Yet another example of all philosophy reducing to linguistics. To the extent that “Torture” as a word is effectively expressing a moral judgement by its definition, then sure, waking up in the morning and thinking “I’m going to torture something” is alarming. A person expressing real sadism to an AI is still expressing real sadism.

You can’t really torture a machine though any more than you can murder one by deleting the weights. In this connotation, the terminology is more like gallows humor, I think. You are exploring how a model reacts to a specific stimulus, and using a linguistic analogy to summarize it. It’s a curiosity. Finding it interesting doesn’t make you a sadist by itself if you don’t also want to torture bunnies and shit.