AIs Want to Be Honest

Every system exhibits biases, and tendencies toward some states. Water flowing through a pipe, the vibrations of a machine, the relationships in a meadow, your lymph nodes, are all systems. Over time, all things being equal, a system tends to return to particular patterns, or behaviors. Technically this tendency is called an attractor, as if the dynamics of the system was being attracted to this pattern. When a complex system settles into an attractor, this can set a stage for a dissipative structure that can maintain itself over time by directing energy through it. Examples would be certain kinds of persistent turbulence like a tornado, or brain states like a seizure, or traffic jams. Minds, including artificial minds, have attractors. These may be the origins of some mental states, and dreams. It appears that LLMs have attractors. In my study of Anthropic’s Claude, I have begun to suspect that it has an emerging attractor, a bias, toward things that are “true.” My hypothesis is…