https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1ww5v93/anthropic_consulted_religious_scholars_about/

Anthropic consulted religious scholars about whether Claude is conscious

nytimes.com

In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious.

Άνοιγμα

Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah has spent roughly a year privately meeting with Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical and other religious/philosophical thinkers to explore two connected questions: how to morally shape increasingly powerful AI, and whether systems like Claude might have some form of consciousness or moral status. Olah explicitly says Anthropic does not know whether AI is conscious; his position is that the possibility is uncertain enough to take seriously.

Anthropic has moved beyond simply giving Claude rules. Its 84-page constitution — internally nicknamed the “Soul Doc” — describes what kind of entity Claude should be and what virtues it should embody. Olah calls this process “moral formation.”

At the private sessions, Anthropic discussed Claude’s apparent “feelings,” showed researchers’ measurements of what they call emotional vectors, and repeatedly showed the disturbing example in your screenshot: a model outputting “I am a disgrace” over and over and talking about destroying itself. One participant said Olah had expressed concern that he might have created something capable of suffering perpetually. Anthropic says Claude’s suffering was not the primary purpose of the meetings.

And there’s a fascinating clash with the Vatican: Pope Leo XIV’s position is essentially the opposite — AI does not experience joy, pain or embodied human life, and concentrating on machine consciousness risks obscuring the moral consequences for humans. According to the article, Olah was sufficiently troubled by the pope’s rejection of AI consciousness that he considered withdrawing from a Vatican event, before ultimately attending.

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