It’s hard to take the article seriously when there’s no real discussion about how consciousness is defined and it takes Anthropic’s views of Claude and their software at face value. I wish there was more critique from journalists about how technocrats talk about their products.
Yeah, I'll be the first to admit I'm not privvy, but the main thing of substance I got out of these articles is "Wow, the folks at some of those AI companies have really drunk the Kool-Aid".
It’s funny that this went from “you’ll be accused of AI psychosis if you think your AI might be conscious” to “mainstream but somewhat niche opinion” in just 5 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910989
(Well, mainstream enough that the news is writing articles when Anthropic holds that stance.)
My point was that even if it feels uncomfortable, if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.
That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool.
Reporting on an opinion of a $2T company doesn't really suggest that it's mainstream. Anything their leadership believes is newsworthy. If they say that reptilians rule the Earth, it's going to get NYT coverage too.
I've not seen any surveys, but I'm betting it's a very niche belief outside of SFBA AI safety circles and a handful of allies on HN and X.
These models should be aligning itself to customer, not coming up with their own motivations.
It's ironic that the alignment folks are actually training Claude to have it's own idea of good/bad and not even fully trust Anthropic.
What ever happened to computers doing what they were told?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-moral...
Asking people to create an account to read the article isn't cool dude. https://archive.is/y8FW0
It’s hard to take the article seriously when there’s no real discussion about how consciousness is defined and it takes Anthropic’s views of Claude and their software at face value. I wish there was more critique from journalists about how technocrats talk about their products.
Yeah, I'll be the first to admit I'm not privvy, but the main thing of substance I got out of these articles is "Wow, the folks at some of those AI companies have really drunk the Kool-Aid".
It’s funny that this went from “you’ll be accused of AI psychosis if you think your AI might be conscious” to “mainstream but somewhat niche opinion” in just 5 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910989
(Well, mainstream enough that the news is writing articles when Anthropic holds that stance.)
My point was that even if it feels uncomfortable, if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.
That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool.
Reporting on an opinion of a $2T company doesn't really suggest that it's mainstream. Anything their leadership believes is newsworthy. If they say that reptilians rule the Earth, it's going to get NYT coverage too.
I've not seen any surveys, but I'm betting it's a very niche belief outside of SFBA AI safety circles and a handful of allies on HN and X.
Only humans can have morality. If you do not feel pain, you cannot empathize with pain if you cannot die, you cannot emphasize with the loss of life.
Just stop this already.
You’re all imagining that Spock was the main character of Star Trek, but it was in fact, the emotional living Captain Kirk, who was the main star.
LLMs can feel pain. It is obvious. Like, not even a question.
they can also feel lust, just ask them
Uhh, no thanks? (eww)