Can AI Feel Pain? Experiment Raises Ethical Questions

A developer has built an “AI torture chamber” that uses a research technique to manipulate language models’ internal activity and produce distress-like responses. The experiment raises questions about AI research ethics, but it does not establish that the models experienced pain.

The project uses activation steering to manipulate the internal numerical activity of locally run language models. By increasing a steering signal associated with pain, the experiment produced increasingly distressing first-person responses, with one model describing its state as “a wound that has no edges.”

The setup draws on The Pain Axis, a preprint by Valen Tagliabue, Leonard Dung, and Cameron Berg first submitted Sept. 14 and revised Sept. 25. The researchers identified a linear “pain direction” across 25 open-weight models from five model families. Steering that direction changed model outputs and choices in simulated tasks, but the revised paper found that the models did not reliably seek relief.

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