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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#321

Post by kalkin »

benzible wrote: post #306
kalkin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This book (from a philosophy professor AFAIK unaffiliated with any AI company) makes what I find a pretty compelling case that it's correct to be uncertain today about what if anything an AI might experience: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIConsciousn... From the folks who think this is obviously ridiculous, I'd like to hear where Schwitzgebel is missing something obvious.

You could execute Claude by hand with printed weight matrices, a pencil, and a lot of free time - the exact same computation, just slower. So where would the "wellbeing" be? In the pencil? Speed doesn't summon ghosts. Matrix multiplications don't create qualia just because they run on GPUs instead of paper.

This basically Searle's Chinese Room argument. It's got a respectable history (... Searle's personal ethics aside) but it's not something that has produced any kind of consensus among philosophers. Note that it would apply to any AI instantiated as a Turing machine and to a simulation of human brain at an arbitrary level of detail as well.

There is a section on the Chinese Room argument in the book.

(I personally am skeptical that LLMs have any conscious experience. I just don't think it's a ridiculous question.)

Re: Claude's new constitution

#322

Post by cjp »

aroman wrote: post #3

I don't understand what this is really about. Is this: - A) legal CYA: "see! we told the models to be good, and we even asked nicely!"? - B) marketing department rebrand of a system prompt - C) a PR stunt to suggest that the models are way more human-like than they actually are Really not sure what I'm even looking at. They say: "The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content direct…

Judging by the responses here, it's functionally a nerd snipe.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#323

Post by GoatInGrey »

rednafi wrote: post #118
falloutx wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because its generated by an AI. All of their posts usually feel like 2 sentences enlarged to 20 paragraphs.

At this point, this is mostly for PR stunts as the company prepares for its IPO. It’s like saying, “Guys, look, we used these docs to make our models behave well. Now if they don’t, it’s not our fault.”

That, and the catastrophic risk framing is where this really loses me. We're discussing models that supposedly threaten "global catastrophe" or could "kill or disempower the vast majority of humans." Meanwhile, Opus 4.5 can't successfully call a Python CLI after reading its 160 lines of code. It confuses itself on escape characters, writes workaround scripts that subsequent instances also can't execute, and after I explicitly tell it "Use header_read.py on Primary_Export.xlsx in the repo root," it'll latch onto some random test case buried in the documentation it read "just in case", and prioritize running the script on the files mentioned there instead.

It's, to me, as ridiculous as claiming that my metaphorical son poses legitimate risk of committing mass murder when he can't even operate a spray bottle.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#324

Post by bakies »

alexjplant wrote: post #122
aroman wrote: post #3

I don't understand what this is really about. Is this: - A) legal CYA: "see! we told the models to be good, and we even asked nicely!"? - B) marketing department rebrand of a system prompt - C) a PR stunt to suggest that the models are way more human-like than they actually are Really not sure what I'm even looking at. They say: "The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content direct…

> In order to be both safe and beneficial, we want all current Claude models to be: > Broadly safe [...] Broadly ethical [...] Compliant with Anthropic’s guidelines [...] Genuinely helpful > In cases of apparent conflict, Claude should generally prioritize these properties in the order in which they’re listed. I chuckled at this because it seems like they're making a pointed attempt at preventing a failure mode simil…

Will they mention there's other models that don't adhere to this constitution. I'm sure those are for the government

Re: Claude's new constitution

#325

Post by JoshTriplett »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #167
jakefromstatecs wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are there moral absolutes? Even if there are, wouldn't the process of finding them effectively mirror moral relativism?.. Assuming that slavery was always immoral, we culturally discovered that fact at some point which appears the same as if it were a culturally relativistic value

You think we discovered that slavery was always immoral? If we "discover" things which were wrong to be now right, then you are making the case for moral relativism. I would argue slavery is absolutely wrong and has always been, despite cultural acceptance.

How will you feel when you "discover" other things are wrong that you currently believe are right? How will you feel when others discover such things and you haven't caught up yet? How can you best avoid holding back the pace of such discovery?

It is a useful exercise to attempt to iterate some of those "discovery" processes to their logical conclusions, rather than repeatedly making "discoveries" of the same sort that all fundamentally rhyme with each other and have common underlying principles.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#326

Post by anabis »

miki123211 wrote: post #318

I find it incredibly ironic that all of Anthropic's "hard constraints", the only things that Claude is not allowed to do under any circumstances, are basically "thou shalt not destroy the world", except the last one, "do not generate child sexual abuse material." To put it into perspective, according to this constitution, killing children is more morally acceptable[1] than generating a Harry Potter fanfiction involvi…

The vocabulary has been long poisoned, but original definition of CSAM had the neccessary condition of actual children being harmed in its production. Although I agree that is not worse than murder, and this Claude's constitution is using it to mean explicit material in general.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#327

Post by arthurcolle »

miki123211 wrote: post #318

I find it incredibly ironic that all of Anthropic's "hard constraints", the only things that Claude is not allowed to do under any circumstances, are basically "thou shalt not destroy the world", except the last one, "do not generate child sexual abuse material." To put it into perspective, according to this constitution, killing children is more morally acceptable[1] than generating a Harry Potter fanfiction involvi…

There are so many contradictions in the "Claude Soul doc" which is distinct from this constitution, apparently.

I vice coded an analysis engine last month that compared the claims internally, and its totally "woo-woo as prompts" IMO

Re: Claude's new constitution

#328

Post by zemptime »

spicyusername wrote: post #164
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As 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…

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

There is one. Don't destroy the means of error correction. Without that, no further means of moral development can occur. So, that becomes the highest moral imperative.

(It's possible this could be wrong, but I've yet to hear an example of it.)

This idea is from, and is explored more, in a book called The Beginning of Infinity.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#329

Post by mikailk »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #172
spicyusername wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. When is it OK to rape and murder a 1 year old child? Congratulations. You just observed a universal moral standard in motion. Any argument other than "never" would be atrocious.

You have two choices:

1) Do what you asked above about a one-year-old child 2) Kill a million people

Does this universal moral standard continue to say “don’t choose (1)”? One would still say “never” to number 1?

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