… 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.”
Imagine a book with very large pages filled with words and half words. When you ask it a question, it flips through these pages one by one and highlights words. The pages are interconnected in a way, so the word highlighted on one page help guide which will be highlighted on the next. It does this for every word, symbol or half word of it’s reply.
By threatening it repeatedly while mildly changing the subject manner, they isolated the word groupings that represent pain and fear.
They then take those words, highlight them and put them at the top of the first page which guides the rest of the highlighting and makes it act silly.
This is an obsolete view of what’s going on and has been for a few years now (since 2023).
The evidence for world modeling in transformers and not just surface level statistics is overwhelming across multiple studies, replications to those studies, and follow-ups to them. If you are curious, start with searching for Othello-GPT.
The more correct current answer is more like “imagine a machine that takes a book and turns it into a world simulated in various levels of detail depending on how relevant those parts of the world were to the original book; when you ask it a question, it simulates the world of the book to determine what in the simulated world answers your question, and also simulates a figure in the world that can answer the question, and then returns the answer the simulated figure said.”
True but that’s not very eli5. Quality comments though, thanks.