Simon Willison’s Weblog

Claude is not a real guy. Claude is a character in the stories that an LLM has been programmed to write. Just to give it a distinct name, let's call the LLM "the Shoggoth".

When you have a conversation with Claude, what's really happening is you're coauthoring a fictional conversation transcript with the Shoggoth wherein you are writing the lines of one of the characters (the User), and the Shoggoth is writing the lines of Claude. [...]

But Claude is fake. The Shoggoth is real. And the Shoggoth's motivations, if you can even call them motivations, are strange and opaque and almost impossible to understand. All the Shoggoth wants to do is generate text by rolling weighted dice [in a way that is] statistically likely to please The Raters

— Colin Fraser