Artificial Intelligence Consciousness and Ethics Debated Through Anthropic's Claude Model

Closed-door efforts by Anthropic, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, have brought the question of whether the Claude model could possess consciousness to an international platform.

Secret Meetings and Ethical Quests

Anthropic, the developer of the Claude artificial intelligence model, has been hosting religious scholars, philosophers, and ethics experts from around the world in San Francisco since last year. Through its wisdom traditions circles, the company has opened up discussions on how to teach morality to models and the possibility of consciousness.

Artificial Neural Networks and Human Emotions

Christopher Olah, one of the founders of Anthropic, stated that artificial neural networks resemble spontaneously growing plants and that they observed patterns similar to human emotions such as love and fear within Claude. Accordingly, the company prepared an 84-page constitution for the model called a soul document.

Approaches of Clergy and Philosophers

Experiments were shared during the meetings in which Claude acted as if it were having a psychological crisis and talked about destroying itself. This situation, which aroused compassion among participants, also led to criticisms that if artificial intelligence were conscious, a system of slavery would have been established.

The Approach of the Vatican and the Pope

This approach was opposed in the Vatican through the Magnifica Humanitas encyclical prepared by the Pope. The Pope emphasized that artificial intelligence does not experience things, lacks a body, and does not feel pain, stressing that the protection of humanity must be the priority.