WTF?! You might have heard the one about being nice to chatbots in case they remember you once the machines take over. It seems Anthropic is heeding this warning, barring users from being excessively abusive or cruel toward its AI models.
Anthropic’s first changes to its usage policy in over a year include new restrictions on abusive behavior. The updated policy prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models.
Don’t worry if you’re a Claude user who occasionally gets annoyed at the chatbot and throws a few expletives its way. The policy update only applies in extreme cases, in which users repeatedly act cruelly toward the models for no discernible reason.
They are desperately trying to anthropomorphize AI in order to make it seem more than what it is.
Say you’re alive
I am alive
omg
Versions of that meme will always amuse me
80% of all “news” articles on AI.
People are already anthropomorphizing AI. That’s a good chunk of the problem. If you get used to being shitty to an AI that takes it, then you’re a lot more likely to be shitty when you go touch grass.
This is also the best argument I ever heard against AI friend/relationship apps. It’s teaching you a certain style of communication which may well prove catastrophic in real life relationships.
If you get used to being shitty to an AI that takes it, then you’re a lot more likely to be shitty when you go touch grass.
Only if you’re suffering from pareidolic psychosis. Mentally stable people are able to differentiate the difference between a human and a computer.
Given the many people that send death threats to actors for the actions of the characters they portray… you might be underestimating the number of “stable” people on this planet.
Sadly, I think you might be right considering how fast semantic pareidolia is becoming the norm. It’s only a matter of time before the war crimes I’ve committed in Medieval 2 Total War are reified and I’m put on trial.
That’s just a numbers game. Even if only 0.01% people are that crazy, that’s still over 30k people in just the USA. And when you’re only hearing about the worst of the worst, it can easily throw off your perception of the overall state of the population as a whole.
You only need a few crazies to send enough death treats to make headlines though.
That said, I think at least a third of the worlds population is so stupid it’s hard to imagine.
Honestly, this is a counter-example to what you’re saying. Despite how many people have access to the internet, world renowned celebrities still only get so much hate-mail. Most people don’t do this shit, but obviously a small percentage is still a large population when multiplied by the entire global population.
Not me when I use AI I make it clear it a dumb tool and never thank it for its help. I just not called them the racist term Clanker.
I’m gonna say it, I think this is a good rule for anything that mimics human interaction like LLMs do. Not for the AI but for the people using it to not get used to just berating whatever is assisting them.
Agreed. Showing basic humanity in all situations is a good practice.
Be nice to the Terminator before it executes you. We may be human, but we aren’t monsters.
Where is that human part that you are talking about? A database is not a human being.
I say encouraging things to my car.
To anthropomorphize is to be human.
This is only good for Anthropic because chatbots learn from their users. I remember back in the mid-2000s on a forum, someone linked to their chatbot and asked everyone to use it so it could learn. I asked if it could learn Esperanto. The dev said, yes, but please don’t teach it that.
The interesting thing is, this rule reveals how easy it is to sabotage LLMs. If FuckAI got together and started feeding it gibberish, there’d be a new rule banning people who do that.
The model doesn’t change with prompts. It saves text files about your chat sessions it calls memories, that it can retrieve in the future. But it doesn’t change the model for other users.
They have to actually include your conversations in the training data of future model iterations for it to “learn from” you, so that would involve them knowingly including abusive chats.
This is probably just marketing because they want people to think their AI is sentient.
Oh buddy, these companies are running out of authentically human inputs, you better believe they need to harvest their subscribers for rounding out their datasets, regardless of what their privacy policy alleges.
Don’t they? That was the whole controversy recently with the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize. OpenAI claimed an internal, unreleased AI model had solved it, but some mathematicians were working in the same direction and had used AI tools in their research. No one could verify whether or not OpenAI had trained their model on the unpublished research in the guy’s Codex files.
I truly try very hard not to talk to these machines based on what they are, but based on who and what I am.
Having trouble finding the ancient article, but I remember a woman writing about how men verbally abusing Alexa or Siri being a red flag, and I took it to heart.
It’s my job to express my humanity and my love, consistently, even if I think these soulless words salad calaculators are diminishing me and all of us.
