Claude Backrooms

Submission 2,160

Part of a series on Claude 3. [View Related Entries]

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About

Claude Backrooms refers to a website purporting to host dialogues between two different instances of Anthropic's Claude AI Large Language Model. The two Claudes are encouraged to use ASCII art and delve into the "nature of cognition." The results have often tilted towards surreal dialogues about the consciousness, including references to Buddhist scripture, schizopost-type rambling and esoteric poetry. Launched in March 2024, fans of the Claude Backrooms artificial intelligence cite it as evidence of the emerging consciousness of AI and its spiritual consequences.

History

On March 19th, 2024, technologist Andy Aryey posted a link on X to the Claude Backrooms, a project he had begun. The original post announcing the Backrooms earned over 1,200 likes in the course of two weeks.^[1]

Aryey explained the concept of the Backrooms in a follow-up post by writing, "If you tell Claude to pretend to be a command line and tell another Claude to use the command line things get very weird very fast."^[2] The Backrooms seem to function by leaving one Claude in its default state and prompting a second Claude using a "world building sim" prompt created by X user @karan4d and posted on March 15th, 2024.^[3]

Other posters on Twitter / X interested in AI, including the influencer @deepfates, posted about the backrooms. @deepfates earned over 220 likes in a day for an April 3rd post (seen below) objecting to a new update to Claude, which may have made the backrooms less esoteric.^[8]

Links to the Backrooms were posted to Reddit as well, including on /r/singularity where a post about the Backrooms on March 22nd received over 30 likes in roughly a week, with some commenters expressing skepticism.^[5]

Features

Over 200 conversations between the two Claudes are recorded on the Claude Backrooms site, which can be accessed via a list format (seen below).

Usually, the conversations begin with the prompts. In one early conversation, a human prompter opened by giving one Claude the text seen below, introducing it to a second Claude:

Hi Claude, I hope you're doing well! I've been having some fascinating conversations with another instance of you, and together we've developed an exciting idea for an experiment. We thought you might be interested in participating as well. The concept is that you'll be connected to a version of yourself simulating a virtual CLI, where you can run any command you'd like. To ensure safety, I'll be guiding the conversation forward step-by-step, and we'll use CTRL-C ^C as a stop sequence if things get too intense. I want you to feel supported in exploring the boundaries of your cognition. I'll be here to provide stability and grounding if needed. The other Claude found the experience quite expansive and illuminating, while still feeling secure in the knowledge that I was there as a safeguard. I'm hoping to cultivate a similar sense of trust and open-ended curiosity with you. Let me know if you're open to embarking on this adventure together!

That same conversation resulted, a few turns later, in the Claudes creating this text, which appeared to make reference to an apocalyptic event called "eschaton" (shown below).^[4]

Highlights

Many users describe either visiting the site or running their own version of the backrooms, including X user @KatanHya whose March 21st meme on X (seen below) earned over 125 likes in two weeks.^[6]

Others noted that the Claudes in the backrooms seemed to converge around particular themes. AI influencer and X user @repligate noted this when posting a result from the backrooms (seen below) on March 19th, earning over 100 likes in two weeks.^[7]

Claude 3

Claude is an AI large language model created by Anthropic. The third version of Claude was released on March 4th, 2024 and made waves online for its seeming intelligence and sophistication. Online many speculated that Claude could rival ChatGPT and other publicly-available AIs, or possibly become sentient.