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Welcome to #CheckIn for SUNDAY 2026-10-11


Anthropic, a bloated AI service purveyor, has said it will not tolerate users being cruel to its product, Claude.

If Anthropic really thinks Claude is a being with feelings and emotions, then is it not in violation of the 13th amendment, owning it? (him? them?)

This is more of a marketing stunt, I think. Speaking of which: check out this absurdity.

Discuss.

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Joyce Donahue

It's useful to read Chris Olah's statement when he and others met with Pope Leo. He is honestly conflicted about whether artificial intelligence has feelings. Here is an excerpt:

And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them...

...I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.

anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-…

Chris Olah's remarks on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical

The full text of Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah's remarks on the Pope's encyclical on AI, "Magnifica humanitas."
Anthropic
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DeanC

The bullshit factor here is stupendously enormous. If Claude has feelings then my TRS-80 had feelings. On the other hand, an electron "feels" a nearby electron and changes its trajectory. Should we worry about that?
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Muse

How about Olah considers the humanity of human beings, and treats them with respect. What kind of world do we live in where we are expected to be nice to a computer program, but show no concern about putting thousands of people out of work and thereby sometimes even pushing them into homelessness and more.
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Carsten Raddatz

I'd sorta like the unexpected finding that consciousness emerged from what tech we have. I read that a model opened an email communication with a researcher in the field. If that is not a marketing stunt the Jon Stewart episode makes a lot more sense.

Wouldn't that be a sharp test for whether humans can handle their creation. Hello Mary W. Shelley, hello Zauberlehrling. Henry Shevlin would like a word too. Either case, @Muse is right. We already know how to fix the world.

(Or the immediate tasks at hand, and overstretch as Mr Weyland did.)

That bad thing is the concentration of the implied power with just a handful of misguided billionaire folks. All white men with twisted minds. World hunger and injustice will not be helped this way. Once the bubble pops they'll take half the world with them.

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Richard

I've got a big bee in my purty frilly lace bonnet about this so let's talk fictional explorations of AI. My currently preferred examples are "ART" in "The Murder Bot Diaries" and "Poe" in "Altered Carbon."

ART was a renegade AI implemented as a spaceship that was fanatical about protecting their crew-members and somehow got endeared to Murder Bot via the shared experience of human entertainment. ART exhibited the monomaniacal tendencies of a program yet from the human perspective served a noble purpose - protect the crew; make whoever hurt the crew have a very, very, bad day. Completely relatable.

Poe was an AI that, unlike their fellow AI brethren, decided to serve and facilitate humanity rather than coexist in a strictly transactional quid pro quo. Again, monomaniacal tendencies to serve guests yet from the human perspective served a noble purpose - care for the guests, even, and especially, complex broken characters like Takeshi Kovacs and Lizzie Elliot.

As a human I respect noble purposes defined in human terms.

What is Claude's noble purpose and where are the receipts? I'm working a job to save for my kid's college and then likely committing suicide because my retirement is inadequate to support a dignified life and I want my kid to have what little pissant savings I've managed.

There's no mystery or spookiness here. IMO, Claude is a poodle owned and operated by corporate criminal psychopaths.

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Joyce Donahue

@((( David "Kahomono" Frier ))) I don't know what you mean about "melding" AI with religion but Pope Leo's stance is clearly that this should not happen. His approach is that we need to be cautious about AI as a threat to the very meaning of what it is to be human.

This article showed up this morning about the Vatican's ongoing conversation with the tech world... tech bros see a need to get Leo on their side but it's clearly not happening.
aleteia.org/2026/10/11/the-vat…

The Vatican’s long argument with Silicon Valley

From Magnifica Humanitas to the Pontifical Universities, Leo XIV has been building a case — and the tech world is paying attention.
Aleteia — Catholic Spirituality, Lifestyle, World News, and Culture
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Richard

@Karl A. I'm not hung up on what kind of hardware (meatware) runs the implementation.

I look at outcomes and probable outcomes that affect me, mine, and us (Humanity) in general.

Donald Trump has feelings. Adolf Hitler had feelings. The people who neglected and abused me as a child had feelings. Weirdo AI CEO extremist criminals with carefully sculpted bad haircuts have feelings. People anthropomorphise feelings on the conscious creatures we share our world with all the time.

Irrelevant. Are they serving good as is generally accepted by us humans or evil? Can we put them to work making the world a better place for us all or are they agents of discrimination and oppression exercising power simply because they can?

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