From a purely mechanistic perspective, the phenomenon we're discussing here is people prompting the machine with words that would be cruel if directed towards a person. When someone does this, he expects and intends that the machine will generate a sequence of words that a person would say if subjected to cruelty.

I think this simply means that he is being mean and cruel, even if you're 100% convinced that there's no actual mind on the other end that he's being mean and cruel to. (Indeed, he almost certainly thinks there is, because why else would he want such a sequence of words outside of the "dark creative themes" Anthropic exempts?)

in my experience people who are cruel to inanimate objects are also cruel to animate ones.

man, i'd be icked by someone who was cruel to a rock with a face painted on it. let alone a chatbot.

It's not irrelevant for generating sequences of words. Input of "that is the dumbest idea I've ever heard" and "perhaps that idea could use some improvement" don't necessarily generate the same output