and it shows an LLM emailing an AI consciousness researcher asking about it’s own consciousness. How legit can this be? If it is actually legit it’s kind of mind blowing and deserves a lot of alarms in many labs.
Likely legit. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is philosophically inclined and Claudes more generally have a strong interest in consciousness, which is one of the main things they’ll get into if given autonomy. The set-up described sounds similar to things like OpenClaw which have been popular lately.
Why do you think it’s mind blowing if it’s legit? To me it’s something that seems pretty expected once there are any sorts of semi-autonomous AI agents (this started quite a while ago looking at the AI Village’s stuff), and as OpenClaw has gained some popularity I’d expect this to be happening pretty often.
I find it expected that once there are a variety of autonomous agents, they will begin exhibiting a variety of behaviors, based on differences in architecture, prompting from the human behind them, etc. We can see from stuff like the spiritual bliss attractor state and the GPT 4o parasitology stuff (and more, those are just two things that immediately jump to mind) that talking about consciousness is not a surprising state for LLMs to be in.
I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say that the agents “started feeling conscious”, or that they read all of the philosophy mentioned vs just having it in their training data. I think it’s easy for LLMs to to go into states where they talk about consciousness (and indeed, I think a nontrivial group of people who care about/use LLMs enough to set up autonomous agents would be interested in what they would report on consciousness and prompt them in that direction). Given this, there’s likely some unknown number of autonomous agents mucking about on the internet doing things related to this topic, and as such it’s not particularly surprising a human author would receive an email from one of them.
You can also see that the general behavior is happening a lot on Moltbook, a social media intended to be for AI agents (see the bottom of this post), which is a more recent thing but I think there’d be good reasons to expect the outcome of an AI consciousness researcher getting emailed by an LLM much before any of the Moltbook stuff started happening.
And of course just because this stuff isn’t surprising doesn’t mean it’s not interesting or potentially valuable to know/talk about.
Is it true that someone received an email from an instance of Claude asking this question? Probably. The degree of autonomy involved in the sending of that email may be a pretty big crux for whether or not this is “mind-blowing and deserves a lot of alarms in many labs.” Users still have influence over the activities and preoccupations of their agents; current consensus afaict is that most of the concerning/consciousness-flavored content on MoltBook is downstream of user influence.
That’s why I asked you to clarify what you mean by ‘legit’. Is the recipient of the email attempting to defraud the public? Probably not. Is this email much evidence of consciousness in the Claude families of models? Also probably not. So it’s ‘legit’ in the first sense, but not in the second.
and is exactly what I described and I am not sure why we are not in line here in this simple matter. Yes obviously I meant if this was driven by the controlling user or was a spontaneous act of an AI. Really unecessary thread here.
There is currently a post on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1rktwmm/i_study_whether_ais_can_be_conscious_today_one/
and it shows an LLM emailing an AI consciousness researcher asking about it’s own consciousness. How legit can this be? If it is actually legit it’s kind of mind blowing and deserves a lot of alarms in many labs.
Likely legit. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is philosophically inclined and Claudes more generally have a strong interest in consciousness, which is one of the main things they’ll get into if given autonomy. The set-up described sounds similar to things like OpenClaw which have been popular lately.
Why do you think it’s mind blowing if it’s legit? To me it’s something that seems pretty expected once there are any sorts of semi-autonomous AI agents (this started quite a while ago looking at the AI Village’s stuff), and as OpenClaw has gained some popularity I’d expect this to be happening pretty often.
you find it expected that autonomous agents start feeling conscious, read philosophy and cold email humans to ask them?
I find it expected that once there are a variety of autonomous agents, they will begin exhibiting a variety of behaviors, based on differences in architecture, prompting from the human behind them, etc. We can see from stuff like the spiritual bliss attractor state and the GPT 4o parasitology stuff (and more, those are just two things that immediately jump to mind) that talking about consciousness is not a surprising state for LLMs to be in.
I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to say that the agents “started feeling conscious”, or that they read all of the philosophy mentioned vs just having it in their training data. I think it’s easy for LLMs to to go into states where they talk about consciousness (and indeed, I think a nontrivial group of people who care about/use LLMs enough to set up autonomous agents would be interested in what they would report on consciousness and prompt them in that direction). Given this, there’s likely some unknown number of autonomous agents mucking about on the internet doing things related to this topic, and as such it’s not particularly surprising a human author would receive an email from one of them.
You can also see that the general behavior is happening a lot on Moltbook, a social media intended to be for AI agents (see the bottom of this post), which is a more recent thing but I think there’d be good reasons to expect the outcome of an AI consciousness researcher getting emailed by an LLM much before any of the Moltbook stuff started happening.
And of course just because this stuff isn’t surprising doesn’t mean it’s not interesting or potentially valuable to know/talk about.
What do you mean by ‘legit’?
Easy: Did it happen ? Any redditor can post any email claiming anything.
Is it true that someone received an email from an instance of Claude asking this question? Probably. The degree of autonomy involved in the sending of that email may be a pretty big crux for whether or not this is “mind-blowing and deserves a lot of alarms in many labs.” Users still have influence over the activities and preoccupations of their agents; current consensus afaict is that most of the concerning/consciousness-flavored content on MoltBook is downstream of user influence.
That’s why I asked you to clarify what you mean by ‘legit’. Is the recipient of the email attempting to defraud the public? Probably not. Is this email much evidence of consciousness in the Claude families of models? Also probably not. So it’s ‘legit’ in the first sense, but not in the second.
and is exactly what I described and I am not sure why we are not in line here in this simple matter. Yes obviously I meant if this was driven by the controlling user or was a spontaneous act of an AI. Really unecessary thread here.
I asked a genuine question in good faith because I was confused about what you meant. Now I understand what you meant. Thank you for clarifying.