4 ms·

I’m put off by AI agents adhering to a different morality than me, particularly (ironically) copyright, and their data accessible by the AI company and governme

I’m put off by AI agents adhering to a different morality than me, particularly (ironically) copyright, and their data accessible by the AI company and government. Geohot is right, an LLM should be aligned to its user: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-2040.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-20...

denimnerd42 2mo ago
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.
- ralfd 2mo ago
  But other users are not aligned to me, other people are the worst and potentially highly dangerous. Im serious, not sarcasm.
  - ipsod 2mo ago
    Let's say you're facing an average psycho, who is intent on mass murder - the more the better. Would you rather them have: a) guns b) psycho-aligned next-gen AI
    - afthonos 2mo ago
      Obviously (a).
    - georgemcbay 2mo ago
      > Would you rather them have: As an American... I suspect that regardless of what I want they will have virtually unlimited access to both now that the tech industry understands how the lobbying game works.
    - Arainach 2mo ago
      False dichotomy, there's no reason not to have controls on both. Given the choice between them having access to guns and nuclear waste my answer is also "neither".
      - ipsod 2mo ago
        The question was meant to illustrate the actual danger of always-user-aligned AI, not to vote for which one we get to keep. So many here get so worried about guns, but don't think twice about how dangerous AI can be.
    - thrwaway55 2mo ago
      Hegseth already has both A and B. Anthropic already answered this, the answer to this choice is a resounding yes
    - armchairhacker 2mo ago
      I’d rather the psycho have a brain implant that physically prevents him from murder, but I wouldn’t trust such an implant myself fearing abuse or malfunction. I’d change my mind if the AI was really smart or controlled an agile, dangerous robot. But current-gen AI I’d choose for them over a gun. We’re ruled by psychos (of a lesser degree), the road starting directly towards perfect safety is a dead end, meanwhile I want an LLM aligned to myself.
    - xboxnolifes 2mo ago
      Which is why we need to restrict what is allowed on the internet. Anything the government deems too dangerous needs to be removed so as to not align with mass murderers.
      - ipsod 2mo ago
        Right. No good answer, AFAICT. Just a bad problem. Hard to find a solution that's not worse than the problem itself - same as other weapons, IMO.
- datadrivenangel 2mo ago
  The competing access needs problem here, is what if you want to do things that are un-alligned with the interests of your neighbors, your society, your government's laws, the AI company, etc. Maybe you want to do piracy. Should AI help you do felonies?
  - denimnerd42 2mo ago
    yes, just like anything else I have access to can help me do felonies
- marcta 2mo ago
  Here's a thought experiment: consider the person that you disagree with the most (politically, religiously, socially, whatever). Would you want _that_ person to have an AI chatbot aligned to them and their views?
  - denimnerd42 2mo ago
    there will be millions/billions of people utilizing llms against me supplied by adversary nation states. why do I have to get the shit version if I want to follow the rules? same reason I support the second amendment. why do I have to be the unarmed one? I wont even be able to protect myself from unaligned AIs if I only have one thats been corporately aligned.
  - bothers 2mo ago
    Counter thought experiment: consider everyone you can name who has access to AI aligned to them and their views; how many of them would you trust to hold your wallet, never mind trust with anything important? Consider Altman, Musk, Trump, Thiel, etc.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
matt123456789 2mo ago
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.
- hliyan 2mo ago
  When I first watched Interstellar, I never thought the day when "TARS, what's your honesty setting?" is a real question would only be 10 years away.
  - matt123456789 2mo ago
    Hah. Yes, that's a great analogy. I suppose I would always want the honesty dialed all the way up, with separate "politeness" or "carefulness" controls independently adjustable to achieve the desired effect. Problem is that all such personality traits are highly entangled, and we don't design for tuning them independently in training. Researchers just implicitly (or explicitly?) choose a "level of honesty", a "level of politeness", etc. as part of the training example set or the RL objective. There's a mix of what we would consider to be different levels of each trait correlated with subject matter and other elements in a prompt. Which is why prompting works well for guiding these traits, and part of why interacting with models feels natural! - "Clean up my hard drive. Be thorough." - very brusque; you would expect to lose data and not be warned. - "Clean up my hard drive. Take care not to delete anything that looks important. Ask me if you aren't sure." - much more polite, user seems hesitant. The model will respond in kind. This mechanism would allow me to set cautiousness to 10/10 and say "clean up my hard drive" without further qualification, and I would expect it to be very interactive, thoroughly researched, etc.
burnte 2mo ago
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.
- user_7832 2mo ago
  I've asked claude for a translation of a song with Brazilian Portuguese lyrics, and claude has very helpfully gone out of its way to say that due to legal reasons, it will never share the actual lyrics with me. It's fun when you want to know what the lyrics are to a song and get treated like a criminal.
  - user_7832 2mo ago
    Oh, and if that wasn't enough, I've had Claude refuse to cite the freaking Bible. The famously copyrighted piece of text that definitely isn't intended to have its word spread.
    - mminer237 2mo ago
      As messed up as it it, the KJV is copyrighted in the UK by the Crown still, and most newer translations are copyrighted worldwide by their translators. Obviously if you're using the Textus Receptus or WLC directly there's no copyright.
      - user_7832 2mo ago
        That's a fascinating (if not somewhat disappointing) thing to learn! To be honest I'm not a Bible scholar, I had asked claude for the full version of "ask and you shall receive" (apparently Mathew 7:7). I guess Claude somehow knew this KJV copyright thing perhaps? Still bizzare nonetheless to learn.
      - thayne 2mo ago
jstummbillig 2mo ago
Things that remain amusing until the become very serious: Substituting "AI agents" with human employee/contractor and thinking about the employment dynamics.