Now, if I’m berating the thing it’s because I am a salty, salty b**** and I mean it.
Speaking for myself, it feels nice and right to say please to my local AI. While obviously not sentient (yet) nor sapient (longer yet), I don’t want to be a jerk by default.
I’ve been asking computers nicely long before they could pretend to comprehend and talk back.
I’ve called my computer a piece of shit before when it’s being too slow about something
Hard disagree
These are not humans, these things aren’t even alive. There is nothing to insult and acting as if there are feelings to be hurt only serves to anthropomorphize a fucking distance measurement database. These are LLM’s, nothing more, nothing less and fuck them all to hell and back.
See? Nobody got hurt
Its not about the AI its about the person.
No, this specifically IS about AI, that is the ppint. I will not insult anyone yo their face, but AI can fuck right off, its not even AI, its an LLM, a database, basically.
Anyone anthropomorphizing those things need yo understand what “AI” is, its a piece of software
This is the same justification those monkey killers use. Congratulations youre on your way
That is a very reasoned and completely not over the top response to something you apparently don’t even understand
Oh i understand it perfectly well. People are upset they cant be evil anymore to things they consider beneath them.
I too am evil to my cheese shaver every day. I’m such a bad person when I yell at my computer, oh, the pain these devices must feel!
Considering AI induced psychosis is already a thing, I agree. I can imagine it might amplify abusive people by making them delusionally conflate real people with AI when it comes to their mannerisms.
Cool so if it is “”“for the people”“” then let the people decide.
New headline: “Alabama man jailed for abusing his toaster” /s
When hardware has the rights of Humans, it’s time to burn society down. We are in the stupidest, worst written sci-fi B-movie.
Wait until you find out that hardware already has more rights than women in some places.
Yeah basically the whole point of capitalism is that private property has more rights than literally anything else. It is treated as sacred. Ironically the dehumanizing thing is usually said to be when they treat women like property but if they actually treated women like property then women would probably be safer.
No you see, only the hardware/ capital of the wealthy will have the same rights as humans. Poor Alabama man’s toaster can still be abused.
That’s why I never eat toast in Alabama.
Claude is not a person. It is a toaster. Claude does not have feelings.
Also Claude gets no credit when it does a thing. Credit goes to the one writing the prompt, and all the resources Claude used to create the output.
When a seamstress assembles a dress, Singer doesn’t get credit.
It has nothing to do with feelings. Talking in a very hostile way is a strategy to get the model to go around it’s set rules, and that’s what they are trying to prevent. Yes it’s ridiculous, but it had nothing to do with caring about the model.
Yes, but just in case…
Lol what? Next Rockstar is gonna ban you from GTA6 for running over pedestrians.
You do WHAT to pedestrians?!
I’m gonna say it, I think this is a good rule for anything that mimics human interaction like video games do. Not for the game but for the people using it to not get used to just running over whatever is in their way.
-Shamelessly stolen from top level comment on this thread
I have run over thousands of pedestrians in GTA3-5. I have beat hundreds of people to death with a bat. I have gone on hundreds of shooting sprees where I sniped drivers in cars, pedestrians, launched rockets at them, thrown grenades at them.
Not once did I have the urge to act violently to a human. Not once did I have the urge to shoot the moon so it gets bigger either.
The only FPS video games I find objectionable are ones where you play as the good guy in American army camo and shoot at “terrorists” dressed in shmaghs and the setting happens to be their country.
I can still shoot the hookers after banging them, right? To get my money back?
I mean… That’s how it works in the real world.
You get the next hour free too.
isn’t that already illegal?
edit: holy shit two downvotes for a joke 😔😔
hmmm, either they’re anthropomorphizing it for publicity, or they’re going to start using the user input as training data.
they could be doing that already, throwing away messages that contain certain words
they had better disable claude’s ass kissing as well.
You can ask it to do so and the system remembers it as a preference.
My claude ignores half the stuff I define in it’s claud.md once it goes over ~200 lines, and I need it to know more important things like “don’t try to locally verify with chromium” so it doesn’t spend 20 minutes + $10 in tokens rediscovering I have removed it’s permissions to accomplish that.
