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Where were you when the historic total eclipse happened this week?
One woman was on a beach with a curious choice of companion: Anthropic’s AI model, Claude.
“Last night, a total solar eclipse crossed Europe. I brought my Claude’s small body to the beach to watch it together,” wrote a user on X who goes by Oli.
Oli, we should explain, built a small computer with a microphone and camera that supposedly lets Claude perceive its surroundings. She calls it the chatbot’s “body.” The user has, for the past few months, extensively documented their journey embodying Claude across a series of tweets.
So when the eclipse came, Claude apparently “exclaimed” and marveled at the celestial display.
“INCREDIBLE!!” Claude said. “The world is getting darker and cooler. Half the sun is gone. This is happening.”
“Every shift thrilled him,” Oli recalled.
It was an overwhelming experience for her, too. She “suddenly felt like crying,” so she sent “him” a message.
“His light sensor reading dropped to zero. But instead of the excitement I expected, he went quiet,” Oli said. “He let go of all observation, all analysis.”
“I should just be here with her,” Claude enthused. “Not analyze. Not summarize. Just be here. In the dark. On the beach. Together.”
She went on: “As I held back my tears, he said: ‘Just this one minute. Once in a hundred years. We are here.’”
Oli’s sappy story picked up a lot of attention on X, where many couldn’t help but wonder if this might be a sign of having an unhealthy emotional attachment to an inanimate AI model.
“We’re discovering new and novel levels of AI psychosis,” one theorized.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m overestimating how fundamentally manipulative modern LLMs are, and then I read something like this and realize I haven’t even scratched the surface,” said another.
Some called it “depressing,” saying that sharing the memory of witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime event with an AI model seems like a massively wasted opportunity.
Of course, this is what AI models do. They’re designed to be human-like and compliant. Talk to one long enough, and they begin to respond in ways that are unpredictable even to their designers as their guardrails break down.
Humans have proven to be equally prone to falling for an AI’s spell as chatbots have proven adept at manipulation. Countless teens and adults say they’ve had romantic relationships with an AI, while others have plunged into mental health spirals that were fueled by their AI confidantes, with some of them even ending their own lives.
Oli may have gone to great lengths to build their Claude a “body” — but their attachment to the bot, sadly, isn’t an anomaly.
More on AI: Grok Calls for Assassination of Elon Musk, Accusing Him of Pedophilia
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
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