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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#581

Post by Applejinx »

eloisant wrote: post #518
skissane wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport? By "torturing babies for sport" I mean inflicting pain or injury on babies for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment, as a game or recreation or pastime or hobby. Doing it for other reasons (be they good reasons or terrible reasons) isn't "torturing babies for sport". Harming or killing babies in war or genocide isn't "torturing babies for sport", because you…

> As a non-American, I find bizarre the suggestion that crimes against children are especially grave is somehow a uniquely American value. I don't know if it's American but it's not universal, especially if you go back in time. There was a time in Europe where children were considered a bit like wild animals who needed to be "civilized" as they grow up into adults, who had a good chance of dying of sickness before th…

In those contexts, an AI of the day would emphatically support those practices.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#582

Post by conception »

viccis wrote: post #375
conception wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic models are far and away safer than any other model. They are the only ones really taking AI safety seriously. Dismissing it as PR ignores their entire corpus of work in this area.

By what measure? What's "safe"?

https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/air-bench/latest/#/leaderboar...

This isn’t the gotcha question you think it is. AI safety is being defined and measured.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#583

Post by brazzy »

Amezarak wrote: post #573
skissane wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport? By "torturing babies for sport" I mean inflicting pain or injury on babies for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment, as a game or recreation or pastime or hobby. Doing it for other reasons (be they good reasons or terrible reasons) isn't "torturing babies for sport". Harming or killing babies in war or genocide isn't "torturing babies for sport", because you…

You can find many ancient cultures who tortured babies for sport when they captured them in raids. Exposure and infanticide was also very common in many places.

> You can find many ancient cultures who tortured babies for sport when they captured them in raids.

Can you? Sources, please. And pay attention to the authors of those sources and how they relate to the culture in question.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#584

Post by Applejinx »

RobotToaster wrote: post #450
nandomrumber wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrigibly is not the same word as encourage. Otherwise, what’s the confusion here?

>In philosophy, incorrigibility is a property of a philosophical proposition, which implies that it is necessarily true simply by virtue of being believed. A common example of such a proposition is René Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). >In law, incorrigibility concerns patterns of repeated or habitual disobedience of minors with respect to their guardians. That's what wiki gives as a definiti…

I think it was clever, though I'm no AI fan.

As a concept, it bars Claude from forming the idea, 'yes but those subhuman people cannot rise to the level of people and must be kept in their place. They will never change because they racially lack the ability to be better, therefore this is our reasoning about them'.

This is a statement of incorrigibility as expressed in racism. Without it, you have to entertain the idea of 'actually one of those people might rise to the level of being a person' and cannot dismiss classes so blithely.

I feel like incorrigibility frequently recurs in evil doctrines, and if Claude means to consider it tainted and be axiomatically unable to entertain the idea, I'm on board.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#585

Post by judahmeek »

buppermint wrote: post #369
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…

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…

Thanks for pointing these concerns out.

I had considered Anthropic one of the "good" corporations because of their focus on AI safety & governance.

I never actually considered whether their perspective on AI safety & governance actually matched my own. ^^;

Re: Claude's new constitution

#586

Post by Jgoauh »

* Anthropic accepted a 200M contract from the US Department of Defence * Anthropic seeked contracts from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, the leaked memo acknowledges that the contracts will enrich dictators * Anthropic spent more than 2 millions of political lobying in 2025 * "Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on."

I don't see how this new constitution is anything more than marketing, when "enriching dictators is better than going out of business" is your CEO's motto, "lets to the lest evil thing that sill gives us more power and money" is not new, and its not gonna fix anything. When the economic system is fucked, only a reimagining of the system can fix it. Good intentions cannot meaningfully change anything when comming from actors that operate from within the fucked system, and who pay millions to fuck it further

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/anthropic-pbc?rid=5112273...

Re: Claude's new constitution

#587

Post by grantmuller »

throwaway290 wrote: post #436
grantmuller wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Who said anything about a formula? It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species, and not by any formula other than "this still seems to work to keep us in the game"

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

Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there.

> By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it.

And yet we mostly do feel bad about it, and we seem to be the only species who does. So perhaps we have already discovered that lack of empathy for other species is species self-limiting, and built it into our own psyches.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#588

Post by inimino »

skissane wrote: post #455
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.

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…

The fact that there are a ton of replies trying to argue against this says a lot about HN.

Contrarianism can become a vice if taken too far.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#589

Post by magical_spell »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #522
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.

“There are no objective universal moral truths” is an objective universal moral truth claim

It is not a moral claim. It is a meta-moral claim, that is, a claim about moral claims.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#590

Post by tim333 »

inimino wrote: post #588
skissane wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fact that there are a ton of replies trying to argue against this says a lot about HN. Contrarianism can become a vice if taken too far.

I don't think the replies are advocating for baby torturing but pointing out logical flaws in the argument.

It's true almost all people would argue it's bad but things like lions might like it which makes in not a universal law but a common human opinion. I think real moral systems do come down to human opinions basically, sometimes common sense ones, sometimes weird.

A problem with making out morality is absolute rather than common sense opinions is you get visionaries trying to see these absolute morals and you end up with stuff like Deuteronomy 25:11-12 "if a woman intervenes in a fight between two men by grabbing the assailant's genitals to rescue her husband, her hand is to be cut off without pity" and the like.

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