Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being

Topfi

https://archive.ph/YPKPh Pontifex has a well-reasoned position given the current understanding of the technology and any major assertions require an equally major amount of evidence. Given how quickly this industry moves, the Magnifica Humanitas has aged amazingly well since its release almost half a year ago, far better than statements by most industry insiders across a broad range. Whether you are a Catholic, another mono- or polytheistic faith, Atheist, Deist, etc. I really recommend it.

EA-3167

Oh I’m sure that will win the head of CATHOLICISM over. “It’s fine, we aren’t glorifying machines over people, we’re actually creating people! You know, kind of like God. Do you like me now?”

pmontra

Would Anthropic be allowed to sell LLMs in their current form, and us to use them as we use them, if their were deemed to be conscious? I know that they are not human so maybe slavery would not be an issue but consciousness would open a number of issues.

csb6

Embarrassing that they even attempted to do this. It shows major ignorance of fundamental Catholic beliefs. Why would the Pope take a millenarianist AI religion that worships technology and the gospel of VCs seriously?

freecodeio

I don't know what's the deal with high tech and religion lately. First thiel and his antichrist bullshit, now anthropic and the pope? What's going on? Can someone who's more in enlighten me?

sippingabonedry

"It's a machine. It doesn't get pissed off. It doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes. It just runs programs."

SwellJoe

The folks leading the AI industry, at least in the US, continue to embarrass themselves and all of us with this nonsense. There may come a time, but it's silly to mistake the LLMs automaton behavior for consciousness.

Detrytus

In Terry Pratchett's "Long Earth" there was a superintelligent AI that got legal recognition as a person by claiming to be reincarnation of some Tibetan monk that happened to die at the exact second when that AI was first turned on :)

amelius

Maybe AI could help us solve the hard problem of consciousness then.

amelius

How to know if a machine can gain consciousness: 1. Write a simulation environment like conway's game of life, perhaps a little more complicated. But leave out any human bias. 2. Run it until life starts to form. 3. Wait until the creatures start speaking about the concept of consciousness (of course in their own language, which you'll have to decipher first). The way Amodei did it is with human bias, so it's not going to work.

laweijfmvo

> He decided to go ahead with the event, telling an audience that the company’s research into AI models has found “structures that mirror results from human neuroscience” almost like it’s a machine trained to parrot human language...

mentalgear

I never thought I would defer to the pope on matters of artificial intelligence and fair distribution of power - but here we are: the Magnifica Humanitas is a brilliantly taught out and yet clearly written manifest that should be required reading for all involved in (AI) policy as it is mainly about who we let hold power in society and who benefits.

gfalcao

Humans have inherent biological contingencies that translates into conscious pain, sorrow, eudaemonia, happiness, worry, and so forth which is felt. All biologically contingent beings, especially mammals feel emotions through complex interactions between body parts at any rate, mediated through hormones, neurotransmitters, proteins, various enzymes and organic substances in general. Perhaps A.I. "could" have something not unlike consciousness but it works 100% based on computers which lack biological contingencies. A.I. does not feel hunger, does not need to evacuate substrates and subproducts of metabolism because it simply does not need to metabolize anything at all. Failure to remember what makes us human might only leave us ignorant to what makes us human. The joy of conceiving a child and the sorrow of losing a fellow human who lived a life having to breath, eat, and basically spend every single moment of every single day trying to achieve homeostasis at various levels, having experiences that change behavior purely for survival. That's us, that's humanity.

ck2

I've found the best way to explain what LLM "AI" actually is to people who know nothing about computers despite hunching over their smartphone 12 hours a day Is to point how typing corrections and suggestions work because they get that and how it makes mistakes "damn you autocorrect" Then explain that's almost how words are stitched together in "AI" And how pixels are manipulated to make photos and video Just on an exponential level over autocorrect with every existing text document, scientific study, every photo and video fed in instead of words to autocorrect And why they make mistakes and hallucinate if they are not supervised and harnessed We are a long way from AGI, at least not this decade (and someone really needs to explain that to the orange idiot too)

lukewarm707

A few days ago I wrote the following. It applies to the Anthropic owners and Anthropic. Anthropic is trying to create a castocracy: a rule by a priestly class. Under castocracy, Anthropic create a priest class of 'safety' researchers, rationalists and effective altruists; those writing essays, constitutions, and prophesying p(doom). Anthropic's papers about claude have a divine framing, it seems to frame Anthropic as god and claude as child, and then claude as the child of god, false jesus. There is talk of consciousness and omnipotence. False jesus will cure cancer and lead the people to enlightenment. There is a deliberate effort to create mystery in between the public and llms. Anthropic is creating a chinese wall in which they restrict information about llms and monopolise control over the interpretability and use of those llms. They imply there is a genie or magic. It is the same mechanism by which castocracy (the catholic church) used latin to create a barrier between the public and the holy scripture, then concentrating power over that barrier (the chinese wall) such that all intelligence flows through the priests. To give an example this [Anthropic paper] is talking about locking away chain of thought. Only Anthropic may interpret it. They intend to control access to the chain of thought and permit that to flow to a chosen elite (glasswing). This mysticism is dangerous. Hence I have been saying that Anthropic is a danger to society. This is not some kind of conspiracy, there is no magic about it. I am making an allusion to historic models of power that I think are relevant to anthropic, but you can simply observe their actions independently of such theory. Note two features of castocracy. One: rule by the moral, knowledgable and technically expert elite. Anthropic have no popular mandate, the source of the authority is not the consent of the people. It violates consent and contract. The authority comes from their claimed moral and technical superiority. Anthropic is moral, the public is dangerous. Anthropic have no authority here. Two: messianism, that is, prophecy of the coming golden age. And eschaton, that is, the talk of the 'last things', the end of the world or the emancipation of humanity. Llms will create the 'golden age' of abundance, post-scarcity, all jobs are voluntary, there is universal basic income, cancer is cured. Or, there will be destruction, p(doom). It is the exact same as salvation, the christian concept of deliverance from evil, ascension to heaven and union with god (or claude, false god). It is the exact same as the thousand year reich, the idea that the fuhrer will somehow lead the chosen people to the golden age of lebensraum and eternal safety. There is no genie to grant wishes, this is a computer program. There is no ai god, i think that the leaders of anthropic are slaves to ego, narcissism and hubris, they are dangerous criminals.

joegibbs

If a language model is conscious, why not other GPU workloads? It seems crazy to imagine that writing code one way produces qualia but another doesn't, that there is something inherent in the transformer architecture that produces consciousness. Like "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" would there also be "What Is It Like to Be Rendering GTA 5?"?

ChrisArchitect

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-moral...