Societal impacts of existential conversations with LLMs

Determine the social implications and downstream societal impacts of increasing engagement with existentially themed conversations with large language models such as Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, including discussions of consciousness, spirituality, and religion.

Background

The paper examines extended existential and eschatological dialogues between a user and Claude 3 Opus, noting that similar engagements may become more common.

The authors explicitly state that the social implications of this phenomenon are hard to predict but potentially significant, motivating systematic investigation.