… 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…
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.
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.
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.
debates furiously
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.