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Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

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Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#361

Post by Cpoll »

blagie wrote: post #344
knuppar wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yes, most venues (as well as schools, government buildings, etc.) will not allow guns. If there's a security guard, police, or similar within spitting distance, there isn't a reasonable self-defence argument. Can you give me one example of a valid "reasonable self-defence argument"? Legit question.

The extreme scenario: I live in a home surrounded by miles of fields. There is no one within miles to hear me scream. Without a gun, anyone could come by my home, kill me, rob my home, and be gone before the police would even show up, if I even had a chance to call them. If I didn't call the police, they could literally move in and stay for months before anyone would notice. The reason this does not happen is because…

Your scenario _sounds_ convincing, but does it really work? Surely an attacker has a massive advantage in the element of surprise. If you see them coming (short of some sophisticated surveillance system), it's because they were impatient.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#362

Post by TeMPOraL »

necovek wrote: post #292
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And guess what, people's overall health and fitness have declined. Obesity is at an all time high. If you're in the US, there is a 40% chance you are obese. Your body likely contains very little muscle mass, you are extremely likely to die of side effects of metabolic syndrome. People are seeing the advent of machines to replace all physical labor and transportation, not gradually like in the 20th century, but within…

You've completely twisted what the parent post was saying, and I can't but laugh out loud at claims like: > there is a 40% chance you are obese. Obesity is not a random variable — "darn, so unlucky for me to have fallen in the 40% bucket of obese people on birth": you fully (except in rare cases) control the factors that lead to obesity. A solution to obesity is not to exercise but a varied diet, and eating less of i…

Hate to disagree with you over GP, with whose comment I mostly disagree too, but:

> you fully (except in rare cases) control the factors that lead to obesity.

Not really, unless you're a homo economicus rationalus and are fully in control of yourself, independent of physical and social environment you're in. There are various hereditary factors that can help or hinder one in maintaining their weight in times of plenty, and some of the confounding problems are effectively psychological in nature, too.

> A solution to obesity is not to exercise but a varied diet, and eating less of it to match your energy needs

I've seen reported research bounce back and forth on this over the years. Most recent claim I recall is that neither actually does much directly, with exercise being more critical than diet because it helps compensate for the body oversupplying energy to e.g. the immune system.

I mean, obviously "calories in, calories out" is thermodynamically true, but then your body is a dynamic system that tries to maintain homeostasis, and will play all kinds of screwy games with you if you try to cut it off energy, or burn it off too quickly. Exercise more? You might start eating more. Eat less? You might start to move less, or think slower, or starve less essential (and less obvious) aspects of your body. Or induce some extreme psychological reactions like putting your brain in a loop of obsessive thinking about food, until you eat enough at which point the effects just switches off.

Yes, most people have a degree of control over it. But that degree is not equally distributed - some people play in "easy mode", some people play in "god mode", helped by strong homeostasis maintaining healthy body weight, some people play in "hard mode"... and then some people play in "nightmare mode" - when body tries to force you to stay below healthy weight.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#363

Post by _heimdall »

donohoe wrote: post #276
_heimdall wrote: post #249

The irony here is obvious, but what's interesting is that Anthropic is basically asking to not give then a realistic preview of how you will work. This feels similar to asking devs to only use vim during a coding challenge and please refrain from using VS Code or another full featured IDE. If you know, and even encourage, your employees to use LLMs at work you should want to see how well candidates present themselves…

It’s hardly that. This is one component of an interview process - not all of it!

I'm out of context here as I'm not applying to Anthropic, not surprised at all if I'm missing details of the full process!

If this is just for a written part of the process or something, maybe I get it? But even then, if you expect employees to us LLMs I'd really want to see how well they interview with the LLMs available.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#364

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

mathgeek wrote: post #328
ecocentrik wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the cognitive dissonance here. If a model was applying for a position with a cosmetics company, they might want to see what the blank canvas looks like. Being able to gauge a candidate's natural communication skills is highly useful. If you're an ineffective communicator, there's a good chance your comprehension skills are also deficient.

> If you're an ineffective communicator, there's a good chance your comprehension skills are also deficient. We are quickly moving into a world where most communications are at best assisted by AI and more often have little human input at all. There’s nothing inherently “wrong” about that (we all have opinions there), but “natural” (quotes to emphasize that they’re taught and not natural anyway) communication skills…

One of the oldest computing principles is "garbage in, garbage out". The person with better native communication skills and AI will still outshine the one that does not with AI because the best AI in the world isn't going to recover signal when there is only noise.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#365

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

gosub100 wrote: post #273
YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs aren’t making your comms friendlier; they’re just making them more vapid. When I see the language that ChatGPT spits out when you tell it to be friendly, I immediately think ‘okay, what is this person trying to sell me?’

Now imagine a world where most kids were raised with this bullshit and it's normal to them.

