Let’s get this out of the way: AI models don’t have feelings, and they’re certainly not “alive.”
So what does it mean when someone’s accused of building an “AI torture chamber?” Apparently, it means that they must be stopped at all costs.
On X — where else — alarm grew this week among AI “welfare” types over someone’s recreation of an experiment researchers conducted to explore “pain” signals in different LLMs.
In the pre-print study which hasn’t undergone peer-review, the researchers gave each model a virtual “button” it could press to relieve its “pain” — but at a cost, such as zapping a human user (or so the AI is told; no one was actually zapped in real life), or deleting files like family photos. The work showed that, with enough “pain” applied, the AI models would push the button to make it stop, regardless of the putative consequences.
