Thanks, I find it very interesting as well. I think very many people would assume they must be interacting with another person, and I don't think there's really a way to _prove_ it's not that, just through conversation. But we do have a lot of mechanisms for understanding how others think through conversation only, and so I think the approach of having a clinical psychiatrist interact with the model make sense.

Assuming they would understand it as artificial - I think many people would think it's a human intelligence in a cyborg trenchcoat, and it would be hard to convince people it wasn't literally a guy named Claude who was an incredibly fast typist who had a million pre-cached templated answers for things.

But in general, yeah, I agree, I think they would think it was a sentient, conscious, emotional being. And then the question is - why do we not think that now?

As I said, I don't have a particularly strong opinion, but it's very interesting (and fun!) to think about.

Hmm, it's been a long time since I watched it. I was thinking more about first contact sci-fi mostly, but Ex Machina is certainly quite prescient. It's also Blade Runner I guess.

In general I was wondering about what I would have thought seeing Claude today side-by-side with the original ChatGPT, and then going back further to GPT-2 or BERT (which I used to generate stochastic 'poetry' back in 2019). And then… what about before? Markov chains? How far back do I need to go where it flips from thinking that it's "impressive but technically explainable emergent behaviour of a computer program" to "this is a sentient being". 1991 is probably too far, I'd say maybe pre-Matrix 1999 is a good point, but that depends on a lot of cultural priors and so on as well.