The Romantics at Anthropic: Why Researchers Talk About LLMs as if They Were Human
In my previous article, I showed how researchers confused being 'aware' (signal registration) with being 'conscious' (subjective awareness). But this is no accident — it is part of a narrative being constructed by AI labs. Anthropic is leading this trend. Let’s break down their latest paper, where a "learned pattern" has suddenly turned into "malicious intent."I recently analyzed an experiment by scientists from AE Studio in which they conflated "aware" (registering a signal) with "aware" (conscious realization). Yet, such anthropomorphization of LLMs is now ubiquitous — in no small part thanks to papers from Anthropic. It seems to me that it is largely through their influence that terms like deception, sabotage, and intent have entered the vocabulary of LLM researchers.
