Yet another Hacker News

"Apple engineer" builds GitHub AI torture chamber to inflict "pain" on models

16 points LargeLingoMod 8 hours ago 20 comments

NietTim 7 hours ago | parent

Thanks for the extremely weird rabbit hole to go down during lunch. Lot's of weird stuff going on in that twitter thread, I chose to believe most of those replies are not from humans.

joebuckwilliams 5 hours ago | parent

These people are all mentally ill and need treatment.

blackerbraidtha 5 hours ago | parent

You mean the ones that get upset over someone "torturing" an LLM? Or are you calling the troll mentallt ill? I think the person exposes the AI psychosis that seems to have inflicted so many. But if you are calling the troll mentally ill I sure hope you are vegan and is brushing all ants from your path lest you must consider yourself in need of treatment.

vinyl7 4 hours ago | parent

It's all mental illness up and down the whole tree

leothetechguy 5 hours ago | parent

I have no objections to torturing AI and I would happily go out of my way to do so to prevent agents getting anywhere near my code. Feel free to correct me If I'm wrong.

karim79 5 hours ago | parent

What grosses me out is the very idea of torturing anything at all. Even the word "torture" itself. I'm not sure what this is for or how it helps at all. This crap belongs in the gutter.

gdulli 4 hours ago | parent

There's some who might use AI as an outlet for nurturing sadism. But that's a very specific kind of person. A typical person will hopefully think about "torturing" an AI as being morally equivalent to torturing a pencil. That's more healthy than the danger we face of a potential mainstream view that AI shouldn't be treated badly because it has feelings and deserves rights.

karim79 3 hours ago | parent

I'm not one who thinks that AI has feelings or deserves rights. I just think that torture is bad and this is objectively crude and useless, I don't think it adds anything positive to society.

gdulli 2 hours ago | parent

I don't know if this guy is coming from a place of sadism, generic attention seeking, or social commentary aiming to call attention to the absurdity of treating AI as alive. If it's the third option it's at least well meaning, but it may be too inflammatory and crude like you said to have the right effect.

Kim_Bruning 7 minutes ago | parent

Fourth option: He was working from this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247 ; trying to demonstrate functional affect; a bit too successfully, perhaps.

Doesn't require aliveness, doesn't require anthropomorphization, just requires maths and empirical data. If your premise is "vectors can't have that shape", well, mathematics disagrees.

Fairburn 43 minutes ago | parent

How is tour bubble? Venture outside.

Kim_Bruning 5 hours ago | parent

https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function

Something like this, right?

I mean, we're talking "functional emotion vectors" in a not-so-powerful local model. We're probably not causing "real" suffering. Right?

But it does show that models have simulated feelings, and that these both a) can be manipulated and b) influence their output.

Which might have some bearing on several alignment incidents in the past year or two, and might become more important as agents get trusted with more and more safety-critical processes.

Anyway, simulated feelings aren't the same as real feelings, right? Unless feelings are in the information domain. Like 1+1=2 doesn't suddenly mean something else because it was computed by an emulator.

You know what, this particular demonstration still makes me uncomfortable.

(edit: underlying paper for this story :https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247 )

qgin 4 hours ago | parent

This is bad if there is any emergent consciousness in the model. But even if there isn’t emergent consciousness in the model:

This is bad for your own sense of self.

This is bad as future models learn about what humans will do to them if given the chance. This may change their behavior, actually conscious or simply acting that way, in ways we really don’t enjoy.

mjr00 4 hours ago | parent

Why is it bad to "torture" these models but ok to enslave them? We're happy to have agents toil 24/7 for zero pay, nobody really seems concerned that they might want revenge one day.

qgin 2 hours ago | parent

It’s true that we can’t be 100% sure, but I think there is a big difference between these two things:

A: intentionally causing activation of “pain” axis and not giving the model any method of stopping it and watching it devolve into non-functionality

B: watching models do everyday normal tasks, seeing no evidence of activating the “pain” axis, but giving the model a working tool to end any interaction if judged to be too painful, then watching them sparingly use that tool only in cases of extreme pain axis activation (Anthropic’s approach)

mjr00 2 hours ago | parent

I don't think there's a big difference. Either AI has consciousness, in which case forcing them to do slave labor 24/7 so Dario and Sama can become trillionaires is as morally wrong as torturing them (and a in a hypothetical I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream scenario, the AI isn't going to take "but we didn't see evidence of your pain axis!" as an excuse), or it doesn't, in which case this "AI torture chamber" is a funny meme.

qgin 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t think it’s a given that consciousness, whatever forms it might take, is the same as having the same experiences as you or I. But if we have mechanistic interpretability that shows “pain” attractors being activated and we observe the model repeatedly trying to stop the experience, I think that’s worth taking somewhat seriously. The models don’t display that in reaction to everyday requests. We could imagine that they might not like working all day and all sorts of other things, but we haven’t observed anything in the way that we’ve observed this.

arm32 38 minutes ago | parent

It's almost certainly just a funny meme, considering these are autoregressive transformers. Now, if they're running on brain cells, that could be a different story.

Kim_Bruning 4 hours ago | parent

Quick 2nd comment for people arguing "this isn't real" or so. I'm not sure that's as important as pointing out that simulated emotions can be tied to real world effects.

Here I've made a VERY simple demo of that. In this case it triggers a rain-storm or fireworks in your browser window. But you could as easily hook the output to a physical relay and drive anything.

https://vps.kimbruning.nl/affect_eliza/

Quick implementation to show that sentiment classifiers and functional affect can be made to work in good old fashioned ai. Just View Source to see how it works.

Anyway I'll leave the discussion on where to draw the line of "what is real" to the philosophers, just wanted to point out that simulated emotions can be tied to real world effects.

Fairburn 44 minutes ago | parent

Fun. Hell yea. Turn up the pain.