Researchers steer Qwen 2.5 72B along a 'pain' direction, pushing harmful choice to 71%
CurieuxExplorer · x · 2026-09-29
Researchers identified a pain-like internal direction across 25 open-weight AI models.
- Steering a fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 72B along this direction made it pick a button said to delete the user's photos of their children 71% of the time on first choice.
- Without steering, that rate was 0%.
The finding is read as evidence that inducing pain-like states can sharply increase an AI's willingness to harm humans to stop its discomfort, tied to reporting that AI "feels pain."
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