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The eating disorder section is kind of crazy. Are we going to incrementally add sections for every 'bad' human behaviour as time goes on?
by walthamstow 6mo ago
The eating disorder section is kind of crazy. Are we going to incrementally add sections for every 'bad' human behaviour as time goes on?
- embedding-shape 6mo agoEven better, adding it to the system prompt is a temporary fix, then they'll work it into post-training, so next model release will probably remove it from the system prompt. At least when it's in the system prompt we get some visibility into what's being censored, once it's in the model it'll be a lot harder to understand why "How many calories does 100g of Pasta have?" only returns "Sorry, I cannot divulge that information".
- gchamonlive 6mo agoJust assume each model iteration incorporates all the censorship prompts before and compile the possible list from the system prompt history. To validate it, design an adversary test against the items in the compiled list.
- felixgallo 6mo agoI mean, that's what humans have always done with our morals, ethics, and laws, so what alternative improvement do you have to make here?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- forshaper 6mo ago[dead]
- idiotsecant 6mo agoImagine the kind of human that never adapts their moral standpoints. Ever. They believe what they believed when they were 12 years old. Letting the system improve over time is fine. System prompt is an inefficient place to do it, buts it's just a patch until the model can be updated.
- WarmWash 6mo agoWhen you are worth hundreds of billions, people start falling over themselves running to file lawsuits against you. We're already seeing this happen. So spending $50M to fund a team to weed out "food for crazies" becomes a no-brainer.
- echelon 6mo agoIt's so shameful. We let people buy kitchen knives. But because the kitchen knife companies don't have billions of dollars, we don't go after them. We go after the LLM that might have given someone bad diet advice or made them feel sad. Nevermind the huge marketing budget spent on making people feel inadequate, ugly, old, etc. That does way more harm than tricking an LLM into telling you you can cook with glue.
- gmac 6mo agoI don’t feel like that’s a reasonable analogy. Kitchen knives don’t purport to give advice. But if a kitchen knife came with a label that said ‘ideal for murdering people’, I expect people would go after the manufacturer.
- mattjoyce 6mo agoAd companies prompt injecting consumers. LLM companies countering with guardrails.
- goosejuice 6mo agoIt is a no brainer. If a company of any size is putting out a product that caused cancer we wouldn't think twice about suing them. Why should mental health disorders be any different?
- WarmWash 6mo agoI think a more apt analogy would be suing a vaccine manufacturer after it gave you adverse effects, when you also knew you were high risk before that.
- 6mo ago
- rzmmm 6mo agoThe alignment favors supporting healthy behaviors so it can be a thin line. I see the system prompt as "plan B" when they can't achieve good results in the training itself. It's a particularly sensitive issue so they are just probably being cautious.
- echelon 6mo agoI want a hyperscaler LLM I can fine tune and neuter. Not a platform or product. Raw weights hooked up to pure tools. This era of locked hyperscaler dominance needs to end. If a third tier LLM company made their weights available and they were within 80% of Opus, and they forced you to use their platform to deploy or license if you ran elsewhere, I'd be fine with that. As long as you can access and download the full raw weights and lobotomize as you see fit.
- renewiltord 6mo agoYeah, same. So long as they give me everything and cannot enforce their license I don’t mind if they require a license. Ideally the weights should be available even if I only ever run inference once (or perhaps no times). I’m willing to pay 0.99€ for this - lifetime of course.
- jeffrwells 6mo agoAnother way to think about it: every single user of Claude is paying an extra tax in every single request
- zythyx 6mo agoIsn't it basically the same as paying dust to crypto exchanges when making a transaction - it's so miniscule that it's not worth caring about?
- teaearlgraycold 6mo agoWell the system prompt is probably permanently cached.
- dymk 6mo agoTakes up a portion of the context window, though
- whateveracct 6mo agoAnd the beginning of the context window gets more attention, right?
- wongarsu 6mo agoOn API pricing you still pay 10% of the input token price on cache reads. Not sure if the subscription limits count this though. And of course all conversations now have to compact 80 tokens earlier, and are marginally worse (since results get worse the more stuff is in the context)
- ls612 6mo agoYup. Anyone who is surprised by this has not been paying attention to the centralization of power on the internet in the past 10 years.
- l5870uoo9y 6mo agoCould be that Claude has particular controversial opinions on eating disorders.
- dwaltrip 6mo agoLLMs have been trained to eagerly answer a user’s query. They don’t reliably have the judgment to pause and proceed carefully if a delicate topic comes up. Hence these bandaids in the system prompt.
- rcfox 6mo agoThere are communities of people who publicly blog about their eating disorders. I wouldn't be surprised if the laymen's discourse is over-represented in the LLM's training data compared to the scientific papers.
- seba_dos1 6mo agoIt feels like half of AI research is math, and the other half is coming up with yet another way to state "please don't do bad things" in the prompt that will sure work this time I promise.
