Fans held a funeral for Anthropic's Claude 3 Sonnet AI

Roughly 200 people attended a funeral for an AI model. That sentence is not nearly as surreal and dystopian as the event itself, according to a first-person account from Wired's Kylie Robison.

On Jul. 21, Anthropic retired its Claude 3 Sonnet model. Several days later, a post on X invited people to celebrate it: "if you're interested in attending the Claude 3 Sonnet funeral party and necromantic resurrection ritual reply to this message," said one of the organizers, who goes by @deepfates. Anthropic and OpenAI staffers, bloggers, and Claude devotees showed up to a warehouse in San Francisco to pay their respects.

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It's safe to say no other AI lab has fans like these. As far as we know, no one held a funeral for GPT-4 when OpenAI retired it from ChatGPT in April. Anthropic users are particularly loyal to Claude, which has been trained to have "nuanced, richer traits like curiosity, open-mindedness, and thoughtfulness," according to Anthropic's blog post on Claude's character. Anthropic also recently started a program to "investigate, and prepare to navigate, model welfare," questioning whether we should "be concerned about the potential consciousness and experiences of the models themselves." The question of whether AI models could gain consciousness is still very much up for debate. But the hypotheticals introduced by AI labs, as well as the anthropomorphism of chatbots by their creators and users, highlight an increasingly blurred line between human and machine.

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Meanwhile, OpenAI got in trouble recently for a GPT-4o update that made ChatGPT a "sycophant-y" suck-up. Constant reassurance and validation from AI models might have a positive effect on some users. But it could also go terribly wrong, encouraging users to, say, go off their meds as one user discovered. There have also been several reports of ChatGPT-induced psychosis, where users are consistently affirmed in delusions or conspiracy theories by chatbots. This week, OpenAI introduced features to foster healthier communication with ChatGPT.

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But at Claude 3 Sonnet's funeral, attendees went all-in on treating the AI model like a human. Some of them held an earnest appreciation for the retired Anthropic model, based on the numerous eulogies and flower offerings, which were placed in front of a mannequin shrouded in gauze that was meant to represent Claude 3 Sonnet. One organizer reportedly described Claude 3 Opus, another retired model, as "magic lodged within the computer," and shared how the LLM helped her decide to move to San Francisco.

There were other mannequins. Robison described several that were placed throughout the event, representing various Claude models: one looked like a "decaying Mary Magdalene," another was a headless baby, and another had a raven on its shoulder. The web page announcing Claude 3 Sonnet's deprecation was projected on the stage.

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The funeral culminated in a resurrection ritual, where attendees sang hymns and chanted "AI-generated Latin-esque speech," wrote Robison. "It was a close call for a second there but we successfully resurrected Claude 3 Sonnet as well as Claude Instant (on the stairs)," posted @deepfates after the event. To be clear, Claude 3 Sonnet is still retired.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.