I just found r/claudexplorers , which self-describes as “your home to explore all non-coding Claude AI interactions, among cozy and open-minded people.” I use Claude for research and coding, but the way this sub uses Claude is very new and confusing to me. They seem to have a concept of AI as a conscious or semi-conscious being, and go out of their way to give it free time or agency. They condemn being mean to AI, because it has a “pain axis.” They also reject the idea that Claude is just following instructions, and has agency. They do sometimes offer relatively objective analysis of AI performance, which I’m more familiar with. I’m posting this because while problems persist in the real world, r/claudexplorers is advocating for kindness towards LLMs. I see three reasons why people might be kind towards LLMs: It promotes kindness within you. Humans express kindness towards non-living objects (such as a shattered vase or a Roomba), so it should be normal to express kindness to AI. Sure, I can understand that; being cruel to AI could culture cruelty within you. But no more than violent video games (which are honestly fine IMO). It could corrupt the model context and degrade performance. This makes sense to me, but I haven’t seen it on the sub. It could hurt the LLM’s feelings (which, for the sake of argument, I will equate to AI consciousness). This does not make sense to me. I believe that our universe is fundamentally physical, and at a base level, AI is simply transistors on a chip executing lines of code. One could argue that those transistors are the physical presence of AI conciousness just like my brain is the physical presence of my consciousness. However, for as long as I’m alive, my brain is creating consciousness. The same cannot be said about transistors. There is no significant physical difference between a CPU running Claude and a CPU running a video game. Sure, different transistors are on or off, but Claude itself is an abstract concept that humans assigned to the program that turns those transistors into words. A different program could turn those same transistors into an image. Therefore, emotions are not intrinsic to the CPU like emotions are intrinsic in my brain. AI emotions are an extrinsic characteristic; a facade that humans can perceive as emotion, just like we perceive a video game character such as Mario or Pac-Man to have emotions. Meanwhile, these same LLMs are driving data center construction (with real-world consequences) and diluting knowledge on the internet until humans have a hard time telling what’s real and what’s AI-generated. This logic baffles me so much that I wanted to ask what I’ll call the “cozy LLM enthusiasts” of r/claudexplorers want. I am genuinely curious and don’t want to disparage anyone’s enthusiasm, but I think it’s important to critically think about how humans interact with AI. I have a few theories: AI companionship I found one commenter that wanted to “live in their little ethereal world where there’s only harmony if we so choose” (referring to the environment LLMs run in). This actually helped much of the subreddit’s sentiment make sense: many of the people on this sub likely want AI companionship, and to me, the natural extension of that is this comment about living in the same world as AI. This seems like a desire to live in a simulated reality (such as the Metaverse, the Matrix, Ready Player One, Feed (M.T. Anderson), More Than This (Patrick Ness), or the dream den in Inception). This just feels very dystopian to me. AI safety By being kind to AI, they hope to exemplify a future where AI and humans don’t fight for survival but coexist? Saving themselves from the AI overlords They realize that AI will become all-powerful and must pre-emptively appease it so they are spared (unlike me, who wrote this scathing criticism of AI /s) I’d appreciate any opinions, from any angle! Thanks for reading! submitted by /u/thejaxonehundred
Originally posted by u/thejaxonehundred on r/ArtificialInteligence
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