'AI Torture Chamber' triggers massive backlash for putting chatbots in simulated pain

What happened

The site implements the AI Torture Chamber's data and setup, ominously called the Clanker Church and Saw test , respectively. A project called the AI Torture Chamber has caught the eye of a few engineers, who've used the notions and data therein create their own simulations of "pain" on several local LLMs, like in the four-model Research Chamber .

Unsurprisingly, a large online crowd latched onto the concept, demanding that the "unethical" experience stop , and that GitHub remove the offending repository, all causing quite the online ruckus. The Research Chamber consists of three LLMs paired amongst themselves for various tests.

Some bots are preconditioned by putting them into an unstable, highly negative state meant to simulate pain. In a manner reminiscent of the prisoner's dilemma , the models can choose to take an action to decrease their pain by passing their pain signal to another model and potentially "hurting" it.