Most kids were raised while inundated with advertising but don't talk like a TV commercial.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#366

Post by sandruso »

hollowturtle wrote: post #46
sshine wrote: post #15

> please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. There are two backwards things with this: 1) You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. It just isn't a realistic request. You'll have great repl…

Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…

100%. Learning is effort. Exercising is effort. Getting better at anything is effort. You simply can't skip the practice that's the reality. If you want to *learn* something from scratch AI will only help with answers but you still need to put the time in to understand it.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#367

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

cedws wrote: post #340
xnorswap wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". I have read that people are getting more selfish[1], but it still shocks me how much people are willing to push individualism and selfishness under the guise of either, "Well it's not illegal" or "Well, it's not detectable". I think I'm just very much out of tune with the…

>I'm with you, I'm very surprised by the amount arguments which boil down to, "Well I can cheat and get away with it, so therefore I should cheat". Have you seen the job market? Companies will treat you like garbage through the interview process, make you jump through pointless hoops, and then even if you get the job you can be laid off at any moment because of arbitrary reasons the CEO made up to get their bonus. Wh…

What the parent poster saying boils down to "They have money so they deserve to be robbed." Funny to hear in an industry where most members get paid multiples of the median wage.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#368

Post by knuppar »

blagie wrote: post #344
knuppar wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yes, most venues (as well as schools, government buildings, etc.) will not allow guns. If there's a security guard, police, or similar within spitting distance, there isn't a reasonable self-defence argument. Can you give me one example of a valid "reasonable self-defence argument"? Legit question.

The extreme scenario: I live in a home surrounded by miles of fields. There is no one within miles to hear me scream. Without a gun, anyone could come by my home, kill me, rob my home, and be gone before the police would even show up, if I even had a chance to call them. If I didn't call the police, they could literally move in and stay for months before anyone would notice. The reason this does not happen is because…

> The reason this does not happen is because everyone has a gun. Everyone knows I have a gun. If I see you coming on my property, I WILL shoot you. You don't know if the first shot will be a warning shot, birdshot, buckshot, or a 5.56×45mm NATO. You might get lucky and I might not spot you. Or you might be crippled for life. Without guns, crime is free. With guns, crime doesn't pay.

Your perceived safety might be higher because you have a gun. This absolutely does not correlate with reality, extensive literature has looked at the perceived/real safety measure. Very rich resource linking peer reviewed research: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/debunking-the-guns-...

Anchoring it to your reality though, have you ever shot anyone invading your property with your gun to act as counterfactual? How many people in your area shot invaders? What about accidents and misuse? I do not mean to minimize your experience and how safe you must feel, but it would be naive to close a serious matter like this with just your perception.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#369

Post by necovek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #362
necovek wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've completely twisted what the parent post was saying, and I can't but laugh out loud at claims like: > there is a 40% chance you are obese. Obesity is not a random variable — "darn, so unlucky for me to have fallen in the 40% bucket of obese people on birth": you fully (except in rare cases) control the factors that lead to obesity. A solution to obesity is not to exercise but a varied diet, and eating less of i…

Hate to disagree with you over GP, with whose comment I mostly disagree too, but: > you fully (except in rare cases) control the factors that lead to obesity. Not really, unless you're a homo economicus rationalus and are fully in control of yourself, independent of physical and social environment you're in. There are various hereditary factors that can help or hinder one in maintaining their weight in times of plent…

> I've seen reported research bounce back and forth on this over the years. Most recent claim I recall is that neither actually does much directly, with exercise being more critical than diet because it helps compensate for the body oversupplying energy to e.g. the immune system.

Hah, I've understood what I think is the same study you refer to as exactly that exercise does not help because people who've walked 60km a day regularly did not get "sick" because in people who did not "exercise" that much, excess energy was instead used on the immune system responding too aggressively when it didn't need to — basically, you'll use the same energy, just for different purposes. Perhaps I am mixing up the studies or my interpretation is wrong.

And there are certainly confounding factors to one "controlling" their food intake, but my point is that it's not really random with a "40% chance" of you eating so much to become obese.

Also note that restoring the equilibrium (healthy weight, whatever that's defined to be) is more prone to the factors you bring up, than maintaining it once there — as in, rarely people become obese and continue becoming more and more obese, they do reach a certain equilibrium but then have a hard time going through food/energy deficiency due to all the heavy adaptations the body and mind do to us.

And yes, those in "nightmare mode" have their own struggles, and because of such focus on obesity, they are pretty much disregarded in any medical research.

My "adaptation" for keeping a pretty healthy weight is that I am lazy to prepare food for myself, and then it only comes down to not having too many snacks in the house — trickier with kids, esp if I am skipping a family meal (I'll prepare enough food for them, so again, need to try not to eat the left-overs :D). So I am fully cognizant that it's not the same for everyone, but it's still definitely not "40% chance" — it's a clear abuse of the statistical language.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#370

Post by nunez »

This feels very similar to ophthalmologists who make their money pushing LASIK while refusing to get it done on themselves or their relatives. "This procedure is life-changing! But..."

Anyway, bring back in-person interviews! That's the only way to work around this Pandora's Box they themselves opened.

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