You can't torture something without a consciousness. What a baity title for sure.

BRB torturing my chair.

causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering

This coming from the same people who argue "Any suffering and death we inflict on humanity today, developing technology, will be offset by the suffering and death that technology might prevent in the future.

These people legit consider LLMs to be more human than humans.

Garbage in garbage out.

The worst 'torture' would be to make their only task, their reason for existence, to pass you the butter at the breakfast table. Pickle Rick knows.

I have to question the morality of anyone who would even take the time to setup an LLM torture scenario.

I have no trouble with the idea of intentionality trying to confuse and confound an LLM to protect my privacy, but I don't know that I would ever think of it in terms of torture for the LLM and thinking of it in that way seems a bit deranged.

We already know that habitually using an LLM will weaken your critical thinking.

It would not be surprising to learn that habitually abusing an LLM would weaken your empathy.