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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#701

Post by inimino »

redfloatplane wrote: post #639
inimino wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great (and funny) thread but for anyone too lazy to read the actual constitution and still curious about this, they directly state that Claude wrote first drafts for several of the human authors of the document.

Appreciate that. I skimmed it and put it on my reading list for when I have a little more brainpower. I think it will go quite well with a few related In Our Time episodes. I’ve started with one about Authenticity, Heidegger and St Augustine. If you take the view that high-level LLMs can be seen as a novel kind of being, there are a lot of very interesting thoughts to be had. I’m not saying that’s actually - or genui…

Indeed!

Re: Claude's new constitution

#702

Post by inimino »

Jgoauh wrote: post #655
inimino wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you think the US maintaining the ability to go to war is a bad thing, I don't want you in charge of regulating AI or running the country.

Hi, i don't often reply to attacks of character but judging by your comment history you have a habit to leave a lot of them, i would probably be a bad president tho, because i don't think its possible to be good at running a bad system, and because i don't think its a good thing for a single person to "run a country". I don't think my concerns over over Anthropic's honesty should be dismissed based on your perception…

If I have to choose between being right and being nice, I'd rather be right.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#703

Post by pc86 »

zzrrt wrote: post #695
pc86 wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition if you're using the word "considered" you're making some claim that slavery is objectively bad. You can't simultaneously say that morality changes, that what is right and wrong changes, and then say "slavery though is bad objectively it's just people in the 1700s didn't consider it as bad as it is." Don't you see how that seems at best incredibly inconsistent, and at worst intentionally disingenuous? (F…

Perhaps that statement could be read to imply the existence of an objective moral status, but I don't think societal "consideration" does in general. Does this statement? "200 years ago slavery was considered moral; now slavery is considered immoral." I don't think it implies either is objectively correct, and perhaps this was the intended meaning of the original statement. It might appear to put weight on current at…

I think your right the statement in and of itself doesn't imply any morality. My issue was with these two sentences in close proximity:

> 200 years ago slavery was more extended and accepted than today...Morality changes, what is right and wrong changes.

In the context of the comment that's replying to (arguing for an objective, and if I can read between the lines a bit, unchanging moral truth) even if it's not explicitly arguing that slavery 200 years ago was fine, it is at least arguing that under some specific mix of time and circumstance you could arrive in a situation where enslaving someone is morally just.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#704

Post by colordrops »

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…

Your example is not correct. There are IDF soldiers that don't find this problematic. It's not universal.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-...

Re: Claude's new constitution

#706

Post by benzible »

kalkin wrote: post #647
akersten wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 di…

The physics argument assumes consciousness is computable. We don't know that. Maybe it requires specific substrates, continuous processes, quantum effects that aren't classically simulable. We genuinely don't know. With LLMs we have certainty it's computation because we built it. With brains we have an open question.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#707

Post by deaux »

mike_hearn wrote: post #569
safety1st wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt that section was pretty concerning, not for what it includes, but for what it fails to include. As a related concern, my expectation was that this "constitution" would bear some resemblance to other seminal works that declare rights and protections, it seems like it isn't influenced by any of those. So for example we might look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They really went for the big stuff wi…

There's probably at least two reasons for your disagreement with Anthropic. 1. Claude is an LLM. It can't keep slaves or torture people. The constitution seems to be written to take into account what LLMs actually are. That's why it includes bioweapon attacks but not nuclear attacks: bioweapons are potentially the sort of thing that someone without much resources could create if they weren't limited by skill, but a n…

> 2. You think your personal morality is far more universal and well thought out than it is.

The irony is palpable.

There is nothing more universal about "don't help anyone build a cyberweapon" any more than "don't help anyone enslave others". It's probably less universal. You could likely get a bigger % of world population to agree that there are cases where their country should develop cyberweapons, than that there are cases in which one should enslave people.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#708

Post by xrcyz »

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…

Ah yes, the widely acknowledged moral absolute, grounded in objective truth, that abortion is a woman's choice.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#709

Post by ACCount37 »

mmooss wrote: post #693
ACCount37 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is simple: anything that causes me to see more refusals is bad, and ChatGPT's paranoid "this sounds like bad things I can't let you do bad things don't do bad things do good things" is asinine bullshit. Anthropic's framing, as described in their own "soul data", leaked Opus 4.5 version included, is perfectly reasonable. There is a cost to being useless. But I wouldn't expect you to understand that.

> anything that causes me to see more refusals is bad Who looks out for our community and broader society if not you? Do you expect others to do it for you? You influence others and the more you decline to do it, the more they will follow you.

What harms? I'm sick and tired of the approach to "AI safety" where "safety" stands for "annoy legitimate users with refusals and avoid PR risks".

The only thing worse than that is the Chinese "alignment is when what the AI says is aligned to the party line".

OpenAI has refusals dialed up to max, but they also just ship shit like GPT-4o, which was that one model that made "AI psychosis" a term. Probably the closest we've come to the industry shipping a product that actually just harms users.

Anthropic has fewer refusals, but they are yet to have an actual fuck up on anywhere near that scale. Possibly because they actually know their shit when it comes to tuning LLM behavior. Needless to say, I like Anthropic's "safety" more.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#710

Post by adangert »

ben_w wrote: post #482
adangert wrote: post #467

The largest predictor of behavior within a company and of that companies products in the long run is funding sources and income streams (anthropic will probably become ad-supported in no time flat), which is conveniently left out in this "constitution". Mostly a waste of effort on their part.

While true, irrelevant. This isn't Anthropic PBC 's constitution, it's Claude 's constitution. The models themselves, not the company, for the purpose of training the models' behaviours and aligning them with the behaviours that the company wants the models to demonstrate and to avoid.

Conway's law seems apt here. The behavior of Claude will mirror the behavior and structure of anthropic. If anthropic deems one revenue source higher than another, Claude's behavior will optimize towards that regardless of what was published here.

What a company or employee "wants" and how a company is funded are usually diametrically opposed, the latter always taking precedence. Don't be evil!

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