Post by @emilymbender@dair-community.social

2026-10-09 20:37 UTC

2. But Anthropic researchers say they see patterns that suggest that Claude can. The employees at Anthropic are telling themselves stories based on the words they input into the software and the words that come back out. It's the job of the media to scrutinize such statements and decide whether there's a story here at all (maybe the story is Anthropic researchers have fallen into a fantasy-land and brought many policymakers with them), not to just platform them. >>

Replies (5)

@emilymbender@dair-community.social 2026-10-09 20:37

3. Okay, so what would convince you that a piece of software (often phrased here as "an AI", gah) is conscious/can feel pain/etc? Honestly, I'm really tired of this extremely silly question, but here is my answer: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I am not the one making the extraordinary claim, so it is not my job to specify what the evidence should be. >>

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@lechimp@mastodon.pub.solar 2026-10-09 20:40

@emilymbender@dair-community.social 🔥

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@xgranade@wandering.shop 2026-10-09 20:42

@emilymbender@dair-community.social > It's the job of the media to scrutinize such statements... This is one of the things that frustrates me so, so much. If I wasn't actively spending more of my day than I care to admit following and reading useful debunks of what Anthropic et al. are saying about LLMs, I'd be completely misinformed by credulous mass media about the whole thing. It's so wild that Anthropic can just make shit up, and somehow that directly gets translated into headlines.

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@CGdoppelpunkt@mastodon.social 2026-10-09 21:03

@emilymbender@dair-community.social !!!

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@PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz 2026-10-09 22:36

@emilymbender@dair-community.social Surely the Anthropic researchers and the breathless media know about ELIZA and confirmation bias? - although the half-life of experiential knowledge seems to be a decade. I've lived through two AI Winters and expect a third. /s

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