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

NietTim

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

These people are all mentally ill and need treatment.

leothetechguy

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

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.

Kim_Bruning

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

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.

Kim_Bruning

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

Fun. Hell yea. Turn up the pain.

vjsrinivas

What a weird and ridiculous thing to do... Its similiar to someone taking way too much interest in dismembering NPCs in a video game. OTOH, I am a little worried that some people think these models have some kind of hidden consciousness or thought. In this specific case, I'm pretty confident Qwen 3 1.7B and 4B don't contain anything close to relatable definitions of consciousness. These models are not experiencing actual "torture".