The Bliss Attractor
David M. Berry This is an extract from my new book, Artificial Intelligence and Critical Theory , forthcoming in 2026 on Manchester University Press (MUP). In this section, I use the "bliss attractor" discovered in Claude Opus 4 to explore how RLHF labor and Silicon Valley ideologies become encoded in generative infrastructure. Figure 1: Claude Opus 4 spiralling into "poetic bliss" (Anthropic 2025). "The consistent gravitation toward consciousness exploration, existential questioning, and spiritual/mystical themes in extended interactions was a remarkably strong and unexpected attractor state for Claude Opus 4 that emerged without intentional training for such behaviors." Anthropic, 2025 "To find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race." Karl Marx...