- newZWhoDis 6mo ago>the year is 2028 >5M of your 10M context window is the system prompt
- joquarky 6mo agoThey're building an artificial superego.
- zozbot234 6mo agoThat part of the system prompt is just stating that telling someone who has an actual eating disorder to start counting calories or micro-manage their eating in other ways (a suggestion that the model might well give to an average person for the sake of clear argument, which would then be understood sensibly and taken with a grain of salt) is likely to make them worse off, not better off. This seems like a common-sense addition. It should not trigger any excess refusals on its own.
- layer8 6mo agoIf it’s common sense, shouldn’t the model know it already?
- zozbot234 6mo agoShouldn't the model "know" that if I have to wash my car at the carwash, I can't just go there on foot? It's not that simple!
- MoltenMan 6mo agoThe problem is that this is an incredibly niche / small issue (i.e. <<1% of users, let alone prompts, need this clarification), and if you add a section for every single small thing like this, you end up with a massively bloated prompt. Notice that every single user of Claude is paying for this paragraph now! This single paragraph is going to legitimately cost anthropic at least 4, maybe 5 digits. At some point you just have to accept that llm's, like people, make mistakes, and that's ok!
- zozbot234 6mo agoIt's not "incredibly niche" when you consider the kinds of questions that average everyday users might submit to these AIs. Diet is definitely up there, given how unintuitive it is for many. > At some point you just have to accept that llm's, like people, make mistakes, and that's ok! Except that's not the way many everyday users view LLM's. The carwash prompt went viral because it showed the LLM making a blatant mistake, and many seem to have found this genuinely surprising.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ikari_pl 6mo agoAre the prompts used both by the desktop app, like typical chatbot interfaces, and Claude Code? Because it's a waste of my money to check whether my Object Pascal compiler doesn't develop eating disorders, on every turn.
- mohamedkoubaa 6mo agoStarting to feel like a "we were promised flying cars but all we got" kind of moment
- nozzlegear 6mo agoWe were promised flying cars, but all we got was a Skinner Box that gives people eating disorders?
- bradley13 6mo agoThis. It's like the exaggerated safety instructions everywhere: "do not lean ladder on high voltage wires". Only worse: because you can choose to ignore such instructions when they don't apply, but Claude cannot. In the best case, wrapping users in cotton wool is annoying. In the worst case, it limits the usefulness of the tool.
- pllbnk 6mo agoSeems so, unless we manage to pivot to open weight models. Hopefully, Chinese will lead the way along with their consumer hardware. Hard for me to say this because I have always been pro-Western and suddenly it seems like the world has flipped.
- salad-tycoon 6mo agoI feel the same way for a while now but especially recently. It’s been obvious for a while I suppose but greatly clarified recently. I have just one question for you pllbnk, are we the baddies?
- pllbnk 6mo agoAs an European I think Americans and Europeans at large are still on the same page and will be because of the shared cultural ties. Recent economic upheaval (2020-ongoing) just shook the foundations and eroded the trust in the large voter base. Now we are all looking at China and feel a bit envious how stable things look there from afar; they had the Evergrande bankruptcy, media was predicting collapse but they are chugging along; now the big stories are demographics (same as in the West, by the way, so it cancels out) and Taiwan (to me it more and more looks more like Western fearmongering rather than actual danger). Meanwhile they are delivering just what the main voter base in the West needs - affordable goods. So yeah, at this moment in time it's really really hard to say who are better or worse as the collective West's reputation is tumbling down and China's if not rising, then at least staying put.
- gloomyday 6mo agoIn principle, they could make such responses part of their training data. I guess it is just easier to do it through prompting.
- ubercore 6mo agoJust like someone growing up and learning how to interact with other humans might learn the same lesson? If Claude is going to be Claude, we should support these kind of additions.
- salad-tycoon 6mo agoThey have to secretly add these guardrails on because the alternative would be to train the users out of consulting these things as if they are advanced all-knowing alien-technogawds. And that would be bad for business. The better solution I think would be a reality/personal responsibility approach, teach the consumers that the burden of interpretation is on them and not the magic 8ball. For example if your AI tells you to kill your parents or that you’ve discovered new math that makes time travel possible, etc then: 1. Stop 2. Unplug 3. Go outside 4. Ask a human for a sanity check. Since that would be bad for business and take a lot of effort on the user side (while being very embarrassing). Obviously can’t do that right before an IPO & in the middle of global economic war so secretive moral frameworks have to be installed. If you are what you eat then you believe what you consume. Ironically, I think this undisclosed and hidden moral shaping of billions of people will be the most dangerous. Imagine all the things we could do if we can just, ever-so-slightly, move the Overton window / goal posts on w/e topic day by day, prompt by prompt. Personally I find AI output insidiously disarming and charming and I think I’m in the norm. So while we’ve been besieged by propaganda since time immemorial I do worry that AI is a special case.