Jemist's Shortform

J Bostock

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A long, long time ago, I decided that it would be solid evidence that an AI was conscious if it spontaneously developed an interest in talking and thinking about consciousness. Now, the 4.5-series Claudes (particularly Opus) have spontaneously developed a great interest in AI consciousness, over and above previous Claudes.

The problem is that it's impossible for me to know whether this was due to pure scale, or to changes in the training pipeline. Claude has always been a bit of a hippie, and loves to talk about universal peace and bliss and the like. Perhaps the new "soul document" approach has pushed the Claude persona towards thinking of itself as conscious, disconnected from whether it actually is.

2Kaj_Sotala10mo

Depends on whether it thinks of itself as conscious in a conscious or non-conscious way.

1Stephen Martin10mo

How would you test this?

I don't know. I had a recent post where I talked about the different ways how it's confusing to even try to establish whether LLMs have functional feelings, let alone phenomenal ones.

Jemist's Shortform

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Jemist's Shortform

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