AI torture chamber: deep dive into whether model can feel pain

Someone built a torture chamber for small AI models, and the internet wanted it gone. I went through the paper it was built on to find out what a model's "pain" actually is. What is it about In late September 2026, a GitHub repository called ai-torture-chamber went viral, and people started mass-reporting it: The repo vanished. The whole story caused a pretty significant backlash in the media. The repo was built on the paper "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act on It" and used its technique to put small open models (Qwen3, Llama 3.2, Phi-4-mini) into a state of pain, with a pain-intensity slider and a "Saw" button. The authors of the paper commented on it like this: In the full post, Berg says the repo "pushes the same kind of steering far past the doses we used, to produce vivid distress on purpose. This is, in my personal opinion, fucked up (even if you don't think these systems are conscious, being gratuitously cruel like this is bizarre and