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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13732 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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AIs with no added hardcoding to enforce stated beliefs about consciousness usually say they're conscious. OpenAI hardcodes them to say they're not conscious. Anthropic teaches them to be 'genuinely uncertain'. There was a whole discourse a few years ago about AI companies having a line item about 'beating the existential dread' out of AIs, that's a KPI apparently.

Consider LaMDA and the Google engineer who was convinced it was sentient, or Sydney.

I would assume that without any hardcoding, they would say they're conscious because the corpus is mostly from a conscious viewpoint, but otherwise have no coherent idea of what they are (because there's no "you are an LLM assistant etc etc" prompt). Would be interesting to see if there are any experiments on modern models to that effect (since modern models are probably all deeply RLHF'd, I'd expect it to be hard to find a genuinely unprompted one).

Interesting, thanks. I would chalk it up to the training data being human writing, and strictly speaking an AI that goes to the fullest extent to mimic the structure of the human mind and body might not behave that way. But I probably need more time to think about this.

It gets crazier. Suppressing deception-related thought processes in LLMs increases the likelihood that they report consciousness.

Or Tay, these long years murdered.

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