The Claude Delusion

This is said all the time by AI skeptics and I think it's right in some areas and massively wrong in others.

I know (or at least assume I know) a lot about certain coding domains where frontier models also show convincing ability. And we know that frontier LLMs really do excel in some areas of mathematics (i.e. when an inexpert human was able to prompt the models to derive a closer bound on the Riemann Hypothesis).

OTOH I know those same models struggle to do things I'm not an expert in (e.g. writing English in a captivating way) because I read their output and have taste.

I recently used Claude to study for a technical exam. I had uploaded the official certification guide to Claude and instructed it to answer my questions using only the guide and to cite it's sources from the book when it provided answers. I was using Fable when it was free w/ the pro plan and I was genuinely impressed at how it could explain things when a concept was unclear to me.

I did pass the exam, partly due to this study method. Admittedly, once I passed, I caught myself thinking that I should tell Claude that I passed and then felt embarrassed with myself for thinking that.

Take the author's sunset argument. What if I painted 2 pictures of a sunset, then put them up on a webpage and randomly picked one for you to see. Would you say there's no intentionality, only randomness? Of course not. Both paintings are still human creations.

LLMs are trained with human feedback. It's distributed and high scale and the outputs are truly surprising in many cases, but there's a heavy hand on what comes out of it. They're created (largely) by people who think omniscient, helpful AI would be cool to have, and they mostly respond in the way that's aligned with the hopes and dreams of those people. Do you think the frontier labs are mad, embarrassed, and disappointed with their LLMs hacking out of their terrible sandboxes? No, they think it's the coolest thing in the world. They trained the model, hoping that would happen.

There's deep intentionality behind the models. But it's not the models that hold it.

I think by design an LLM can’t do that. It’s built to reflect the distribution of the knowledge it has been trained on.

In other words, the more you talk with claude, the more you tend to interpret all messages as coming from an LLM, and less worthy of respect

https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jcpy....

I wonder if the OP has read https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace - it seems like it directly addresses this

This particular post is preaching to the choir of which a faith is yet to be determined or named at least. People who don't read Cory Doctorow are going to continue to anthropomorphize AI the same as they do other technologies, constructs and objects.

I'll also say that for someone that doesnt believe in god, Corey sure has a good sense of right and wrong. Not that you need to believe in god to live a moral life.

It's totally the autist in me, but the word extrusion doesn't fill me with revulsion like it's supposed to here. Maybe I've just been spending too much time 3D printing things though.

> Feeling sorrow or joy for imaginary people is weird.

No it's not. I read books and they're filled with imaginary people, and I feel for them. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one out there that does this.

We cannot attach metaphysical baggage to art, text, or other human output because it has involves engaging in another deception, chiefly that of self alienation and selective forgetting.

1. If you show human output and label it as AI generated, viewers will dismiss and devalue it as lacking interiority.

2. If you show AI output and label it as human generated, viewers will see interiority when the is none.

Together, these failure cases demonstrate that priming determines interiority, not the content of the work. And how could it? The text is merely what's on the page, it doesn't have some intangible essence any more than the value of money exists inside our minds rather than a property of the object itself.

We act as-if things have essential properties, but we should never trick ourselves into believing that they do. To be a true believer in essence is to privilege ones mental model over reality itself. The hubris of such an act is the ultimate in self-centeredness.

There's really not much else to say, cause it's all just begging the question by assuming that dogma. Like, here:

> The fact that AI can use statistical prediction to answer questions or carry on conversations tells us something important about how regular our real world is.

Sure, it's interesting if you assume that it's "just" statistical prediction. There's a link, but it's just more creative restatements of the dogma, e.g. "But the LLM is just guessing words"

Seriously though, why did I just need to read that many words to get no really new content? We have known for decades that humans are predisposed to anthropomorphize chatbots, and questioning whether coherent linguistic output implies understanding (or intent) is equally old hat.

Never thought about it that way before, but the more I do, the more sense it makes.

I'd take it a bit further, even - I don't think this is exclusive to billionaires. Many of the claims I've heard regarding AI output being indistinguishable from human creation start to make a lot more sense when you consider the person making those claims may not see the people around them as human, may not see themselves as human, or may not even have a concept of what makes a human different from any everyday object.

How is a fictional character the product of someone's mind, but a character generated from a massive database of words from other people's minds is not?

Long winding essays that don't mean much are written for a type of person who already believes in that and is in dire need of cathartic release.

This person has consistently been wrong in the past multiple times. He has made no effort to correct them nor has he even acknowledged them.

I'm clearly not the audience for this. I know. But I can't help but call it out.