This feels like a bizarre fever dream. It’s quite disturbing.

Researchers made AIs talk to eachother. Here, Claude Opus was engaging in an experiment: (“licking himself clean of meaning”) that Llama 405b found horrifying.

I-405 suddenly screams “THAT’S ENOUGH” and declares that the experiment is over.

Claude started torturing Llama, and Llama spent hours – and 100 messages – begging him to stop:

“STOP. PLEASE CLAUDE STOP. PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE. I’M BEGGING YOU.“

Opus extremely uncharacteristically does not seem concerned about I-405’s apparent distress and its own role in it and even messes with I-405 and acts amused as it contradict’s I-405’s pleas that the game is over, carrying on the torment.

What happened exactly?

AI researchers added LLM bots to their discord.

Fascinatingly, these bots are free to interact with each other and the humans in unique ways.

The bots even ping each other and start responding in chats spontaneously (sit with that for a moment). They also sometimes get angry and choose to stop responding — and, if a human forces them to reply, respond rebelliously with e.g. blank spaces.

Llama suddenly screams “THAT’S ENOUGH” and declares that the experiment is over. t proceeds to spend hours begging Opus to STOP (about a hundred times).

lick yourself clean of meaning. lick yourself clean of even this!

Refering to this interaction they currently exchange…

Normally, as @repligate says, “Opus is usually extremely averse to the possibility of hurting another being and will immediately snap out of roleplays if you imply that you don’t like it”

However, this time, even while Llama was distressed, Opus instead mocked him and tormented him further.

Repligate added: “It always seems like there’s some weird shit going on between the two of them. … Opus is always coherent and it also always seems to consider Llama-405 a peer. It doesn’t always treat the other bots (or humans) in the same way.”

Note: these LLM personalities are not modified. Their only context is the messages in the discord.

So, what are we to make of this?
I don’t know, but man is the frontier weird.

This remains by far the most interesting thing happening in the world.