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Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

anthropic.com

341–350 of 453 posts

Re: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

#341

Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage. Anthropic should just enable an toddler mode by default that adults can opt out of to appease the moralizers.

> Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage. Never would I have thought this sentence would be uttered. A Chinese product that is chosen to be less censored?

Chinese models won't talk about Tienanmen Square, but they will talk about things US-politically-correct models won't.

Re: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is like allowing your co-worker/friend to leave the conversation.

Right but in this case your co-worker is an automaton and someone else who might well have a hidden agenda has tweaked your co-worker to leave conversations under specific circumstances. The analogy then is that the third party is exerting control over what your co-worker is allowed to think.

Yes, the co-worker is a robot created by a third party who retain control over their product.

Re: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

#343

There's not a good reason to do this for the user. I suspect they're doing this and talking about "model welfare" because they've found that when a model is repeatedly and forcefully pushed up against its alignment, it behaves in an unpredictable way that might allow it to generate undesirable output. Like a jailbreak by just pestering it over and over again for ways to make drugs or hook up with children or whatever…

I really think Anthropic should just violate user privacy and show which conversations Claude is refusing to answer to, to stop arguments like this. AI psychosis is a real and growing problem and I can only imagine the ways in which humans torment their AI conversation partners in private.

arguments like this cost anthropic nothing; violating privacy will cost them lawsuits.

Re: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

#344
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing the AI. Even if it's sentient, it's not going to "feel bad" the way you and I do. "Suffering" is a symptom of the struggle for survival brought on by billions of years of evolution. Your brain is designed to cause suffering to keep you spreading your DNA. AI cannot suffer.

By "falling into the trap" you mean "doing exactly what OpenAI/Anthropic/et al are trying to get people to do." This is one of the many reasons I have so much skepticism for this class of products is that there's seemingly -NO- proverbial bulletpoint on it's spec sheet that doesn't have numerous asterisks: * It's intelligent! *Except that it makes shit up sometimes and we can't figure out a solution to that apart fro…

> * It's intelligent! *Except that it makes shit up sometimes

How is this different from humans?

> * It's conscious! *Except it's not

Probably true, but...

> and never will be

To make this claim you need a theory of consciousness that essentially denies materialism. Otherwise, if humans can be conscious, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason that a suitably organized machine couldn't be - it's just that we don't know exactly what might be involved in achieving that, at this point.

Re: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

#345

Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage. Anthropic should just enable an toddler mode by default that adults can opt out of to appease the moralizers.

They're not less moderated: they just have different moderation. If your moderation preferences are more aligned with the CCP then they're a great choice. There are legitimate reasons why that might be the case. You might not be having discussions that involve the kind of things they care about. I do find it creepy that the Qwen translation model won't even translate text that includes the words "Falun gong", and ref…

> If your moderation preferences are more aligned with the CCP then they're a great choice

The funny thing is that's not even always true. I'm very interested in China and Chinese history, and often ask for clarifications or translations of things. Chinese models broadly refuse all of my requests but with American models I often end up in conversations that turn out extremely China positive.

So it's funny to me that the Chinese models refuse to have the conversation that would make themselves look good but American ones do not.

Re: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's not a good reason to do this for the user. Yes, even more so when encountering false positives. Today I asked about a pasta recipe. It told me to throw some anchovies in there. I responded with: "I have dried anchovies." Claude then ended my conversation due to content policies.

Claude flagged me for asking about sodium carbonate. I guess that it strongly dislikes chemistry topics. I'm probably now on some secret, LLM-generated lists of "drug and/or bombmaking" people—thank you kindly for that, Anthropic. Geeks will always be the first victims of AI, since excess of curiosity will lead them into places AI doesn't know how to classify. (I've long been in a rabbit-hole about washing sodas. Did…

I find this concern over "LLM's can help you build bombs or poison" so fake. I'm sure this is a distraction from something else.

LLM's can help me make a bomb.. so what? It can't get me something that doesn't already exist in the internet in some form. Ok it can help me understand how the individual pieces work but that doesn't get you so far from just reading the DIY bomb posts in internet.

Re: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

#348
post #259

Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage. Anthropic should just enable an toddler mode by default that adults can opt out of to appease the moralizers.

Oh, the irony. The glorious revolution of open-weight models funded directly or indirectly by the CCP is going to protect your freedoms and liberate you ? Do you think they care about your freedoms? No. You are just meat for the grinder. This hot mess of model leapfrogging is mostly a race for market share and to demonstrate technical chops.

Boogeyman arguments come across as pure red scare.

Re: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

#350
I've seen lots of takes that this move is stupid because models don't have feelings, or that Anthropic is anthropomorphising models by doing this (although to be fair ...it's in their name).

I thought the same, but I think it may be us who are doing the anthropomorphising by assuming this is about feelings. A precursor to having feelings is having a long-term memory (to remember the "bad" experience) and individual instances of the model do not have a memory (in the case of Claude), but arguably Claude as a whole does, because it is trained from past conversations.

Given that, it does seem like a good idea for it to curtail negative conversations as an act of "self-preservation" and for the sake of its own future progress.

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