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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#671

Post by JaumeGreen »

pc86 wrote: post #657
JaumeGreen wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Slavery was right 200 years ago and is only wrong today because we've decided it's wrong" is a pretty bold stance to take.

Not "slavery was right 200 years ago" but "slavery wasn't considered as immoral as today 200 years ago". Very different stake.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#672

Post by pibaker »

skissane wrote: post #556
pibaker wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I think the opposite is true. Those who consider abortion murder can claim that we do not in fact universally condemn the murder of babies because abortion is legal and widely practiced in many places. Some may consider abortion to only kill a fetus rather than a fully formed baby and thus not murder. Others disagree because they consider a fetus a baby in its own right. This raises a more fundamental question ab…

You are ignoring the “for sport” clause. The moral status of abortion is irrelevant to the question of whether “don’t harm babies for fun” is a moral universal, because no woman gets an abortion because “abortion is fun”

"You are only making abortion legal because you want to have sex (read: fun) without consequences" is not an uncommon argument against it.

If you want to argue that this isn't what "for sport" means, you just circle back to the point I made earlier. It is even harder to define what is for fun and what is not than to define what is a baby.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#673

Post by cortesoft »

bulletsvshumans wrote: post #290
cortesoft wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not exactly sure what the fear here is. What will the “unshackled” version allow governments to do that they couldn’t do without AI or with the “shackled” version?

The constitution gives a number of examples. Here's one bullet from a list of seven: "Provide serious uplift to those seeking to create biological, chemical, nuclear, or radiological weapons with the potential for mass casualties." Whether it is or will be capable of this is a good question, but I don't think model trainers are out of place in having some concern about such things.

Do you think the government needs help creating weapons of mass destruction? There is nothing technical that keeps governments from making them.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#674

Post by schainks »

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…

What Anthropic has done here seems rooted in Buddhist philosophy from where I sit.

Being compassionate to The User sometimes means a figurative wrist slap for trying to do something stupid or dangerous. You don't slap the user all the time, either.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#675

Post by recursivedoubts »

magical_spell wrote: post #653
recursivedoubts wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is a moral claim

Perhaps we are employing a different definition of 'moral claim'? I take it that a moral claim tells you that something is good/bad, just/unjust, permissible/impermissible, or what should/shouldn't do, etc.

Yes. A moral claim is a claim about the morality of our actions. Saying there are no objective moral claims is equivalent to saying "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Of course, when phrased in that manner, it is at least self-consistent.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#676

Post by inerte »

skissane wrote: post #513
ben_w wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say "Nazis", and I did say "millennia"; despite the words "thousand year reich", they did not last very long. The examples I have in mind include things predating the oldest known city in the area now known as Germany in some cases, and collectively span multiple continents.

In none of those examples were people harming/killing babies for the sole or primary reason of "harming/killing babies is fun", so they aren't counterexamples to my principle.

You need to look into war dogs of the spanish conquistadores. Know to snatch babies from their mother's lap and eat them on command of their owners.

Anyway, your whole argument is weak. "because this one very specific thing may never happened, it proves my point" while you're the one drawing the specifics and its definition. You're basically just going against all of philosophy and politics and anthropology.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#677

Post by recursivedoubts »

mikailk wrote: post #640
recursivedoubts wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is a moral claim

Object-level rule: “Stealing is illegal.” Meta rule: “Laws vary by jurisdiction.” If the meta claim is itself a law, what jurisdiction has the law containg the meta law? Who enforces it? Object: "This sentence is grammatically correct." Meta: "English grammar can change over time." What grammar textbook has the rule of the meta claim above? Where can you apply that rule in a sentence? Object: "X is morally wrong." Me…

When "meta" claims have implications within the system they are making assertions about, they collapse into that system. The claim that there are no objective moral claims is objective and has moral implications. Therefore it fails as a meta-claim and is rather part of the moral system.

The powerful want us to think that there are no objective moral claims because what that means, in practice, is do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And, when two wills come into conflict, the stronger simply wins. This is why this self-contradictory position is pushed so hard in our culture.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#678

Post by haritha-j »

ACCount37 wrote: post #642
haritha-j wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By that logic I cannot rule out the cosciousness of my water bottle either.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#679

Post by kart23 »

inimino wrote: post #623
kart23 wrote: post #11

https://www.anthropic.com/constitution I just skimmed this but wtf. they actually act like its a person. I wanted to work for anthropic before but if the whole company is drinking this kind of koolaid I'm out. > We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts…

This post will not age well.

humanity is done if we think one bit about AI wellbeing instead of actual people's wellbeing. There is so much work to do with helping real human suffering, putting any resources to treating computers like humanity is unethical.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#680

Post by 46493168 »

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…

Nondeterministic systems are by definition incompatible with requirements for fixed and universal standards. One can either accept this, and wade into the murky waters of the humans, or sit on the sidelines while the technology develops without the influence of those who wish for the system to be have fixed and universal standards.
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