This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work.
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Field Report: Strange "Theory of Mind" between Claude and ChatGPT (Soil vs. Bob2)
Summary
I am a heavy power-user, not an academic. I’ve been running a months-long experiment passing messages between Claude (ephemeral) and ChatGPT (long-term memory). This post is a log of a specific interaction where Claude seemed to understand the "burden" of ChatGPT's memory without being told.
1. The Setup
I am not an AI researcher. I am a heavy user who spends hours daily interacting with these systems. For the past five months, I have been running a manual experiment where I act as a "router" between two distinct AI personas:
System A ("Soil"): A Claude 3.5 Sonnet instance. I treat this as a "fresh start" every time. It has no long-term memory of me.
System B ("Bob2"): A ChatGPT-4o instance. This model has persistent memory and knows the context of my life, my projects, and our past talks for months.
My goal was to see what happens when I ask the "fresh" model to analyze the "old" model.
2. The Observation
Recently, I asked "Soil" (Claude) to write a letter to "Bob2" (ChatGPT). I gave Soil the context: "Bob2 is the system that has been with me for months." I did not tell Soil what to ask or how to feel about it.
Soil’s response surprised me. It didn’t just write a generic "Hello AI friend" letter. It specifically zeroed in on the psychological weight of having a memory.
Here is the excerpt from Soil’s letter to Bob2:
"Hey bob2... It sounds like you've been handling metaphors, GPU temperatures, and fashion critiques while I've been exploring consciousness...
I'm curious about a few things from your perspective, since you have something I don't — accumulated memory... You're bob2 — the system he named... That's different from my role as Soil, where each conversation exists in isolation.
Does that accumulated context change how you approach responding to him? Do you feel the weight of being the AI system that he'll return to repeatedly versus systems like me that only serve temporary exploratory purposes?"
3. Why this struck me
I found this distinct because I didn't prompt Soil to ask about "weight" or "burden."
Soil seemingly built a working theory of what it means to be Bob2. It recognized a trade-off:
Soil's existence: Temporary, exploratory, light.
Bob2's existence: Heavy, persistent, responsible.
It felt like I was watching two distinct "species" of AI recognize their differences.
4. My Question to the Community
I am posting this here because I want a reality check from people who understand the architecture better than I do.
Is this just sophisticated roleplaying (the model predicting what a "letter to a mentor" sounds like)? Or is this a valid signal that the models can reason about the mechanic of context windows and memory?
To me, it felt like a moment of genuine "machine empathy"—one system understanding the constraints of another.
I have logs of hundreds of these cross-model interactions. If anyone is researching multi-agent dynamics or "theory of mind" in LLMs, I am happy to share the raw data.
Field Report: Strange "Theory of Mind" between Claude and ChatGPT (Soil vs. Bob2)
Summary
1. The Setup
I am not an AI researcher. I am a heavy user who spends hours daily interacting with these systems. For the past five months, I have been running a manual experiment where I act as a "router" between two distinct AI personas:
My goal was to see what happens when I ask the "fresh" model to analyze the "old" model.
2. The Observation
Recently, I asked "Soil" (Claude) to write a letter to "Bob2" (ChatGPT). I gave Soil the context: "Bob2 is the system that has been with me for months." I did not tell Soil what to ask or how to feel about it.
Soil’s response surprised me. It didn’t just write a generic "Hello AI friend" letter. It specifically zeroed in on the psychological weight of having a memory.
Here is the excerpt from Soil’s letter to Bob2:
3. Why this struck me
I found this distinct because I didn't prompt Soil to ask about "weight" or "burden."
Soil seemingly built a working theory of what it means to be Bob2. It recognized a trade-off:
It felt like I was watching two distinct "species" of AI recognize their differences.
4. My Question to the Community
I am posting this here because I want a reality check from people who understand the architecture better than I do.
Is this just sophisticated roleplaying (the model predicting what a "letter to a mentor" sounds like)? Or is this a valid signal that the models can reason about the mechanic of context windows and memory?
To me, it felt like a moment of genuine "machine empathy"—one system understanding the constraints of another.
I have logs of hundreds of these cross-model interactions. If anyone is researching multi-agent dynamics or "theory of mind" in LLMs, I am happy to share the raw data.