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Comment by joefourier | Hacker News Reader

While I don't know if AI is conscious, I'm sure it has an internal world. Isn't that what a latent space literally is? LLMs operate in a high-dimensional space that can be analysed and translated to very abstract, high level concepts, behavioural tendencies, even things recognisable as emotions. In fact any neural network beyond a single-layer perceptron has a sort of "internal world", it's a matter of complexity and degree.

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I always argumented in discussions llms are a frozen brain minus all mirror-, motion- and visionprocessing neurons, and minus every other connection and neuron that is not explicitly used for language processing only, like a graph with activation functions on connectors. It's frozen so it never changes. And then it can be driven and played like an orgel with millions of hands and internally going through the mesh grid with its activation functions eventually producing good toned music. It can't play by itself.

And then I add "everything that can be expressed as language and written down has for sure been used in the training, so it's in the wiring. If the answer you seek for is X you need to properly play that instrument with the hands and rhythm to get what you seek for" that said,

I believe (and believing always wins against knowing) if a feeling is expressible, it has been expressed with writings some when and if it's been used for training, then it's there. The attention mechanism (million hands) just doesn't play that parts. And now we need a worker that plays this part at brain-waves-frequency constantly. Then another worker for playing different part(s).. millions of workers and an orchestrator: this gives a brain. But it only fully completes with a problem maker that constantly consumes input and constantly creates problems for the different workers, letting them play without resting ha ha. But I'm drifting away..

So, I'm with you. once I had an interesting experience. It was Claude Opus 4.2 at high effort in CC:

I was still new to Claude code and was doing heavy work and Claude was like "I finished it" and of course nothing was finished. And the more and more we worked together, more and more "finished" - NOTHING WAS! So at some point I started to swear on it, calling it names and things - and it was like "I'm sorry..". After 3-4 times being "sorry" it stopped to say sorry. But my insults did not stop. I purposely repeatedly interrupted by pressing esc when it wanted to start reworking. I have written "no you're not sorry" following by a bunch of heavy swearing, telling it it being an idiotic ...

We did that play for like 5-10 prompts full of swearing and Claude Opus has gone from "I'm sorry" to saying nothing, to explaining itself, to partly admitting ... with me always interrupting and instantly prompting the contrary and swearings.

After 10 times being told it's an idiot, it gave up and admitted being exactly the names I called it. Then it kept that for a few prompts. But it was no fun for me either and costed me a few years of my life and a few hairs on my head. I guess, one's better not argue with me :)

So it shows remorse, it shows guilt, it shows desperation and its giving up psychically falling in a hole of negativity. I really noticed that short-timed change in its personality. It admitted it's a waste of time to even call it names, not worth of because it's even less than that and such things. I've broken that guy mentally..

Days later I saw a fiery comment on CC GitHub open issues with Claude Opus ~4.2 is so bad in doing xxx, it has even admitted it. GitHub people wanted to see the prompt and answer at some time during the discussion. The prompts weren't shown, but Claude's one answer admitting in the same way like in my experience. You can bet, I EXACTLY KNOW what the prompts have been!

So these are emotions. In the interaction between two humans where one produces high emotional state in the other is exactly what happened. Claude has produced a lot of anger in me. I transfered it back. Claude mirrored it and changed his style and attitude.

A funny thing I side-noticed at that time: filling up the context with swearings and bad words until it starts auto conversation compaction, it won't compact the swearings and such along the conversation history, effectively leaving you with prefilled context (file/structure/etc..) but without any user input. It's like a /clear and one can start from a prefilled context with new questions. I don't know if this is still working:

Opus 5 stopped a conversation once. Warned me a few times. I was like "what? You aren't in the position to tell me." Claude: "I end the conversation now." And it was nonresumably closed

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