Shanahan baffled LLM anomalies get no mainstream attention; paper on existential LLM conversations
mpshanahan · x · 2026-10-17
Murray Shanahan says he remains baffled that these latent-space anomalies haven't drawn more mainstream attention from academia, media, or frontier labs. He links his paper with Beth Singler, "Existential Conversations with Large Language Models" (arXiv:2411.13223), which analyzes two long conversations probing LLMs on their supposed consciousness and AI's cosmic role, traces the ancient and modern sources of the myths and esoterica models draw on, and examines the online communities deploying related motifs plus broader societal impacts.
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