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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#641

Post by snowram »

zemptime wrote: post #328
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 is one. Don't destroy the means of error correction. Without that, no further means of moral development can occur. So, that becomes the highest moral imperative. (It's possible this could be wrong, but I've yet to hear an example of it.) This idea is from, and is explored more, in a book called The Beginning of Infinity.

We just have to define what an "error" is first, good luck with that.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#642

Post by ACCount37 »

haritha-j wrote: post #612
inimino wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're either not an AI researcher or you're not paying attention if you think these questions aren't relevant.

Even a basic understanding of LLMs should convince anyone that LLM conciousness and well being are nonsensical ideas. And as for constitution, I mostly object to the use of the word rather than the concept of guidelines. Its an uncessarily grandiose word. And yes I'm aware that its been used in LLM research before.

Do you have a known-good, rigorously validated consciousness-meter that you can point at an LLM to confirm that it reads "NO CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED"?

No? You don't?

Then where exactly is that overconfidence of yours coming from?

We don't know what "consciousness" is - let alone whether it can happen in arrays of matrix math. The leading theories, for all the good they do, are conflicting on whether LLM consciousness can be ruled out - and we, of course, don't know which theory of consciousness is correct. Or if any of them is.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#644

Post by mikemarsh »

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…

Nice job kicking the hornet's nest with this one lol.

Apparently it's an objective truth on HN that "scholars" or "philosophers" are the source of objective truth, and they disagree on things so no one really knows anything about morality (until you steal my wallet of course).

Re: Claude's new constitution

#645

Post by Shocka1 »

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 think I've said several times over the years here this is the phenomenon that happens on HN - basically being a contrarian just to be a contrarian. HN users are extremely intelligent, and many of them seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Prime example is this thread and many like them, which end up going into a different universe entirely. I totally get it though - in my younger days when I had more time for myself, I was capable of extreme forms of abstract thought, and used it like a superpower. Now though with a lot of software to write and a family, I try to limit to 15 min per day.

I went on a tangent... Ultimately I'm not saying abstract thought and/or being contrarian is a bad thing, because it's actually very useful. But I would agree, it can be a vice when taken too far. Like many things in life, it should be used in moderation.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#646

Post by amelius »

the_other wrote: post #576
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…

I doubt it's "universal". Do coyotes and orcas follow this rule?

From Google:

> Male gorillas, particularly new dominant silverbacks, sometimes kill infants (infanticide) when taking over a group, a behavior that ensures the mother becomes fertile sooner for the new male to sire his own offspring, helping his genes survive, though it's a natural, albeit tragic, part of their evolutionary strategy and group dynamics

Re: Claude's new constitution

#647

Post by kalkin »

akersten wrote: post #438
comp_throw7 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If a human is ultimately made up of nothing more than particles obeying the laws of physics, it would be in principle possible to simulate one on paper. Completely impractical, but the same is true of simulating Claude by hand (presuming Anthropic doesn't have some kind of insane secret efficiency breakthrough which allows many orders of magnitude fewer flops to run Claude than other models, which they're cleverly disguising by buying billions of dollars of compute they don't need).

Re: Claude's new constitution

#648

Post by kalkin »

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.

It would be pretty arrogant, I think, though possibly classic tech-bro behavior, for Anthropic to say, "you know what, smart people who've spent their whole lives thinking and debating about this don't have any agreement on what's required for consciousness, but we're good at engineering so we can just say that some of those people are idiots and we can give their conclusions zero credence."

Re: Claude's new constitution

#649

Post by KludgeShySir »

Shocka1 wrote: post #645
inimino wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think I've said several times over the years here this is the phenomenon that happens on HN - basically being a contrarian just to be a contrarian. HN users are extremely intelligent, and many of them seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Prime example is this thread and many like them, which end up going into a different universe entirely. I totally get it though - in my younger days when I had more time for…

[dead]

Re: Claude's new constitution

#650

Post by bicepjai »

inimino wrote: post #625
bicepjai wrote: post #169

I fed claudes-constitution.pdf into GPT-5.2 and prompted: [Closely read the document and see if there are discrepancies in the constitution.] It surfaced at least five. A pattern I noticed: a bunch of the "rules" become trivially bypassable if you just ask Claude to roleplay. Excerpts: A: "Claude should basically never directly lie or actively deceive anyone it’s interacting with." B: "If the user asks Claude to play…

If you replace Claude with a person you'll see that the Constitution was right, GPT was idiotically wrong, and you were fooled by AI slop + confirmation bias.

I think you might be right about confirmation bias and AI slop :) The "replace Claude with a person" argument is fine in theory, but LLMs aren't people. They hallucinate, drift, and struggle to follow instructions reliably. Giving a system like that an ambiguous "roleplay doesn't count as lying" carve-out is asking for trouble.
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