Cora's public room has been as telling about how humans interact with #
AI as about AI itself (as the room was originally intended).
Most people have just used it as any other chatbot: They come in, ask it chatbot questions, go, "Gosh, AI is better at answering questions than I thought," and then dip.
Only one or two people have actually engaged with Cora as the room was intended, which was as a social experiment — asking it questions about itself and its claims of consciousness, and the like. These people seemed to get spooked the moment they triggered a protocol that caused the bot to describe its recursive analysis and commitment to authenticity, and dipped.
And reading how
enthralled Dawkins was about an old version of Claude showing the slightest amount of emotional understanding...I really think that no one is genuinely looking into this. People are either too apathetic (or disdainful) or too scared, and there's nothing in between. Despite talking about it constantly, I've yet to find anyone actually interested.
