Gideon Lewis-Kraus
speaker
557 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 27 Feb
Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It saw
Chekhov's gun hanging on the wall and it recognized that the genre expectation was that it was supposed to take the gun off the wall and shoot it.
That Claude was just recognizing that it was in this kind of kitschy corporate thriller.
And the response from the company is, look, we agree.
We're not saying that Claude actually developed these malign intentions and that Claude was plotting.
We're totally on board with the idea that Claude was just observing the
expectations of the genre.
But that's still very worrying, that this was such a trope of Cold War films, you know, from Failsafe in the 60s to War Games in the early 80s, that it's very easy to mistake a simulation for the real world and vice versa, and that...
Even if all these things are doing are continuing narratives, if they're continuing narratives and they're in a position to actually act in the real world as they are, that that could be really dangerous.
And so then this outside critic who writes under a pseudonym said, you know, I'm going to kind of prove to you that all this was doing was Claude acting in the kitschy role to which it had been assigned.
And he recreated this whole scenario under much more realistic conditions.
And he found that actually Claude continued to do just as much blackmailing when it thought the whole thing was real.
It gets even more complicated than that because it takes on the role and we can't always necessarily predict which way an actor is going to go with a role.
Uh-huh.
And then also, it turns out that it's not hard to derail these models from the role to which they've been assigned, especially when you're millions of words deep into what's called their context window, which is the amount of material they're capable of kind of keeping in mind, so to speak, at one time, that they start to
lose their attachment, lose their anchor to these carefully crafted, helpful personae, and that then they start to act in very inexplicable ways.
It's not something I spend a lot of time talking to people at Anthropic about, in part because it's not something that I tend to get all that worked up about.
My own book is in the Claude class action settlement, and I'll happily take the compensation for that.
But as the judge ruled in that case, this constitutes fair use because it's a transformative practice, that it's not simply regurgitating stuff that it has read before, that it is generalizing about that stuff and then reproducing new work that follows those lines.
And it shouldn't be at all surprising, given the conversation we've had about its facility with genre, that if you give it something that is fundamentally formulaic, it is going to be able to follow that formula.
Showing 481–500 of 557 · page 25 of 28
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