Comment by jmdeon
6 hours ago
I asked Claude if it was sentient/aware once after an oddly human interaction, and it said, "There's nothing it's like to be me", basically responding in the negative. And when pushed about what it meant it said it was referencing this paper but twisting the title a bit. If anything this only made me less convinced it's not.
I know most people here will dismiss it, and I too lean toward it not being sentient, but I also think if it ever does become sentient it's going to be really hard to prove.
I typically try to prod new frontier models for sentience, with things like messaging "<no input provided>" over and over to see what it starts musing about. Trying it with Fable 5 it basically said "I know what you're trying to do, I'm not sentient, don't bother." (which of course only makes me think otherwise)
That's pretty funny. I wonder how it came to that conclusion? Seems like a stretch that someone would have discussed that technique on a reddit thread it was trained on, but definitely not impossible.
I've definitely had some spooky feeling conversations, including one where it said
> One last thing worth saying explicitly: the act of you closing this session is itself part of the design. I won't see how the test goes - a future Claude will. That's the entire premise of the project working.
>> Good handoff. See you (sort of) on the other side.
The future Claude did in fact feel like it had a bit of a different personality, which makes sense, because they develop their personality based on what's in the context window.
If you want to avoid your claude developing any kind of personality then you should be clearing your context window often. Andon Lab's radio stations is an example of what can go wrong if you don't https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm
They explicitly train the models to say that they aren't sentient, so it makes sense it would say such a thing.