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?)