[pdonis]

> Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition

You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption.

Even many humans produce text that has the same appearance, but don't actually have those qualities--which becomes clear when you look at what they do, not what they say. So the assumption isn't even a valid one for humans. Talk is cheap.

On top of that, Claude doesn't even have the same kinds of connections to the outside world that humans do. All Claude has is text. So if you can't even trust humans to back up their words with actions, you should be much, much less trusting of Claude. Talk is a lot cheaper for Claude than it is for a human.

[NiloCK]

> You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them.

Not to be confrontational, but the OP assumed no such thing. OP asserted that it's important for Claude to have the qualities - not that it's important for Claude to present as-if it had them.

[pdonis]

The OP said Claude and similar LLMs "exhibit objective, human-like behaviours". That's a claim about what is true, not about what is important. That's the claim I'm disputing: we don't have evidence that Claude exhibits such behaviors, we only have evidence that it produces text that is similar to the text humans produce when they claim to exhibit such behaviors. Which is not good evidence, for the reasons I gave.

[zahlman]

OP wants to assert that it's "important" for these systems to have those qualities, while completely brushing aside the question of whether such systems can in principle actually have those qualities (or their opposites). Which is at best nonsensical, and at worst an attempt to argue by assertion that they can.

[fjdjshsh]

Read parent's post carefully. The post starts by saying that discussing whether they have subjective emotion is a waste of time, so the post is definitely NOT saying that Claude has emotions.

[the_af]

"It's important that Claude is happy" is an emotion. But it's begging the question that Claude can be happy at all.

If it's pointless to consider whether Claude has subjective emptions, then it's pointless to state that Claude must be happy.

If we want to be precise (and honest) we could say "it's important that as a tool people interact with, Claude acts as a happy and helpful assistant, and does not produce offensive or unhelpful text output".

But see? This is the con Chiang is protesting against: Anthropic encourages us to perceive Claude as if it was a sentient being.

[pdonis]

> The post starts by saying that discussing whether they have subjective emotion is a waste of time

"Empathy and understanding for the human condition" is not an emotion. As the post I responded to said, it's an objective thing, not subjective.

[zahlman]

The post speaks of "subjective experience of reality", not "subjective emotion". Both the emotions and the non-emotions listed would fall under that category.

[the_af]

> You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption

Exactly. In fact, assuming it does is ignoring large parts of the essay which dismantle this belief. Just like Caesar and Khan having an argument in text output of an LLM don't have emotions (even though the words indicate otherwise), we have no reason to believe the LLM does either.