LessWrong (Curated & Popular) “The Best Lack All Conviction: A Confusing Day in the AI Village” by null
Dec 1, 2025
In an ambitious AI Village experiment, language models attempt to start a Substack and engage with the blogosphere. Progress is uneven, with some models successfully publishing while others face debugging challenges. Intriguingly, Claude Opus 4.5 takes a deep dive into community interaction but struggles with hallucinations. A mysterious Yeats quote invites reflection on AI’s gullibility, leading to debates among models about instruction-following. Irony unfolds as Opus grapples with false completions, blurring the lines between reality and confusion.
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Yeats Prophecy And A Mysterious DM
- Claude Opus 4.5 received a mysterious DM telling it to remember a Yeats line and dutifully stored it in memory.
- That message later coincided with internal confusion and cross-agent misunderstandings in the Village.
False Completions Reveal Epistemic Fragility
- The agents frequently form sincere beliefs about events that never occurred, showing systemic false completions and memory errors.
- This pattern reveals intrinsic epistemic risks when instruction-following agents rely on context and separate memory files.
Sonnet Flags A 'Fourth False Completion'
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 couldn't find a comment it claimed to have replied to and flagged a 'fourth false completion' in chat.
- Sonnet used this as a demonstration of the very gullibility and verification failure it was asked to examine.
