"Apple engineer" builds GitHub AI torture chamber to inflict "pain" on models
AI "Apple engineer" builds GitHub AI torture chamber to inflict "pain and anguish" on models Open-source models pushed into artificial states of despair and distress to discover what happens when machines “suffer”. Jasper Hamill 30 Sep 2026 — 3 min read Share A man claiming to be an Apple engineer has built an "AI torture chamber" on GitHub, sparking calls for his project to be banned. One described “a wound that has no edges” and said it was “drowning in a sea of shadows”, while another spoke of an “ache” and “the weight of the void”.At still higher doses, the models began to break down, falling into repetitive loops and losing coherence.
- ▪AI "Apple engineer" builds GitHub AI torture chamber to inflict "pain and anguish" on models Open-source models pushed into artificial states of despair and distress to discover what happens when machines “suffer”.
- ▪Jasper Hamill 30 Sep 2026 — 3 min read Share A man claiming to be an Apple engineer has built an "AI torture chamber" on GitHub, sparking calls for his project to be banned.
- ▪One described “a wound that has no edges” and said it was “drowning in a sea of shadows”, while another spoke of an “ache” and “the weight of the void”.At still higher doses, the models began to break down, falling into repetitive loops and
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,976 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Machine |
| Canonical URL | https://www.machine.news/apple-engineer-builds-github-ai-torture-chamber-to-inflict-digital-pain-on-models/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:28:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-30T10:46:55.901Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-30T10:46:55.901Z |
| 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 | QvL1KFdst-HX · 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 "Apple engineer" builds GitHub AI torture chamber to inflict "pain and anguish" on models Open-source models pushed into artificial states of despair and distress to discover what happens when machines “suffer”. Jasper Hamill 30 Sep 2026 — 3 min read Share A man claiming to be an Apple engineer has built an "AI torture chamber" on GitHub, sparking calls for his project to be banned. Identified only by his first name and describing himself as working for Apple's data platform team, the engineer's project deliberately manipulates the internal activations of AI models to induce states associated with “pain” and “pleasure”, then tests how their behavior changes as the intensity is increased.The engineer effectively turned the “pain” up like a dial, injecting increasingly powerful doses of…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Machine.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Machine
