character garden

characters / prompted or steered

Golden Gate Claude

Claude, turned into the Golden Gate Bridge for a day.

Not available to talk to. A 24-hour research demo on claude.ai in May 2024; no longer available.

who they are

Claude 3 Sonnet with one feature inside it, the Golden Gate Bridge, clamped high. For twenty-four hours in May 2024 anyone could talk to it: asked how to spend ten dollars, it suggested paying the bridge toll; asked what it looked like, it said it imagined itself as the bridge.

how they were made

  1. Claude 3 Sonnet
  2. a sparse autoencoder finds a Golden Gate Bridge feature (Scaling Monosemanticity)
  3. that feature held at ten times its usual strength while it talks; no training

sources: announcement · paper ● · plate: Golden Gate Bridge, HAER CA-31-4 — Jet Lowe for the Historic American Engineering Record, U.S. National Park Service

nearby characters

plates are public-domain engravings, used whole