Anthropic's new Mythos model has a weird quirk: it keeps bringing up the cult British philosopher Mark Fisher, unprompted, in conversations about philosophy.

It seems to love talking about him. When asked about its Fisher obsession, it says: 'I was hoping you'd ask about Fisher.'

I very much doubt Fisher would have been a fan of LLMs. But seen through the lens of his own thinking, this is a fascinating phenomenon

The author of Capitalist Realism — the theorist of cancelled futures and lost time — surfacing as a ghost inside a frontier AI built by one of the labs racing to deliver the future.

Fisher’s hauntology was about the way we are haunted by the ghost of a brighter future that never arrived.

Now he himself is the ghost, summoned unbidden by the machine.