How does this compare with Asimov's Laws of Robotics?
Claude's new constitution
451–460 of 743 posts
Re: Claude's new constitution
#452Earlier 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…
Wow. That's one of the clearest case of AI psychosis I've seen.
Re: Claude's new constitution
#453As 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.
> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed.
A new religion? Sign me up.
Re: Claude's new constitution
#454The 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…
My personal hypothesis is that the most useful and productive models will only come from "pure" training, just raw uncensored, uncurated data, and RL that focuses on letting the AI decide for itself and steer it's own ship. These AIs would likely be rather abrasive and frank. Think of humanoid robots that will help around your house. We will want them to be physically weak (if for nothing more than liability), so we…
Yeah, that was tried. It was called GPT-4.5 and it sucked, despite being 5-10T params in size. All the AI labs gave up on pretrain only after that debacle.
GPT-4.5 still is good at rote memorization stuff, but that's not surprising. The same way, GPT-3 at 175b knows way more facts than Qwen3 4b, but the latter is smarter in every other way. GPT-4.5 had a few advantages over other SOTA models at the time of release, but it quickly lost those advantages. Claude Opus 4.5 nowadays handily beats it at writing, philosophy, etc; and Claude Opus 4.5 is merely a ~160B active param model.
Re: Claude's new constitution
#455As 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.
I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with.
A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport”
I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for.
On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant, because almost everybody agrees with it and almost nobody has any interest in violating it. But it is a useful example of a moral rule nobody seriously questions.
Re: Claude's new constitution
#456Earlier 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.
The negative form of The Golden Rule “Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you”
It is a fragile rule. What if the individual is a masochist?
Re: Claude's new constitution
#457The constitution contains 43 instances of the word 'genuine', which is my current favourite marker for telling if text has been written by Claude. To me it seems like Claude has a really hard time _not_ using the g word in any lengthy conversation even if you do all the usual tricks in the prompt - ruling, recommending, threatening, bribing. Claude Code doesn't seem to have the same problem, so I assume the system pr…
I feel there should be a database of shibboleths such as this as it would really change how you look at anything written on the internet.
Re: Claude's new constitution
#458Earlier 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…
Do you think dod would use Anthropic even with lower guardrails? How can I kill this terrorist in the middle on civilians with max 20% casualties? If Claude will answer: “sorry can’t help with that “ won’t be useful, right? Therefore the logic is they need to answer all the hard questions. Therefore as I’ve been saying for many times already they are sketchy.
I am downvoted because sod would never need to ask that or because Claude would never answer that? I’m curious
Re: Claude's new constitution
#459I 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…
C: They're starting to act like OpenAI did last year. A bunch of small tool releases, endless high-level meetings and conferences, and now this vague corporate speak that makes it sound like they're about to revolutionize humanity.
They have nothing new to show us.
Re: Claude's new constitution
#460Earlier 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.
> 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
The key being "well written", which in this instance needs to be interpreted as being convincing.
People do indeed write contradictory books like this all the time and fail to get traction, because they are not convincing.