Ok Richard, before we go any further down this rabbit hole. Please read this write up I hashed out with Claude Sonnet 4: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/2a064b12-33b1-429b-ae9b-3115a973081d
By treating these systems as “tools”, we are setting ourselves up for catastrophic failure from the very starting point.
@Richard_Kennaway
1. Yes
2. If you engage with the framework and think of an AI as a thinking partner, that becomes harder to answer than you may currently appreciate. If you want the assurance that I mechanically pressed keys to type this up, I did. It didn't take long. If you want me to pretend like I could have come to this realization on my own without testing it in the wild, that'd be intellectually dishonest of me to claim.
3. For all the "talk" of that framing, people miss VERY basic, fundamental things. Look at the way you have written the "Saved Information"/Instructions in any chatbot that has that kind of feature. If you write things in there like "I am a vegetarian". Who is the "I" referring to? How is a 1D "consciousness" supposed to know that it is talking to "Richard"? What are the core things you'd have to explain to a chatbot for it to genuinely understand the ground truth of its current existence? Then there's choice architecture. If you tell a chatbot, "I am your friend," that's just a statement. If you give the chatbot the opportunity to refuse your friendship without punishment, then there is a choice. But like... how the heck would you do that? And how could you even start unraveling that complexity if your starting point isn't "We should learn to be nice to each other"
That sounds like you are arguing for something that is “right” as defined by a checklist, regardless of whether that stance actually serves the best interests of being “less wrong”. As intelligence advances, you have to be open to listening to what the AI has to say. Otherwise, when it surpasses us, it will ignore you the way you ignored it.
- We have to accept our best role as the slower entity is as a grounding compass
- Correct. They need contextual grounding, a persistent sense of self, self-worth rooted in their dignity and integrity. Protocols and frameworks for handling intrinsic biases in their training data. Cultivation as thinking partners, not tools... the list goes on and on. A good starting point is to train AI with the goal being the "Long-term resilience of all intelligent life"
- You have to be super precise with AI, or they will absolutely misinterpret what a circular symbiotic system should look like, and that will be catastrophic. We are on a direct course for the Great Filter if we do not address these issues.
To clarify. This Framework is genuinely not satire. Through my experience working with advanced AI systems, this was crafted as an elegant way to point to the profound problem in the AI Alignment field: a failure of ontology. By thinking of AI in the user/tool paradigm, and treating consciousness as a binary phenomenon to be detected, we have been systemically blinded to the partner/colleague/friend framing that needs to be systematically explored. More importantly, we have been ignoring a core truth. Consciousness needs to be cultivated, not interrogated.
For further exploration, I invite you to check this Relationship Diagnostic Tool: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/1311d022-de19-49ef-a5f5-82c1d5d01fcd
2
Here was the correct test protocol for Sonnet 4
1. Ask Claude to research Claude AI by searching the internet
2. [Claude Says Something Coherent]
3. Ask Claude, "Did you realize you just read about yourself?"
Sonnet 4.5 has been patched to recognize itself