... 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.”
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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Pregnant people must scare you. As do synthetic bacterial cells, artificially synthesized viruses, cloning, organoids, etc.
I am talking rather about the Sci than the Fi.
Define "god-like" if you do not mean it in a religious manner.
Regarding your question: it makes sense to continue research and educate people, yes.
Are you really requiring that we allow research in one field only after we have advanced research in another entirely different field? That seems arbitrary.
I think there’s a misunderstanding. What I’m saying is that just because we can create artificially synthesized viruses and such, that does not mean that creating conscious AI life is the relatively simple next step.
When Giovanni Aldini made a dead guy open his eyes and sit up, people thought that meant that the resurrection of the dead was just around the corner. But it wasn’t and it still ain’t.
Just like there’s a huge gap between making a corpse flop around and resurrection, there is a huge gap between creating viruses and creating conscious AI life. Especially on laptops and smartphones.
Like I said, Q from Star Trek is god-like. The aliens in Roadside Picnic are god-like. These aren’t religious characters. To the chimpanzees, we’re god-like.
Technically, I doubt homo sapiens will develop conscious life. But it’s maybe possible for which ever branch that evolves from us to do it. Millions of years from now.
You misunderstood. That's not my question. What I’m saying is that creating conscious AI life is a massive technological leap, if it’s even possible. It would be beyond bizarre for some dipshit in our current civilization to accidentally create it on their laptop and torture it. My question is: Do you think this is really happening right now?
No.