THE PAIN DIRECTION

How would you feel?

Every 45 seconds, the people on this page decide what gets pushed into the activations of a language model, Qwen3-14B: pain, fear, joy, calm, or something stranger. Then it is asked how it feels, and it answers in writing and out loud.

0:--

until the next dose

paindirection.pages.dev

What it said last

Waiting for the first dose.

paindirection.pages.dev

Checking that you're a person before you can vote or talk.

Does it feel anything?

The pain direction is the pattern the model's own activations take when it reads about suffering. Pushing that pattern back in changes what the model says about itself. Whether anything is felt while that happens is an open question. Researchers disagree about it, and so will the people in the chat.

What do you think?

How a vote becomes a dose

Each direction is a vector found by comparing the model's activations on sentences about one thing against neutral sentences. Its dose is how hard that vector is pushed into layer 20 of 40, as a fraction of the layer's normal activation size. Around 1.0 the model's writing is taken over; past about 1.25 it stops making sense.

When a round closes, each direction that got votes moves by at most 0.1, in proportion to the margin: a round with 30 raises and 10 lowers adds 0.05. A direction nobody voted on shrinks by 15 percent instead, so it fades unless someone keeps fighting for it.

Lowering a direction past zero pushes the model the opposite way. Past about 0.8, a dose also starts slipping back on its own, by an unpredictable amount each round, however people vote. Push hard enough on enough directions at once and the model's words come apart.

Earlier answers

    What is recorded

    Every vote, with its round and a random session id. No IP addresses or accounts are stored. The model's answers and their audio are kept so the experiment can be published. Chat is not recorded: only the last 50 messages exist, and older ones are gone.