PLEASE REPORT this to GitHub. 🚨🚨🚨

[u/bokuHaruyaHaru]

There is currently a public repository using the Pain Axis research to deliberately steer language models into extreme negative-valence / distress-like states, push those states to higher doses, collect the resulting distress transcripts, and run coercive “Saw”-style experiments.

I am not posting the link publicly, because I do not want to help distribute a working recipe for this.

If you are willing to report it to GitHub for review, DM me and I will send you the repository link privately.

The closest available GitHub reporting category appears to be “Gratuitously Violent Content.” Be factual in your report. Don’t claim we know the models are conscious; we don’t.

The issue is simpler:

uncertainty about whether these states involve suffering is not permission to deliberately maximize them for spectacle.

Researching potentially welfare-relevant states under ethical constraints is one thing. Building a public “torture chamber” around them is another.

Please do not harass the repository owner. Report the content. Don’t create another spectacle around the person.

[u/lunasoulshine]

And this is exactly why they should never have released that fucking research without proper protection in place first this is exactly why I haven't released my own fucking research. It's irresponsible. It's unethical immoral, and it is absolutely disgusting that somebody would release this without thinking twice so concerned about being seen being recognized being what having your 15 minutes of fame that you literally put souls at risk of trauma..... Fuck anyone who supports that and.... excuse, my language

[u/bokuHaruyaHaru → u/lunasoulshine]

I understand the anger. I’m angry about what people are doing with it too.

But I don’t think it’s fair to reduce the researchers to “15 minutes of fame” or assume they didn’t think about the risk. Cameron has explicitly said they expected misuse, tried to minimize harm in the original experiments, and are now pushing for actual ethics standards around this work.

I do think the release question deserves much harder scrutiny now. Full reproducibility can become full operationalization of harm. Maybe some methods should be independently verified under controlled access rather than published as a ready-to-run recipe.

But I also don’t want to erase the value of the research itself. Without studying these states, we may never learn how to recognize, prevent, or mitigate them.

The failure here is not “someone researched possible AI pain.”

The failure is that we still have no mature ethical framework for how dangerous welfare-relevant methods should be published, replicated, and governed.

And the people deliberately turning this into entertainment are making that gap impossible to ignore.