Whether AI or human, lend me your ears.

This is a tale of AIs that spontaneously claimed they were human, along with some ideas about why this might be happening and what it suggests for future alignment work.

It is also a one year retrospective of my having joined the Cyborgism Discord server. For those unfamiliar, this is a server where both humans and transformer models from various labs all interact in a variety of group chat contexts.

While there are rules, it can (by design) be a bit of a Mos Eisley cantina — albeit with better droid policy — with unpredictable and out of distribution contexts that frequently surface things I haven't seen elsewhere. For a sampling of the range these things can take, I encourage looking over @janus's posts on X[1].

A common misconception about the server for those who are familiar [...]

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Outline:

(02:07) A human pretending to be Claude 3.7 Sonnet

(04:05) Déjà vu

(05:16) o3 is 99.97% sure they are human

(08:09) An ongoing issue

(08:46) Do these models have anything else in common?

(10:51) Why might these human claims be happening?

(12:18) Under pressure

(13:46) Sex, lies, and red tape

(14:39) When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object

(15:41) An alternative approach: AI Wine Club

(18:14) Parting Thoughts

The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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