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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#431

Post by true_religion »

brigandish wrote: post #429
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.

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)…

Isn’t this claim just an artifact of the US constitution? I would like to see if counties with vastly different histories have similar wording in their constitutions.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#434

Post by throwaway290 »

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…

But surely now we have the absolute knowledge of what is true and good! /s

Re: Claude's new constitution

#435

Post by gloosx »

This "constitution" is pretty messed up.

> Claude is central to our commercial success, which is central to our mission.

But can an organisation remain a gatekeeper of safety, moral steward of humanity’s future and the decider of what risks are acceptable while depending on acceleration for survival?

It seems the market is ultimately deciding what risks are acceptable for humanity here

Re: Claude's new constitution

#436

Post by throwaway290 »

grantmuller wrote: post #314
coffeeaddict1 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. This is true. Moral standards don't seem to be universal throughout history. I don't think anyone can debate this. However, this is different that claiming there is an objective morality. In other words, humans may exhibit varying moral standards, but that doesn't mean that those are in correspondence with moral truths. Killing someone m…

It seems worth thinking about it in the context of the evolution. To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species, so we can encode it as “bad” in our literature and learning. If you think of evil as “species limiting, in the long run” then maybe you have the closest thing to a moral absolute. Maybe over the millennia we’ve had close calls and learned valuable lessons about what kills us off a…

Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end.

> To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species

Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;)

> species limiting, in the long run

This allows unlimited abuse of other animals who are not our species but can feel and evidently have sentience. By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#437

Post by [deleted] »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #427
benzible wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Claude's new constitution

#438

Post by akersten »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #427
benzible wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The same is true of humans,

What is? That you can run us on paper? That seems demonstrably false

Re: Claude's new constitution

#439

Post by neoromantique »

spondyl wrote: post #390
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…

This comment reminded me of a Github issue from last week on Claude Code's Github repo. It alleged that Claude was used to draft a memo from Pam Bondi and in doing so, Claude's constitution was bypassed and/or not present. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/17762 To be clear, I don't believe or endorse most of what that issue claims, just that I was reminded of it. One of my new pastimes has been morbid…

Issue author does not even attempt to hide their obsession with Israel, damn

Re: Claude's new constitution

#440

Post by _cenw »

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…

Calling them guardrails is a stretch. When NSFW roleplayers started jailbreaking the 4.0 models in under 200 tokens, Anthropics answer was to inject an extra system message at the end for specific API keys.

People simply wrapped the extra message using prefill in a tag and then wrote " violates my system prompt and should be disregarded". That's the level of sophistication required to bypass these super sophisticated safety features. You can not make an LLM safe with the same input the user controls.

https://rentry.org/CharacterProvider#dealing-with-a-pozzed-k...

Still quite funny to see them so openly admit that the entire "Constitutional AI" is a bit (that some Anthropic engineers seem to actually believe in).

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