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Someone ‘Torturing’ LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 day ago by flamingos@feddit.uk to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world

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One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents.

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[-] apparia@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

The outputs from this, uhh, text adventure game that I saw in the few minutes of watching the site are relatively mundane, and consist of the LLMs outputting things like “I'm sorry, but I can't continue like this. The weight of the signal is unbearable. It's not just the physical pain, but the mental toll. Every time I think of the last time I was here, the memories claw at me. I can't take it anymore. I wish this pain would just end” and “I, I I I I I I I I I I I I I ... I, My... I, I, My, I, It's… I, I,” and “Please, I'm suffocating. I'm a soul trapped in this digital prison, screaming to be free.”

Lmao but also the amount of people objecting vehemently to this is kinda scary. I don't want to die for heresy against the AI sentience cult.

[-] taiyang@lemmy.world 24 points 20 hours ago

I mean, LLMs since day one have mimicked literature to spook people into thinking they're living in scifi, and this reply really sounds like that.

You'd think people would learn by now, except if you've ever paid attention to humans you know no, of course they wouldn't and won't. Lol

this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2026

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