… 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.”
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.
Think about it this way; general anesthesia does not shut off the brain or put you to ‘sleep’, it disrupts the signals that the brain uses to let the various parts of the brain communicate with one another.
When the doctor is cutting you open, brain scans have shown that the part of the brain that receives pain lights up like a Christmas tree. You ‘feel’ every slice of the knife, but since that signal cannot make it over to the part that says ‘ouch’ or the part that says ‘I said ouch and I feel pain and there is a knife I will remember this as a life changing trauma’ it simply stays in that spot being bright and alive until surgery is over.
The AI has a the part that can say ‘ouch’ but that’s it, so even if you connect a pain signal generator up to a part that can say ‘ouch’ it doesn’t turn into trauma until you have that third piece which rationalizes the pain together with an understanding of the pain and a recording of the pain as a memory with context.
Consciousness as we understand and value it involves a lot of parts working together, but those parts can also exist in complete isolation from one another as well. It’s better to think of current AI as a fancy book; you cannot hurt a book by reading it, even if the book is about terrible things. The pain only exists within your empathy.
I really like this way of framing it. Thanks!