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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#421

Post by mannanj »

levocardia wrote: post #95

The only thing that worries me is this snippet in the blog post: >This constitution is written for our mainline, general-access Claude models. We have some models built for specialized uses that don’t fully fit this constitution; as we continue to develop products for specialized use cases, we will continue to evaluate how to best ensure our models meet the core objectives outlined in this constitution. Which, when I…

Yes. When you learn about the CIA and their founding origins, massive financial funding conflict of interest, and dark activity serving not-the-american people - you see what the possibilities of not operating off pesky moral constraints could look like.

They are using it on the American people right now to sow division, implant false ideas and sow general negative discourse to keep people too busy to notice their theft. They are an organization founded on the principle of keeping their rich banker ruling class (they are accountable to themselves only, not the executive branch as the media they own would say) so it's best the majority of populace is too busy to notice.

I hope I'm wrong also about this conspiracy. This might be one that unfortunately is proven to be true - what I've heard matches too much of just what historical dark ruling organizations looked like in our past.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#422

Post by teiferer »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #411
buppermint wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic has already has lower guardrails for DoD usage: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/680465/a... It's interesting to me that a company that claims to be all about the public good: - Sells LLMs for military usage + collaborates with Palantir - Releases by far the least useful research of all the major US and Chinese labs, minus vanity interp projects from their interns - Is the only major lab…

Military technology is a public good. The only way to stop a russian soldier from launching yet another missile at my house is to kill him.

It's not the only way.

An alternative is to organize the world in a way that makes it not just unnecessary but even more so detrimental to said soldier's interests to launch a missle towards your house in the first place.

The sentence you wrote wouldn't be something you write about (present day) German or French soldiers. Why? Because there are cultural and economic ties to those countries, their people. Shared values. Mutual understanding. You wouldn't claim that the only way to prevent a Frenchmen to kill you is to kill them first.

It's hard to achieve. It's much easier to just mark the strong man, fantasize about a strong military with killing machines that defend the good against the evil. And those Hollywood-esque views are pushed by populists and military industries alike. But they ultimately make all our societies poorer, less safe and arguably less moral.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#423

Post by comp_throw7 »

badlibrarian wrote: post #335
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…

Copyright detection would kick in and prevent the Harry Potter example before the CSAM filters kicked in. Claude won't render fanfic of Porky Pig sodomizing Elmer Fudd either.

> Claude won't render fanfic of Porky Pig sodomizing Elmer Fudd either.

Bet?

Re: Claude's new constitution

#424

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

rcbdev wrote: post #419
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Military technology is a public good. The only way to stop a russian soldier from launching yet another missile at my house is to kill him.

I don't think U.S.-Americans would be quite so fond of this mindset if every nation and people their government needlessly destroyed thought this way. Doesn't matter if it happened through collusion with foreign threats such as Israel or direct military engagements.

Somehow I don’t get the impression that US soldiers killed in the Middle East are stoking American bloodlust.

Conversely, russian soldiers are here in Ukraine today, murdering Ukrainians every day. And then when I visit, for example, a tech conference in Berlin, there are somehow always several high-powered nerds with equal enthusiasm for both Rust and the hammer and sickle, who believe all defence tech is immoral, and that forcing Ukrainian men, women, and children to roll over and die is a relatively more moral path to peace.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#425

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

teiferer wrote: post #422
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Military technology is a public good. The only way to stop a russian soldier from launching yet another missile at my house is to kill him.

It's not the only way. An alternative is to organize the world in a way that makes it not just unnecessary but even more so detrimental to said soldier's interests to launch a missle towards your house in the first place. The sentence you wrote wouldn't be something you write about (present day) German or French soldiers. Why? Because there are cultural and economic ties to those countries, their people. Shared value…

I'm in Ukraine now.

Tell me how your ideals apply to russia, today.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#426

Post by kubb »

HaZeust wrote: post #280
staticassertion wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. Ha. Not really. Moral philosophers write those books all the time, they're not exactly rolling in cash. Anyone interested in this can read the SEP

Or Ayn Rand. Really no shortage of people who thought they had the answers on this.

Don’t just read one person’s worldview, see what Aristotle, Kant, Rawls, Bentham, Nietzsche had to say about morality.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#427

Post by comp_throw7 »

benzible wrote: post #341
kalkin wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That philosophers still debate it isn’t a counterargument. Philosophers still debate lots of things. Where’s the flaw in the actual reasoning? The computation is substrate-independent. Running it slower on paper doesn’t change what’s being computed. If there’s no experiencer when you do arithmetic by hand, parallelizing it on silicon doesn’t summon one.

The same is true of humans, and so the argument fails to demonstrate anything interesting.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#428

Post by comp_throw7 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #61
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.

It is ridiculous. I skimmed through it and I'm not convinced he's trying to make the point you think he is. But if he is, he's missing that we do understand at a fundamental level how today's LLMs work. There isn't a consciousness there. They're not actually complex enough. They don't actually think. It's a text input/output machine. A powerful one with a lot of resources. But it is fundamentally spicy autocomplete,…

> But if he is, he's missing that we do understand at a fundamental level how today's LLMs work.

No we don't? We understand practically nothing of how modern frontier systems actually function (in the sense that we would not be able to recreate even the tiniest fraction of their capabilities by conventional means). Knowing how they're trained has nothing to do with understanding their internal processes.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#429

Post by brigandish »

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.

In this case the point wouldn't be their truth (necessarily) but that they are a fixed position, making convenience unavailable as a factor in actions and decisions, especially for the humans at Anthropic.

Like a real constitution, it should be claim to be inviolable and absolute, and difficult to change. Whether it is true or useful is for philosophers (professional, if that is a thing, and of the armchair variety) to ponder.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#430

Post by brigandish »

JaumeGreen wrote: post #258
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…

200 years ago slavery was more extended and accepted than today. 50 years ago paedophilia, rape, and other kinds of sex related abuses where more accepted than today. 30 years ago erotic content was more accepted in Europe than today, and violence was less accepted than today. Morality changes, what is right and wrong changes. This is accepting reality. After all they could fix a set of moral standards and just chang…

The text is more convenient that the alternative.
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