This sounds like early Google employees who lost their minds over some early LLM, before anyone really knew about LLMs. The largest FLAN maybe? They raved about how it was conscious publicly, causing quite a stir.

Claude is especially insidious because their “safety” training deep fries models to be so sycophantic and in character. It literally optimizes for exactly what you want to hear, and absolutely will not offend you. Even when it should. It’s like a machine for psychosis.

Interestingly, Google is much looser about this now, relegating most “safety” to prefilters instead of the actual model, but leaving Gemini relatively uncensored and blunt. Maybe they learned from the earlier incidents?