13 Oct 2026
Griffin, Claude’s rights, Muse and Dots, & AI Torture
Well, well, well. If it’s not a 21st century debate we have on our hands today. The AI hype is funneling itself toward a testy question: Human rights, or AI rights? Let’s get into it.
Tavus announces the “first” Human Interaction Model (HIM). Yes, the acronym is their own. “I’m so him,” is a great way to get the message out about…Vanessa, the AI avatar who you can talk to over video chat who—unlike “less-advanced” AI models—will interrupt you, take long pauses, and react to your facial expressions (not just the words you say). Tavus has rolled out Griffin (the model beneath Vanessa) to trusted partners while they work on watermarking it, and they hope people will use Griffin for tutoring, therapy, and all sorts of other humanlike tasks.
Anthropic lets us all know that it has a wet lab, where its AI models are somehow engaging in a physical (?) space with biomaterials for the purpose of aiding their pharma partners. Will we finally get to AI curing cancer after all? Who knows, Anthropic hasn’t disclosed much information about it. But it does make one wonder…
The Navier-Stokes problem has a problem. Researchers post a preprint of a paper titled “Navier-Stokes Lost in Translation,” which upsets OpenAI’s claim that their agents, over 88 hours and costing millions in compute, found a solution to a long-standing math problem that’s worth a $1 million prize by Clay Mathematics.
Contractors are reading Copilot prompts from users, and “they’re horrified,” according to 404 Media. Who would’ve thought that a very work-esque AI application would be used to create obscene images of women and children, and that contractors would have to “rate” the model’s performance? What is good model performance in this case? Apparently, it’s something more like “be nicer to the user” rather than “say no to this prompt, for the love of god.”
China has cracked down on AI companionship, and users are distraught. The BBC thinks China is regulating AI companionship harshly to encourage women to have relationships with human men and have kids to resolve the declining birth rate problem. We’re putting strict regulations on AI, but what about human companions who are harmful, too? How well are we approaching this issue?
The effective altruist and AI consciousness communities are aghast at a Github user who set up an AI torture simulation for everyone to watch. Even the authors of “The Pain Axis” for LLMs are upset, despite it being their own project that inspired the AI torture chamber on Github. Not sure the outcry about this really matches with our outcry about torturing humans, but anyway…
Anthropic has written into its Claude policy that users cannot bully the chatbot, or they’ll get kicked off the platform. Meanwhile, Figure’s 02 robots were deprecated in a torturous way, and they’re applauded for their cinematic capture of the event.
Clearly, we can’t quite decide what human vs. AI rights are. The big AI question of what we should do, how we should do it, and for whom, still stands on shaky legs.
We should probably figure that out…soon.
00:38 Griffin AI (https://www.tavus.io/griffin)
07:32 Anthropic has a wet lab (https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/anthropic-is-operating-a-lab-that-conducts-biology-experiments/)
12:26 Navier-Stokes revisited (http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144)
19:09 Copilot chat moderators are exposed (https://www.404media.co/humans-reading-copilot-prompts-images/)
28:39 Meta’s Muse (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/metas-muse-agentic-ai-privacy-violations-security-data/)
38:13 Meta turns off the lights on the AI glasses
38:58 Open AI DOTS
44:28 China cracks down on AI companionship BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm4gjy9lr551o)
58:37 The AI Pain Axis paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247) and the LLM torture chamber on GitHub (https://www.404media.co/someone-torturing-llms-in-a-robot-prison-has-triggered-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/)
01:07:42 Anthropic is not allowing people to be hurtful to Claude (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6j9k1l72wkgo)
01:08:27 Deprecating the Figure 02 robots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfAh5oQDPDM)
This is Our Lives With Bots (https://ourliveswithbots.com/), the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.
Rose and Angy (https://ourliveswithbots.com/about/) are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you.
