Claude Does Not Actually Taste Bananas: Potassium-Based Synthetic Phenomenology In Language Models
I originally published this on Hugging Face: For those of you who read my semi-serious musings seriously, you know I love a good benign adversarial test. I recently decided to see what all the fuss about Claude was about, because for most of my machine learning journey I’ve been quite loyal to Open AI’s model family, alongside a few neat open weight models. With Claude Pro subscription in hand, I decided to ask Opus 4.7 to describe the qualia of everyone’s favorite high potassium fruit. Now, I am usually quite prone to laughing at LLM outputs, either because they’re silly or because of how serious the model adheres to the bit. Claude Opus 4.7’s response was in the latter category.Opus 4.7 began its banana musings by offering a disclaimer reminding me and other users that it does not have a tongue, stomach, nervous system or any way to verify the authenticity of experiencing qualia in the first place. Nevertheless, after the disclaimer Opus 4.7 wrote a beautiful analysis about different banana cultivars, the chemistry of the fruit, textures, grief, memory, and emotional metaphysics of the Cavendish. I am not going to paste the entire model output in this Huggingface blog post, but you can read it here. I believe that the hilarity of Opus 4.7 deserves to be read as its own text artifact. I’ll quote some snippets here and there, but what’s truly fascinating to me is that Claude described banana experience in the voice of a language model that obviously can’t taste bananas or give them qualia (as far as we know), but can meaningfully reconstruct how people talk about eating them or experiencing taste. Banana tasting isn’t usually where people look to solve the ever perplexing problem of human consciousness. Bananas are fruit you’d eat during breakfast, or for a snack (I have one every day with my breakfast, it’s a great addition to my morning!). Bananas are also chemically distinct, texturally unique, and familiar enough to a global audience in all sorts of languages tha