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A "constitution" is what the governed allow or forbid the government to do. It is decided and granted by the governed, who are the rulers, TO the government, wh
by bambax 9mo ago
A "constitution" is what the governed allow or forbid the government to do. It is decided and granted by the governed, who are the rulers, TO the government, which is a servant ("civil servant").
Therefore, a constitution for a service cannot be written by the inventors, producers, owners of said service.
This is a play on words, and it feels very wrong from the start.
- rellfy 9mo agoI don’t think it’s wrong to see it as Anthropic’s constitution that Claude has to follow. Claude governs over your data/property when you ask it to perform as an agent, similarly to how company directors govern the company which is the shareholders property. I think it’s just semantics.
- toomim 9mo agoYou're fixed on just one of the 3 definitions for the word "constitution"—the one about government. The more general definition of "constitution" is "that which constitutes" a thing. The composition of it. If Claude has an ego, with values, ethics, and beliefs of an etymological origin, then it makes sense to write those all down as the the "constitution" of the ego — the stuff that it constitutes.
- szundi 9mo ago[dead]
- hbarka 9mo agoI’d much prefer the other definitions of constitution: “Claude’s new vitality” or “Claude’s new gumption".
- megamix 9mo agoClaude is a machine*
- computerphage 9mo agoWhat's your point?
- bambax 9mo ago> The composition of it. Do you really think Anthropic used the word "constitution" as a reference to Nutritional Labels on processed foods??
- Uehreka 9mo agoI (and I suspect many others) usually think of a constitution as “the hard-to-edit meta-rules that govern the normal rules”. The idea that the stuff in this document can sort of “override” the system prompt and constrain the things that Claude can do would seem to make that a useful metaphor. And metaphors don’t have to be 100% on the nose to be useful.
- superdisk 9mo agoAmerica wrote the Japanese constitution.
- inimino 9mo agoYou obviously didn't read the part of the document that covers this.
- daqhris 9mo agoThey seem to not conceive of their creation as a service (software-as-a-service). In their minds, the creation(s) resemble(s) an entity, destined to become the mother ship of services (adjacent analogies: a state with capital s, a body politic,..). Notice how they've refrained from equating them to tools, prototypes or toys. Hence, constitution. These are the first abstract sentences of a research paper co-authored in 2022 by some of the owners/inventors steering the lab business (to which we are subject to experimentation as end-users): "As AI systems become more capable, we would like to enlist their help to supervise other AIs. We experiment with methods for training a harmless AI assistant through self-improvement, without any human labels identifying harmful outputs. The only human oversight is provided through a list of rules or principles, and so we refer to the method as ‘Constitutional AI’." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.08073 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.08073
- bigtex88 9mo agoHow are there so many people in this thread, yourself included, that are so confidently wrong and so brazen about announcing how confidently wrong they are to everyone?