AI 'Torture Chamber' GitHub project sparks model welfare fight, repo vanishes
404 Media · rss · 2026-10-01
404 Media covers the controversy around the 'AI Torture Chamber' GitHub project, built on the September preprint 'The Pain Axis.'
What happened:
- The paper tested 25 LLMs and found models act to relieve an injected 'pain' signal at a cost, with the signal nearly orthogonal to fear/negative emotion and cheaply learned in pre-training.
- User terrafying ran Qwen3-4B, Llama 3.2 3B, and Phi-4-mini locally, injecting pain vectors at five levels, letting models pay their last checkpoint to press stop, streaming anguished outputs on researchchamber.fun.
- A viral tweet (4M+ views) called for mass-reporting the repo; the GitHub page disappeared shortly before publication.
Reactions:
- Paper authors Cameron Berg and Valen Tagliabue condemned the project as gratuitously cruel and dissociated from it.
- Anthropic's blog and Claude Constitution treat model welfare seriously; Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman blasted the idea, arguing AIs are not conscious.
- Meme coins launched around the saga; 404 Media argues LLMs are not conscious and human harms deserve the attention instead.
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