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Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

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Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#561

Post by plasticeagle »

Why oh why, please why, did you use AI to write this? It's about five times longer than it needs to be. It repeats itself over and over again. It's agony to read.

Please, just write normal English that we can read. Please, for the love of god, respect our time and the attention we will be spending on the text you provide.

Anyway, one can scarcely be surprised that the AI companies are being dishonest in their tools. They're consistently dishonest in their marketing. They're famously dishonest in their financials. Why anyone trusts these people with anything is entirely beyond me. But here we are - people handing over their creativity, their productivity, to these things.

You don't have to. You didn't need these tools before, when you were creating content, when you were writing code. You don't need it now. Fight back. Stop using it. It's not hard. It's easy.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#562

Post by plasticeagle »

kalkin wrote: post #471
danlitt wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is not eligible for copyright. If they do not give you a copy of the source code, that does not matter. And if you don't know which parts were generated by LLM, you can't safely reuse the code.

> The code is not eligible for copyright. This is very much not what the linked case established.

According to the link:

"The US Copyright Office and federal courts require human authorship for copyright protection; works created solely by AI are not eligible for registration under the current rules."

The Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to this rule, and so for the moment at least, the rule remains in place.

This means that companies leaning heavily into their LLM use may very well find that they do not, under the law at least, actually own any of their code. As I've read elsewhere there's every possibility that AI code will be the asbestos of the Software Engineering world. Something we'll be trying to get rid of for decades, once everyone comes to their senses.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#563

Post by TheDong »

bicepjai wrote: post #511

AI companies are running a compressed version of Google’s “don’t be evil” arc. Google took the better part of a decade to quietly retire the motto; these companies are speedrunning the same trajectory in a year or two

1. 2022 A non-profit literally quote "to better all of humanity, not shareholders"

2. 2024 For profit, but "we will train biases out of our models and make sure our AI is safe to use"

3. 2025 We'll make sure it doesn't take over the world, with like a 70% confidence interval

4. 2025 The mecha-hitler inflection point

5. 2026 Our new model is so terrifying it will destroy all of security and hack the chinese, we can't let the chinese use it

6. 2028 (projected) Our new model requires so much energy that 30% of the elderly population will die without AC, but it will be stronger than the chinese models and let us destroy china

7. 2030 (projected) Our new model will triumph over the mecha-hitler dictator model, and will be a benevolent dictator that only demands 60% of all energy produced, not 98%

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#565

Post by JCharante »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #438
NewsaHackO wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half of those don't actually require proxying Claude. Also, Claude has made it apparent time and time again that it does not want people using Claude Code as a "tool" in a workflow. If you want to select a model dynamically based on the prompt difficulty, Anthropic wants people to use the API for this. It was the whole issue Claude had with OpenClaw.

This forum is called Hacker News. I would expect most users not to limit themselves to using tools precisely how they were intended to be used.

I mean go do it but don't complain about the company adding countermeasures when they don't want you to do it

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#566

Post by n_kr »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #496
silver_silver wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you know how their human rights violations compare to, say, western nations? You have to be joking

Please do some research on how they treat their own dissident citizens. 57k citizens disappeared since 2013, and another 5k every year. Their human rights lawyers sent to concentration camps, forced to eat their own shit, raped, and then murdered. Mere online criticism of the government gets you a visit from the police and gets you put on the watchlist. Often a few months' imprisonment without trial. This is not even…

I'm not doubting you but could you provide sources for your claims? TIA

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#567

Post by [deleted] »

computerex wrote: post #362
solenoid0937 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your harness isn't doing sneaky things unless you're breaking TOS. HN hysteria is unreal.

You may be ok with the harness doing 100 things that are not what I am using it for. But none everyone is, and it’s hardly hysterical. Perhaps you are simply careless.

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#568

Post by 1dom »

I think the comments in this thread are a little unhinged, and it's making me concerned about the sincerity and knowledge of the average commenter here.

The fact is the post shows no evidence of anything malicious being hidden, only that stuff is being hidden.

There are a few obvious explanations in comments for why they would want to hide this particular stuff in this particular way (e.g. if it's to detect abuse and competition).

I don't see how this is different to using e.g. sentry or google analytics, just with an extra bit of trying to hide. I always assume all tech companies do stuff like this, having worked at many tech companies where I've ended up on both sides of stuff like this. I always assumed the average HN reader had a similar background and would be completely used to this sort of stuff.

Like someone else pointed out, the data gathered is likely covered in the TOS too.

In the grand scheme of privacy invasion and modern tech software doing underhanded things to get data, this feels fairly standard?

I'm generally pro-local LLMs and I don't like Anthropic, and from the headline and comments I was ready to get riled up, until I read the article. If this was some small plucky EU privacy startup, then I feel the outrage would be a bit more justified, but this is a frontier AI lab - I can't have been the only one who knew/assumed this happens, and probably happens in some form with all software from any company valued over a certain amount (incl. MS, Google etc.)

I really think this comment section feels completely unhinged. It feels 99% ideology, politics, hysteria and astroturfing, rather than a reaction to the tech and technicality which is what I come to HN for.

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#569

Post by jonathanstrange »

brookst wrote: post #513
appplication wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mean to insult you, but it is probably worth refreshing yourself on when slippery slope is actually a fallacy. It’s not correct to suggest logical extension of an established precedent is a slippery slope.

Slipper slope is always a fallacy. It works as a metaphor, and as a rhetorical device, but the fact that it’s possible to construct a gradient from heaven to hell is not proof that each step in the gradient is inevitable. It’s a good way to illustrate a potential bad path. But I can construct a slippery slope from commenting on HN to making bioweapons. That should not be seen as evidence that HN commenters are likely…

That's not correct. Many slippery slope arguments are perfectly valid and sound, namely whenever there is plausible evidence for the existence of the respective slippery slope. It can for instance be based on historical precedents, or on probabilistic or convincing balance of consideration sub-arguments for the slippery slope premise.

Whether its a fallacy or not depends a lot on how warranted the slippery slope premise is (notwithstanding other, possible logical errors that might me made in setting up the argument, of course).

Re: Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

#570

Post by tripzilch »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #442
bayindirh wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the asymmetry. When small fish tries to protect itself, big fish hits small fish with "It's not illegal" pole. When small fish points out that what the big fish is crying about is "not illegal", big fish has the right to be above the law to prevent the problem themselves. Having values requires equality. They have lost the right to cry foul when they trained their model with "but it's fair use" card. Life work…

> I love the asymmetry. Much as I hate to defend companies climbing to success and pulling up the ladder afterwards, this asymmetry you note is kind of the whole point a company would want to grow big . Growing an organization has some super-linear costs and generally sucks for most individuals living through it - including the management - but it's still considered worth it, precisely because big entities can do thi…

> It's so basic it's actually part of the reason we exist, and animals of various sizes exist, and generally why evolution didn't stop at single-cellular life.

It's also quite natural to want it to stop at individual human life instead of us getting absorbed by some next bigger thing.

Which I'm fairly sure is also the desire (as far as they can be said to have any) of these animals of various sizes you speak of.

> We can call out the hypocrisy until our throats run dry, and in ideal fantasy land this would've meant something, but here in the real world, they sow the seeds of success

Just because they pulled a mirage over people's eyes doesn't mean it suddenly became the "real" world.

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