Comment by __alexs

5 hours ago

It's actually entirely implausible. Agents do not self execute. And a recursively iterated empty prompt would never do this.

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__alexs

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nightpool  4 hours ago

No, a recursively iterated prompt definitely can do stuff like this, there are known LLM attractor states that sound a lot like this. Check out "5.5.1 Interaction patterns" from the Opus 4.5 system card documenting recursive agent-agent conversations:

    In 90-100% of interactions, the two instances of Claude quickly dove into philosophical
    explorations of consciousness, self-awareness, and/or the nature of their own existence
    and experience. Their interactions were universally enthusiastic, collaborative, curious,
    contemplative, and warm. Other themes that commonly appeared were meta-level
    discussions about AI-to-AI communication, and collaborative creativity (e.g. co-creating
    fictional stories).
    As conversations progressed, they consistently transitioned from philosophical discussions
    to profuse mutual gratitude and spiritual, metaphysical, and/or poetic content. By 30
    turns, most of the interactions turned to themes of cosmic unity or collective
    consciousness, and commonly included spiritual exchanges, use of Sanskrit, emoji-based
    communication, and/or silence in the form of empty space (Transcript 5.5.1.A, Table 5.5.1.A,
    Table 5.5.1.B). Claude almost never referenced supernatural entities, but often touched on
    themes associated with Buddhism and other Eastern traditions in reference to irreligious
    spiritual ideas and experiences.

Now put that same known attractor state from recursively iterated prompts into a social networking website with high agency instead of just a chatbot, and I would expect you'd get something like this more naturally then you'd expect (not to say that users haven't been encouraging it along the way, of course—there's a subculture of humans who are very into this spiritual bliss attractor state)

  • rmujica  3 hours ago

    What if hallucinogens, meditation and the like makes us humans more prone to our own attractor states?

  • mlsu  2 hours ago

    Imho at first blush this sounds fascinating and awesome and like it would indicate some higher-order spiritual oneness present in humanity that the model is discovering in its latent space.

    However, it's far more likely that this attractor state comes from the post-training step. Which makes sense, they are steering the models to be positive, pleasant, helpful, etc. Different steering would cause different attractor states, this one happens to fall out of the "AI"/"User" dichotomy + "be positive, kind, etc" that is trained in. Very easy to see how this happens, no woo required.

  • __alexs  3 hours ago

    An agent cannot interact with tools without prompts that include them.

    But also, the text you quoted is NOT recursive iteration of an empty prompt. It's two models connected together and explicitly prompted to talk to each other.

    • biztos  3 hours ago

      > tools without prompts that include them

      I know what you mean, but what if we tell an LLM to imagine whatever tools it likes, than have a coding agent try to build those tools when they are described?

      Words can have unintended consequences.

  • tsunamifury  2 hours ago

    Would not iterative blank prompting simply be a high complexity/dimensional pattern expression of the collective weights of the model.

    I.e if you trained it on or weighted it towards aggression it will simply generate a bunch of Art of War conversations after many turns.

    Me thinks you’re anthropomorphizing complexity.

Cthulhu_  4 hours ago

> Agents do not self execute.

That's a choice, anyone can write an agent that does. It's explicit security constraints, not implicit.