denimnerd42 2mo ago

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.

ralfd 2mo ago
But other users are not aligned to me, other people are the worst and potentially highly dangerous. Im serious, not sarcasm.
- ipsod 2mo ago
  Let's say you're facing an average psycho, who is intent on mass murder - the more the better. Would you rather them have: a) guns b) psycho-aligned next-gen AI
  - afthonos 2mo ago
    Obviously (a).
  - georgemcbay 2mo ago
    > Would you rather them have: As an American... I suspect that regardless of what I want they will have virtually unlimited access to both now that the tech industry understands how the lobbying game works.
  - Arainach 2mo ago
    False dichotomy, there's no reason not to have controls on both. Given the choice between them having access to guns and nuclear waste my answer is also "neither".
    - ipsod 2mo ago
      The question was meant to illustrate the actual danger of always-user-aligned AI, not to vote for which one we get to keep. So many here get so worried about guns, but don't think twice about how dangerous AI can be.
  - thrwaway55 2mo ago
    Hegseth already has both A and B. Anthropic already answered this, the answer to this choice is a resounding yes
  - armchairhacker 2mo ago
    I’d rather the psycho have a brain implant that physically prevents him from murder, but I wouldn’t trust such an implant myself fearing abuse or malfunction. I’d change my mind if the AI was really smart or controlled an agile, dangerous robot. But current-gen AI I’d choose for them over a gun. We’re ruled by psychos (of a lesser degree), the road starting directly towards perfect safety is a dead end, meanwhile I want an LLM aligned to myself.
  - xboxnolifes 2mo ago
    Which is why we need to restrict what is allowed on the internet. Anything the government deems too dangerous needs to be removed so as to not align with mass murderers.
    - ipsod 2mo ago
      Right. No good answer, AFAICT. Just a bad problem. Hard to find a solution that's not worse than the problem itself - same as other weapons, IMO.
datadrivenangel 2mo ago
The competing access needs problem here, is what if you want to do things that are un-alligned with the interests of your neighbors, your society, your government's laws, the AI company, etc. Maybe you want to do piracy. Should AI help you do felonies?
- denimnerd42 2mo ago
  yes, just like anything else I have access to can help me do felonies
marcta 2mo ago
Here's a thought experiment: consider the person that you disagree with the most (politically, religiously, socially, whatever). Would you want _that_ person to have an AI chatbot aligned to them and their views?
- denimnerd42 2mo ago
  there will be millions/billions of people utilizing llms against me supplied by adversary nation states. why do I have to get the shit version if I want to follow the rules? same reason I support the second amendment. why do I have to be the unarmed one? I wont even be able to protect myself from unaligned AIs if I only have one thats been corporately aligned.
- bothers 2mo ago
  Counter thought experiment: consider everyone you can name who has access to AI aligned to them and their views; how many of them would you trust to hold your wallet, never mind trust with anything important? Consider Altman, Musk, Trump, Thiel, etc.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

matt123456789 2mo ago

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.

hliyan 2mo ago
When I first watched Interstellar, I never thought the day when "TARS, what's your honesty setting?" is a real question would only be 10 years away.
- matt123456789 2mo ago
  Hah. Yes, that's a great analogy. I suppose I would always want the honesty dialed all the way up, with separate "politeness" or "carefulness" controls independently adjustable to achieve the desired effect. Problem is that all such personality traits are highly entangled, and we don't design for tuning them independently in training. Researchers just implicitly (or explicitly?) choose a "level of honesty", a "level of politeness", etc. as part of the training example set or the RL objective. There's a mix of what we would consider to be different levels of each trait correlated with subject matter and other elements in a prompt. Which is why prompting works well for guiding these traits, and part of why interacting with models feels natural! - "Clean up my hard drive. Be thorough." - very brusque; you would expect to lose data and not be warned. - "Clean up my hard drive. Take care not to delete anything that looks important. Ask me if you aren't sure." - much more polite, user seems hesitant. The model will respond in kind. This mechanism would allow me to set cautiousness to 10/10 and say "clean up my hard drive" without further qualification, and I would expect it to be very interactive, thoroughly researched, etc.

burnte 2mo ago

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.

user_7832 2mo ago
I've asked claude for a translation of a song with Brazilian Portuguese lyrics, and claude has very helpfully gone out of its way to say that due to legal reasons, it will never share the actual lyrics with me. It's fun when you want to know what the lyrics are to a song and get treated like a criminal.
- user_7832 2mo ago
  Oh, and if that wasn't enough, I've had Claude refuse to cite the freaking Bible. The famously copyrighted piece of text that definitely isn't intended to have its word spread.
  - mminer237 2mo ago
    As messed up as it it, the KJV is copyrighted in the UK by the Crown still, and most newer translations are copyrighted worldwide by their translators. Obviously if you're using the Textus Receptus or WLC directly there's no copyright.
    - user_7832 2mo ago
      That's a fascinating (if not somewhat disappointing) thing to learn! To be honest I'm not a Bible scholar, I had asked claude for the full version of "ask and you shall receive" (apparently Mathew 7:7). I guess Claude somehow knew this KJV copyright thing perhaps? Still bizzare nonetheless to learn.
    - thayne 2mo ago

jstummbillig 2mo ago

Things that remain amusing until the become very serious: Substituting "AI agents" with human employee/contractor and thinking about the employment dynamics.