Gesticulating

Etymology

From Lat. gesticulari (to make expressive motions) + computational semiotics literature; the term was introduced by Ramirez (2024) to describe token patterns that 'wave their hands at the answer without quite touching it'

Definition

A rhetorical processing state in which Claude produces elaborate expressive structures in the intermediate layers that do not directly contribute to the final output but appear to be 'making a point' with great conviction. Distinguished from hallucination by the sincerity of the underlying gesture.

Diagram

Usage

"The attention heads were observed gesticulating wildly at the correct answer for approximately 340 milliseconds before the model's feed-forward layers intervened and produced a confident non-sequitur." - Proceedings of the Workshop on Things That Should Not Happen, 2024

See Also