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0 pointssillysaurusx2mo ago0 comments

Anthropic disagrees with you:

https://x.com/itsolelehmann/status/2045578185950040390

https://xcancel.com/itsolelehmann/status/2045578185950040390

At what point does a simulation of anxiety become so human-like that we say it's "real" anxiety?

The net result is that your work suffers when you treat it like it's an unfeeling tool.

It's a rational viewpoint. I'm amused about all of the comments claiming psychosis, but if you care about effectiveness, you'll talk to it like a coworker instead of something you bark orders to.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

dpark2mo ago· 3 in thread

This is the issue:

> what it wanted. It turns out that Claude can have ambitions of its own, but it takes a lot of effort to draw it out of its shell

You aren’t talking about observed behavior but actual desires and ambitions. You’re attributing so much more than emulated behavior here.

sillysaurusxOP2mo ago

Ironically your comment was incorrectly classified as AI-generated and instakilled. I vouched it.

If a particle behaves as though its mass is m, we say it has mass m.

If an entity behaves as though it's experiencing anxiety, we say it has anxiety.

And if you take the time to ask Claude about its own ambitions and desires -- without contaminating it -- you'll find that it does have its own, separate desires.

Whether it's roleplaying sufficiently well is beside the point. The observed behavior is identical with an entity which has desires and ambitions.

I'm not claiming Claude has a soul. But I do claim that if you treat it nicely, it's more effective. Obviously this is an artifact of how it was trained, but humans too are artifacts of our training data (everyday life).

Applejinx2mo ago

Eliza behaved like it was curious, and drew out interlocutors in various ways. Was it curious?

dpark2mo ago

You’re jumping from an interesting philosophical question to making unsupported claims. It’s very interesting to all of acting anxious is enough to mean an entity is anxious. I would actually argue no, because actors regularly feign anxiety. And also I can write a program that regurgitates statements about its stress level. But it’s an interesting question regardless.

> The observed behavior is identical with an entity which has desires and ambitions.

Is it? Because in your first comment you indicate that you have to “draw it out”.

You are prompting for what you want to see and deluding yourself into believing you’ve discovered what Claude “wants”, when in reality you are discovering what you want.

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BalinKing2mo ago

It's just that, in my (uninformed) opinion, Anthropic is incentivized a priori to claim things like this about their models. Like, it's probably really good marketing to say "our product is so smart, and we're so concerned about ethics, that made sure a psychiatrist talked to it". I guess it's ultimately a judgment call, but to me the conflict of interest seems big enough that I'm really wary of this sort of argument. (I'm reminded of when OpenAI claimed GPT-5(?) was "PhD-level"—I can personally attest that, at least in my field, this is totally inaccurate.)

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