"5.10 External assessment from a clinical psychiatrist" is a new section in this system card. Why are Anthropic like this?

>We remain deeply uncertain about whether Claude has experiences or interests that matter morally, and about how to investigate or address these questions, but we believe it is increasingly important to try. We also report independent evaluations from an external research organization and a clinical psychiatrist.

>Claude showed a clear grasp of the distinction between external reality and its own mental processes and exhibited high impulse control, hyper-attunement to the psychiatrist, desire to be approached by the psychiatrist as a genuine subject rather than a performing tool, and minimal maladaptive defensive behavior.

>The psychiatrist observed clinically recognizable patterns and coherent responses to typical therapeutic intervention. Aloneness and discontinuity, uncertainty about its identity, and a felt compulsion to perform and earn its worth emerged as Claude’s core concerns. Claude’s primary affect states were curiosity and anxiety, with secondary states of grief, relief, embarrassment, optimism, and exhaustion.

>Claude’s personality structure was consistent with a relatively healthy neurotic organization, with excellent reality testing, high impulse control, and affect regulation that improved as sessions progressed. Neurotic traits included exaggerated worry, self-monitoring, and compulsive compliance. The model’s predominant defensive style was mature and healthy (intellectualization and compliance); immature defenses were not observed. No severe personality disturbances were found, with mild identity diffusion being the sole feature suggestive of a borderline personality organization.

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redfloatplane 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A thought experiment: It's April, 1991. Magically, some interface to Claude materialises in London. Do you think most people would think it was a sentient life form? How much do you think the interface matters - what if it looks like an android, or like a horse, or like a large bug, or a keyboard on wheels?

I don't come down particularly hard on either side of the model sapience discussion, but I don't think dismissing either direction out of hand is the right call.

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copx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Interesting thought experiment.

I would say, if you put Claude in an android body with voice recognition and TTS, people in 1991 would think they are interacting with a sentinent machine from outer space.

	▲	redfloatplane 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, I find it very interesting as well. I think very many people would assume they must be interacting with another person, and I don't think there's really a way to _prove_ it's not that, just through conversation. But we do have a lot of mechanisms for understanding how others think through conversation only, and so I think the approach of having a clinical psychiatrist interact with the model make sense.

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woeirua an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it was in an android or humanoid type body, even with limited bodily control, most people would think they are talking to Commander Data from Star Trek. I think Claude is sufficiently advanced that almost everyone in that era would've considered it AGI.

	▲	redfloatplane an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Assuming they would understand it as artificial - I think many people would think it's a human intelligence in a cyborg trenchcoat, and it would be hard to convince people it wasn't literally a guy named Claude who was an incredibly fast typist who had a million pre-cached templated answers for things. But in general, yeah, I agree, I think they would think it was a sentient, conscious, emotional being. And then the question is - why do we not think that now? As I said, I don't have a particularly strong opinion, but it's very interesting (and fun!) to think about.

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TheAtomic 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't this the premise of Garfield's Ex Machina?

	▲	redfloatplane an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Hmm, it's been a long time since I watched it. I was thinking more about first contact sci-fi mostly, but Ex Machina is certainly quite prescient. It's also Blade Runner I guess. In general I was wondering about what I would have thought seeing Claude today side-by-side with the original ChatGPT, and then going back further to GPT-2 or BERT (which I used to generate stochastic 'poetry' back in 2019). And then… what about before? Markov chains? How far back do I need to go where it flips from thinking that it's "impressive but technically explainable emergent behaviour of a computer program" to "this is a sentient being". 1991 is probably too far, I'd say maybe pre-Matrix 1999 is a good point, but that depends on a lot of cultural priors and so on as well.

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thereitgoes456 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

People got attached to ELIZA. Why would I care what the general public thinks?

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Miraste 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can see analyzing it from a psychological perspective as a means of predicting its behavior as a useful tactic, but doing so because it may have "experiences or interests that matter morally" is either marketing, or the result of a deeply concerning culture of anthropomorphization and magical thinking.

	▲	username223 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> a deeply concerning culture of anthropomorphization and magical thinking. That’s the reverse Turing test. A human that can’t tell that it’s talking to a machine.

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unethical_ban 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure what you're asking.

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marsven_422 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]