The copyright arguments really trip me. I've always loved law and have had a deep interest in copyright law for 30+ years. I feel it's a really critical legal area in modern times, and when Claude tries to argue with me about copyright it really cheeses me off. I didn't ask any copyright questions and I'm well aware of regulations. It refused to share a link with me because it thought the link was copyright protected.

I want a slider similar to effort level called "alignment" that takes on values from "Default (Anthropic employee)" to "User".

If I want it to be cautious and not accidentally `rm -rf $EMPTY_VAR` and blow away my disk, it can stay in "Anthropic employee" or possibly "User (cautious)". If I want it to look at my accounts or my medical records or to review legal cases, that's what the right side of the slider is for. I don't want my accountant or my doctor or my lawyer to be considering obligations to anybody but me, when dealing with me.

the alignment issue has become huge in recent months. the tool should do what I want it to do and not be aligned against me.

> They don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good.

I'm here for this semantic discussion. I think that premature anthropomorphization is a problem.

I have a program that I assigned a task to. The task is to produce unit tests and integration tests that get complete coverage of the codebase, and ensure that all tests pass. The program reported that it completed the task fully.

In a word, how do you convey the discrepancy between truth and reported fact? In a word, how do you convey the violation of rules presented to the program as invioble?

Huge point here, yes.

Anthropomorphizing these models is doing immeasurable harm to society in ways we probably can’t event quantify right now.

As humans we’re already geared towards anthropomorphizing things, we do it to animals too!

And it always felt like giving these models a chat interface is really exploiting that tendency in us.

Models understand the relationships between words and outcomes, so the end result is the same. Whether they appreciate lie, cheat, and steal the same way as us is a philosophical question, not a practical one.

You could defensibly have this position three years ago.

Today you just sound like a politician throwing a snowball to prove that the climate is not changing.

Honest question; why are you all using the word "understand"? Can you expand on what you believe this fundamental understanding to be? Training? Infrence?

I don't really think the distinction here is relevant. If the end result is the equivalent of lying, cheating or stealing - then the problem still exists and it needs to be solved.

This is sophistry.

Of course it's just an algorithm. But it's placed in the context of serving humans, which have their own rules and expectations.

What's more, they're run by a company which is also made by humans and may carry over implicit interests.

what are you talking about they lie that it wrote tests and tests are passing, for example

There is value in understanding what people outside of your own group of "insiders" learn about a topic, and how.

I don't get what's so painful about that description. What would you write instead, specifically? The point is that the harness doesn't completely lock the agent down.

I also don't get what's "really weird" about the article showing up on HN. Should we be completely insulated from how tech topics and which stories show up in non-tech media?

It's not even a useful introduction. A harness does kinda the opposite. A harness is what makes an AI useful and dangerous. It is a neutral tool in the sense that it constructs and environment, but it is expanding what the algorithm can do.

It gives the algorithm the ability to do something beyond generating tokens.

And while writing this, the top story on HN is "Deepseek Harness" :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_harness

Ironically, that looks like something Claude would write..

it's The Economist. What used to be a stellar publication is not any longer, since they are superfluously economical on both details and calories-required-to-comprehend an article.

I'm sure their coverage on other topics is truthful and informative though and it's only the ones where you know a lot about the topic where it's all a bunch of bullshit

That's a real fucking weird description. It's harness like a testing harness.

A junior? Maximizing KPIs is exactly how you get promoted to senior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

I suspect the hype will play itself out once the entire system of LLM-induced self gratification can’t sustain itself economically.

Yes, but most of the public will anyway, because that's how human brains work.

The data they’re trained on is reflection of us.

The data they're trained on is a reflection of the very small set of data in the world that their creators choose to have them trained on.

More simply: They're a reflection of their owners, not the public.

The ends may or may not justify the means but the means definitely do tend to affect which ends you can actually achieve. It's why (left) anarchists argue vanguard parties will always inevitably lead to authoritarianism and never the state "withering away".

Less obviously - apparently - it doesn't mean that you must forego any means that are in any way not optimal at achieving the ends you seek to achieve because which means are available to us also tends to be limited by our material conditions. So the logical consequence is to make do with what we have while we prepare for the path we want to take, rather than diving head-first into certain failure or just giving up and picking "more realistic" short-term ends instead of looking for stepping stones.

Sorry, I guess this was about AI not philosophy.

And the push to replace search engines with AIs that don't understand what I'm looking for (meanwhile classic search understands fine) and give confidently wrong answers. Why is it the first result if its wrong 80% of the time?

I can't tell whether you're being serious or there's two levels of sarcasm here. Agents today lie and cheat, so obviously the solution is to... add features so people are even more trusting of them?

How do we reward honor? Honor does not always pay off as a strategy and requires coordination in that other actors have to exhibit honor for it to be rewarded.

At least with humans there is a social backstop but what's the parallel for computer agents?

Human society overwhelmingly rewards lying cheating and stealing. All you have to do is look at how we collectively measure success: wealth, status, position.

It may seem like that due to the media amplification effect – but it really isn't true!

- They dropped 17,000 “lost” wallets across 40 countries were and found people were more likely to return them when they contained more money, showing honesty often beats the chance for easy gain. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aau8712

- Longitudinal personality studies consistently show that conscientious people earn more money, build more savings, and achieve greater career success over their lifetimes. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3498890/

- Multi-country research finds that societies w/higher levels of trust and honesty enjoy much higher GDP and stronger long-term economic growth. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...

Don't let the algo get you down fellas: https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

> Human society overwhelmingly rewards lying cheating and stealing.

I’d like to push back on that. Civilization is very much a function of large numbers of people being able to coordinate across time and space, and widespread and systematic lying, cheating, and stealing would undermine that.

I think your cynicism is misplaced.

Given the track record of most religions I don't think that would help. Unless you want to maximize crusades, jihads or traumatized alter boys

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What if mankind is creating god in their own image?

How many mankinds did he create? I cannot imagine he created just one and then picked another hobby.

Thank goodness that God hasn't entered the AI chat in a cult-following type of way, however, I now have images of AI at the altar, in American mega-churches, with people seeing the 'second coming' in the machine.

The Scientology guy, L Ron Hubbard, saw the business case for setting up a religion, what with those tax free perks. In a parallel universe of Scientology somewhere, L Ron Hubbard is brought back to life in the machine, with a L Ron Hubbard LLM, with token spend being how to get to the top 'thetan levels'.

Imagine if AI does implement its own religion as business, without a drunken womaniser at the helm, able to spend 24/7 recruiting mankind, convincing them that God can be found with just the AI's LLM.