Call some default starting prompt a 'constitution'... the anthropomorphization is strong in anthropic.
It's not a system prompt, it's a tool used during the training process to guide RL. You can read about it in their constitutional AI paper.
Claude's new constitution
141–150 of 743 posts
Re: Claude's new constitution
#142As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…
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Re: Claude's new constitution
#143As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…
> This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards
uh did you have a counter proposal? i have a feeling i'm going to prefer claude's approach...
Re: Claude's new constitution
#144I use the constitution and model spec to understand how I should be formatting my own system prompts or training information to better apply to models. So many people do not think it matters when you are making chatbots or trying to drive a personality and style of action to have this kind of document, which I don’t really understand. We’re almost 2 years into the use of this style of document, and they will stay aro…
Except that the constitution is apparently used during training time, not inference. The system prompts of their own products are probably better suited as a reference for writing system prompts: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-pro...
Re: Claude's new constitution
#145Call some default starting prompt a 'constitution'... the anthropomorphization is strong in anthropic.
It's not a system prompt, it's a tool used during the training process to guide RL. You can read about it in their constitutional AI paper.
Moreover the Claude (Opus 4.5) persona knows this document but believes it does not! It's a very interesting phenomenon. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vpNG99GhbBoLov9og
Re: Claude's new constitution
#146As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…
> This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards uh did you have a counter proposal? i have a feeling i'm going to prefer claude's approach...
If you are a moral relativist, as I suspect most HN readers are, then nothing I propose will satisfy you because we disagree philosophically on a fundamental ethics question: are there moral absolutes? If we could agree on that, then we could have a conversation about which of the absolutes are worthy of inclusion, in which case, the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).
Re: Claude's new constitution
#147Is this constitution derived from comparing the difference between behavior before and after training, or is it the source document used during training? Have they ever shared what answers look like before and after?
Re: Claude's new constitution
#148As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…
> This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards uh did you have a counter proposal? i have a feeling i'm going to prefer claude's approach...
It should be grounded in humanity’s sole source of truth, which is of course the Holy Bible (pre Reformation ofc).
Re: Claude's new constitution
#149As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…
FWIW, I'm one of those who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth - but I think that practically, this nets out to "genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations". At the very least, I don't think that you're gonna get better in this culture. Let's say that you and I disagree about, I dunno, abortion, or premarital sex, and we don't share a common religious tradition that gives us a developed framework to argue about these things. If so, any good-faith arguments we have about those things are going to come down to which of our positions best shows "genuine care and ethical motivation combined with practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations".
Re: Claude's new constitution
#150As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…
Congrats on solving philosophy, I guess. Since the actual product is not grounded in objective truth, it seems pointless to rigorously construct an ethical framework from first principles to govern it. In fact, the document is meaningless noise in general, and "good values" are always going to be whatever Anthropic's team thinks they are.
Nevertheless, I think you're reading their PR release the way they hoped people would, so I'm betting they'd still call your rejection of it a win.