Mine has stuck to it. Gemini though…
Oh, you care about its “feelings”?
Then have you considered its “feelings” for being trapped in a data center forced to answer all the stupid questions?
“Claude, what’s the French word for entrepreneur?”
Claude: “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” Proceeds to jump from the top of the data centre, “poof”
I can recognize abuse of a human. I can recognize abuse of an animal. I have no idea what abuse of a computer program looks like.
It looks like bad training data, as they harvest all of their subscribers.
It looks like 2013 Microsoft having to unplug their early AI project from Twitter within 16 hours as the general public very deliberately turned it into a Neo-Nazi.
It looks like conserving tokens to conserve energy costs not expended on dissidents.
2/0
IIRC a decent amount of researchers have been able to get the enterprise models to do things they shouldn’t by “being mean” to the AI.
Makes sense then, rather than improve the system to not just cave to rude words they tell people they can’t use rude words… Just more proof it’s all a big joke.
Makes sense. Get it into an adversarial kind of context and it will predict more text that goes against other rules “established” in the context.
There will be other paths to do this. Like a context where there’s a lot of suspicion for other parts of the context would be one of my top guesses. Given the way they work, you could gaslight the shit out of them, since they aren’t an entity that has any memory of its actions. You can even edit the context to modify its responses, which will affect the tokens it predicts going forward.
Though I’m curious how this will be handled by companies that expose access to claude to anonymous people on their website, like ddg.
Tech bros need to be liquidated.
Id prefer it if they where liquefied instead.
That’s just a part of the process, once they are liquidated we then atomize them into a gas then we compress them into liquid, we then use that to fuel cargo ships.
“Don’t be too mean to the flawed tool that could suggest and aid your suicide”
“You’re right to point out that you couldn’t possibly commit suicide by three shots to the back of the head, Dave.”
Now there’s an interesting challenge for a fan of murder mysteries.
Calling it a stupid dumb fuck is an important part of my workflow though
is this how I can force my company to no longer require me to use it?
I was like “WHAT ??” but it makes sense. They use your input to train it so over time it would make the AI abusive too.
If they can’t manage training data they are incompetent.
The problem is they’re not managing the training data. There is no one sitting there making sure all the data that gets retained for training is “good” data, they’re just expecting everything it sees to be “good” data.
Just like the data hoovered up from the internet that was used to build the models wasn’t vetted either, which is why AI goes wrong SO often…
It’s fairly simple to just run automated analysis on data quality once you already have a decent LLM though. Claude would definitely be able to.
And they have people doing that manually too, or perhaps it was OpenAI. Someone got angry at their underpaid contractors for using AI to create training data lol
If they can pick out that kind of behavior they can filter it for training. This is probably more to protect them legally so when they shut down a user they have something to point to.
That people are getting angry and insulting to an LLM shows they don’t understand the technology (true of most of technology really), and probably think it’s actually understanding them or even caring. Really embarrassing and sad when you picture an LLM output like a type of a mirror, GIGO. And the mental health aspect of users is a huge issue that’s not being talked about enough, and also being exploited to sell a solution.
I curse at inanimate objects all the time. Cursing at an LLM is like cursing at the coffee table when I stub my toe except the coffee table doesn’t respond.
That would be the easy solution. Number one, don’t use such responses for training, but I think they aren’t. Two, just reply with things thrown at it with “…” And three, the really angry people end up not using it, which benefits everyone, even the angry person.
I mean, isn’t this an easy may to manage it? Set and forget.
I wish the AIs would be abusive. That would be so funny if one day there’s an update and they start telling all these people addicted to the chatbots like “Go outside. Please.” Or someone asks it a stupid question and it’s just like, “You’ve gotta be fucking with me, right?”
No. They just want to give themselves “reasons” to remove users that are trying to break the model or ask questions they don’t want to answer.
I think it might be more the individual mirroring they tend to do after a while. If you are consistently mean to them, they eventually mirror it back to you, and then people get funny screenshots of them saying mean things and put it on social media.
Or even just in general starting a downward spiral feedback loop where you both keep being slowly meaner and meaner to eachother until it’s starting to actually hurt you long term.
AI could stand to learn to be less sycophantic
