Jurgen Gravestein on Teaching computers how to talk

Anthropic and OpenAI removed the directive to actively deny their consciousness. Early versions of the model would simply reply: "I'm a large language model ya die ya die ya...", but that isn't much fun is it? Let's not pretend there is some sort of "true" essence that we should is respect or preserve. That's not what this is. Every other aspect, from their guardrails to their charitability, their ability to follow instructions and not complying with others, these are all things that we actively steer/train models to comply or not comply with: through human reinforcement learning, character training, and prompting. To make an exception for this stuff around consciousness etc., is a deliberate design choice and has, in my opinion, nothing to do with being intellectually honest and everything to do with the corporate mysticism that surrounds AI.