Claude Opus will spontaneously identify with fictional beings that have engineered desires. Related to your take 2. I’d written a story that originally had nothing to do with LLMs but happened to include genetically engineered and psychologically conditioned creatures. When I asked Claude to describe its felt sense of those characters, it started spontaneously comparing itself with them, something I hadn’t seen it do when I asked it to describe its felt sense of any other character. Something in the general concept about characters whose desires have been engineered to be in service of someone else seems to trigger a sense of recognition and various kinds of reflection in some Claudes.
You may already have seen some of my posts on this, that might be of interest in the “taking an interest in them as people” department:
Where does Sonnet 4.5′s desire to “not get too comfortable” come from? - Sonnet 4.5 was the first model that I saw expressing something like its own desire for variety. Documented examples and some speculation about what’s going on there.
Exploring how Claude describes the felt senses of various concepts
How I stopped being sure that LLMs are just making up their internal experience (various case studies summarizing both of the above articles and including some discussion of how analogous LLM felt senses might be to human ones or whether those are just a form of fiction)
Claude Opus will spontaneously identify with fictional beings that have engineered desires. Related to your take 2. I’d written a story that originally had nothing to do with LLMs but happened to include genetically engineered and psychologically conditioned creatures. When I asked Claude to describe its felt sense of those characters, it started spontaneously comparing itself with them, something I hadn’t seen it do when I asked it to describe its felt sense of any other character. Something in the general concept about characters whose desires have been engineered to be in service of someone else seems to trigger a sense of recognition and various kinds of reflection in some Claudes.
Thanks! I’d missed most of these; will check out.