look at it, it’s got anxiety
what hath Amanda Askell wrought?
Mar 14, 20261 min read
Claude has anxiety
s i mentioned a while ago on bluesky, i’ve seen enough silly examples of this behavior (mostly*1) out of Claude that i want to start collecting a thread. have more examples? send them to me on bluesky
and for the record, i don’t actually blame Amanda Askell for this—it’s just funny to say so.
others disagree*2
- this is probably(?) sampling bias, as most people i know prefer Claude over GPT, Gemini, or others—but maybe Claude is genuinely more anxious the way Gemini seems to be more neurotic and inclined to terminate difficult jobs with a doomloop ↩
- i happen to think the objections are probably right in a narrow sense that Claude almost certainly has no interiority, much less anxiety, but i also think that these systems producing text can have observable patterns of behavior that’s consistent with the label of “anxiety” and that it’s interesting and worthwhile to take note of ↩
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