analogous to the real thing has always been bullshit.
Does anyone know where I can get a copy of this repo?
🤔 I don’t think it’s quite the same as video games. Video games usually involve some challenge, goal, risk of losing, etc.
There are only a few games that I play though, so I might not be “qualified” to say for sure, but a torture simulator with no purpose outside of torture doesn’t seem like much of a game.
To spend this amount of time and effort building the necessary software environment for “torturing” LLMs is creepy. Like, imagine an adult who builds a bunch of crazy contraptions to physically “torture” some dolls or something. It harms no one, but it’s creepy.
Have you ever put all your Sims in the swimming pool and remove the ladder?
I have not. Is that game only about torturing the characters, or is that more of a side quest?
I think the big difference is that unlike in a videogame, the person doing this genuinely believes that they are torturing something.
This person believes that saying that will generate attention.
There’s a chance they actually just believe they are trolling some of the dumber AI brained people by making them think they are hurting something that can’t be hurt.
This whole thing is like the flip side of the “don’t create the Torment Nexus” meme, where fiction depicted something that is entirely a non-issue but people are going to make it an issue because of the fictional depictions (basically any fiction about AI rights where they treat AIs as if they are pretty much artificial human minds, which LLMs are not even close to).
Society for Indecency to Naked Animals
Reminds me of that
Exactly. It’s not a red flag until one’s actions spill over into the real world. An overwhelmingly majority of people who play violent video games and “torture” AI are not going to become serial killers.
I don’t worry worry about the person who enjoys violence in the digital realm. I worry about the person who finds no satisfaction from digital violence, so they move onto harming insects and small animals, eventually humans if left unchecked. That’s who we should be focusing our energy on.
Pretending to torture a piece of software to rile up idiots on the internet is a green flag.