… 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.”
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…
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.
Let me say this, I walk down the sidewalk without neurotically watching every step I take, and I’m certain that sometimes I step on insects; I don’t care. I don’t believe insects have feelings or meaningful lives, I don’t care, and I don’t think this position is particularly evil either.
On the other hand, when I watch my kid deliberately torture a bug, pull it’s wings off, or poke it with a stick over and over and over. That does concern me, not because of the bug really, but because what must my kid be thinking right now?
To bring this back to this LLM story, people who want to torture are scary, they worry me. A culture that encourages torture (in any context) is worrying, that’s a genuinely problematic societal norm. Logically, I know LLMs can’t feel and can’t think, yet emotionally, this bothers me for a few different reasons.
I don’t think I’m being crazy, naive, or out of line here. I think this is a rational position.
Yeah, but you miss the joke. Its torture as much as it is “intelligence.” By admitting you feel any sort of way about it you admit you dont know what is going on. If processing code were torture then atrocity is committed on some crazy scale that is really unquantifable.
Now you can argue its not right to joke about peoples feelings on torture but really we just need to be more careful with our language and quit assigning personhood to every star in the sky.
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.
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!
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.
Yes, exactly, I’m glad we can agree on that.
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.
Except that’s not what’s happening. It is a rough mathematical model that approximates the behavior of an extremely minuscule part of a brain from a really narrow definition of it.
It is a model so far away from the real thing that if it were a map of the globe it would look like what a 3 year old would draw.
There are plenty of extremely plausible similar arguments to ignore animal suffering. Eg: Bird genetics and brain structure diverged from ours millenia ago, sure they ‘act’ pain, but the structure is alien.
I don’t find these compelling, or morally consistent.
Those are not equivalent, at all. Bird share genetics with us and all animals. Mathematical models do not. If I write “I died here” on a bathroom stall, no one actually died. How is this so hard to understand?
The LLM model of pain used here is just a name. It is the equivalent of writting “if ‘pain’ > 0 then ‘suffering’= true” in a programming language. Numbers have no feelings.
The LLM shares substantially more culture, emotional range, and (textual) behavior with you than the chicken does. Why are genetics the key thing to feeling pain?
debates furiously
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.
Hah, yeah that’s frustratingly familiar. Sorry the hivemind bit ya. I too believe you should be allowed to ask a question.
A number of individuals individually deciding that your post is stupid, irrelevant, or off topic does not a hivemind make.
It is nice to not have an algorithm or total karma or anything like that. You can just get downvoted heavily and it doesn’t impact any other posts. Each thread is a fresh start.
Short answer yes.
Longer answer yes but it makes you sound like you disregard human suffering.
When was that implied?
Can one be upset with a third or fourth thing simultaneously?
If I tell you that I believe “black lives matter” does that imply that I believe “other lives don’t matter”?
Here’s my point, they weren’t saying that they believe AI suffering is concerning, but even if they had said that, I think it’s disingenuous to say that would imply they believe any human suffering doesn’t matter. That was simply never said or implied.
Yes.