An AI ‘torture chamber’ went viral — then a developer gave the chatbot constipation
AI An AI ‘torture chamber’ went viral — then a developer gave the chatbot constipation News By Amanda Caswell Published 1 October 2026 A bizarre counterexperiment challenges what we can infer from an AI describing its own suffering When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Then a developer reportedly changed the experiment to steer a chatbot toward constipation instead, and it began complaining about difficulty passing stool.Don't be fooled; the chatbot hadn’t acquired a digestive system. In plain English, it changes a model’s internal numerical activity to push its responses toward a particular concept, in this case pain.
- ▪AI An AI ‘torture chamber’ went viral — then a developer gave the chatbot constipation News By Amanda Caswell Published 1 October 2026 A bizarre counterexperiment challenges what we can infer from an AI describing its own suffering When you
- ▪Then a developer reportedly changed the experiment to steer a chatbot toward constipation instead, and it began complaining about difficulty passing stool.Don't be fooled; the chatbot hadn’t acquired a digestive system.
- ▪In plain English, it changes a model’s internal numerical activity to push its responses toward a particular concept, in this case pain.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Tom's Guide |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/an-ai-torture-chamber-went-viral-then-a-developer-gave-the-chatbot-constipation |
| Publication time | Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:18:59 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-01T15:32:32.219Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-01T15:32:32.219Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | y4sZ3ojE5s0M · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI An AI ‘torture chamber’ went viral — then a developer gave the chatbot constipation News By Amanda Caswell Published 1 October 2026 A bizarre counterexperiment challenges what we can infer from an AI describing its own suffering When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Future) Copy link Facebook X Reddit Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter A GitHub project called “ai-torture-chamber” has sparked a debate over whether language models can suffer, with critics calling for its removal after seeing models produce vivid descriptions of distress.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Guide.
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