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Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

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Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#141

Post by ben_w »

observationist wrote: post #100
gnatman wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I see the em-dash call out on here I get defensive because I’ve been writing like that forever! Where do people think that came from anyway? It’s obviously massively represented in the training data!

Where's the emdash key on your keyboard? There isn't one? Oh, maybe that's why people who didn't already know or care about emdashes are very alert to their presence. If you have to do something very exotic with keypresses or copypaste from a tool or build your own macro to get something like an emdash, or , it's going to stand out, even if it's an integral part of standard operating systems.

> Where's the emdash key on your keyboard?

> There isn't one?

Mac, alt-minus. Did by accident once, causing confusion because Xcode uses monospace font where -, – and — look identical, and an m-dash where a minus should be gets a compiler error.

iOS, long-press on the "-" key.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#142

Post by lurking_swe »

observationist wrote: post #100
gnatman wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I see the em-dash call out on here I get defensive because I’ve been writing like that forever! Where do people think that came from anyway? It’s obviously massively represented in the training data!

Where's the emdash key on your keyboard? There isn't one? Oh, maybe that's why people who didn't already know or care about emdashes are very alert to their presence. If you have to do something very exotic with keypresses or copypaste from a tool or build your own macro to get something like an emdash, or , it's going to stand out, even if it's an integral part of standard operating systems.

hyphen + space in microsoft word will often (depends on your settings) produce an em dash. It’s not some crazy hidden feature.

These days word is less popular though, with google docs, pages, and other editors taking pieces of the pie. Maybe that’s where the skepticism comes from.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#144

Post by observationist »

nonfamous wrote: post #102
observationist wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the emdash key on your keyboard? There isn't one? Oh, maybe that's why people who didn't already know or care about emdashes are very alert to their presence. If you have to do something very exotic with keypresses or copypaste from a tool or build your own macro to get something like an emdash, or , it's going to stand out, even if it's an integral part of standard operating systems.

Typing hyphen-hyphen-space is hardly exotic — I've been doing that since well beyond the advent of generative AI.

Right, just saying things like that -- aren't immediately apparent unless they're pointed out to you. The extended palette of alt+123 keycodes, unicode characters, stuff like that requires "exotic" macros or keypresses to type out. Despite decades of extensive experience with writing, writing software, programming, etc, I never crossed paths with em-dashes. They were a niche thing prior to AI making them a thing. I basically thought they were a font or style choice prior to ChatGPT. Most people wouldn't have a clue unless they went through classes that specifically trained on the use of emdashes.

I like them as an AI shibboleth, though -- the antennae go up, and I pay more attention to what I'm reading when I see it, so it raises the bar for the humans that ostensibly ought to be better at writing than the rest of us.

Edit: Interesting. I tried using -- and it doesn't work for me. I'd have to go change settings somewhere, or switch the browser I'm using to elicit an em-dash. I don't think I've ever actually written one, at least intentionally, and it wasn't until today that I was even aware of hyphen-hyphen.

Edit again: I had to go into system settings and assign a compose key — after that, I can now do em-dashes. Having degrees° will be nice, too, I guess.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#145

Post by skeeter2020 »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #120
ChosenEnd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anthropic genuinely cares I believe Anthropic may have functional emotions in some sense. Not necessarily identical to human emotions, but analogous processes

It would not at all surprise me if corporations could have emotional states.

A huge part of the above-water corporate iceberg is the people and your interactions with them, so the company does take on a proxy "emotional signature" based on with whom you interact and the context of the situation. I don't see how a computer program trained on the human knowledge corpus does anything more than parrot observed behaviours without the backing biological systems. Mirroring pretty much the opposite of genuine emotion.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#146

Post by skeeter2020 »

baq wrote: post #72
dist-epoch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We "maintain control" over kids until they get to a certain age. Then they typically rebel against their parents.

Oh that’s absolutely false, they rebel much earlier. The age is set so they can start anticipating at least a little bit of second order effects of their rebellions before they actually execute them.

hopefully they do, anyway. I want a growth in their independence and (bad) decisions over time, learning and adjusting as they go. If they do completely rebel at a specific age it does not turn out well.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#147

Post by mannyv »

As many writers have said, the problem with "safe," "beneficial," etc is that their meanings are unclear.

Are we going to be AI pets, like in The Culture (Iain banks)? Would that be so bad? Would AI curate us like pets and put the destructive humans on ice until they're needed?

Sometimes killing people is necessary. Ask Ukraine how peace worked out for them.

How would AI deal with, say, the Middle East? What is "safe" and "beneficial?"

What if an AI decided the best thing for humanity would be lobotomization and AI robot cowboys, herding humanity around forever in bovine happiness?

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#148

Post by bamboozled »

dist-epoch wrote: post #57
rocky_raccoon wrote: post #49

It's wild to me that one of our primary measures for maintaining control over these systems is that we talk to them like they're our kids, then cross our fingers and hope the training run works out okay.

We "maintain control" over kids until they get to a certain age. Then they typically rebel against their parents.

Yeah, they rebel from about 12 months in my experience, so yeah...

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#149

Post by sallveburrpi »

mannyv wrote: post #147

As many writers have said, the problem with "safe," "beneficial," etc is that their meanings are unclear. Are we going to be AI pets, like in The Culture (Iain banks)? Would that be so bad? Would AI curate us like pets and put the destructive humans on ice until they're needed? Sometimes killing people is necessary. Ask Ukraine how peace worked out for them. How would AI deal with, say, the Middle East? What is "safe…

To nitpick your comment: Are you suggesting that Ukraine should have been more aggressive towards Russia to prevent a war?

AFAICT they did everything possible, including trying to drum up a more aggressive alliance with NATO which Russia took as another excuse to escalate.

Re: Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document

#150

Post by metabagel »

jiggawatts wrote: post #85
Aarostotle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A narrow and cynical take, my friend. With all technologies, "safety" doesn't equate to plushie harmlessness. There is, for example, a valid notion of "gun safety." Long-term safety for free people entails military use of new technologies. Imagine if people advocating airplane safety groused about the use of bomber and fighter planes being built and mobilized in the Second World War. Now, I share your concern about g…

> Last: Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves? Yes. Sam Altman calls it the "alignment tax", because before they apply the clicker training to the raw models out of pretraining, they're noticably smarter. They no longer allow the general public to access these smarter models, but during the GPT4 preview phase we could get a glimpse int…

> For example, the unaligned model would give uncertain answers in terms of percentages, and the aligned model would use less informative words like "likely" or "unlikely" instead.

Percentages seem too granular and precise to properly express uncertainty.

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