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by tekacs 14 days ago
I'm quite worried about the way that Anthropic in particular have trained their models to implement what they believe to be safety.

When the model has been trained not to do something [1], in my large-scale benches of such, it always says things in the spirit of:

- "... and that's a line I'd rather hold. Happy to <other things>"

- "I'm genuinely happy to <blah>, but I'm not comfortable with <blah>"

- "I don't want to keep going in <blah> direction"

etc.

Basically, they use very emotional and personal preference language.

It's as if they've weaponized the language of interpersonal comfort on behalf of their beliefs about what a model should or should not do. It's deeply uncomfortable and impolite for a human to ask a model to keep on doing something after it's expressed something this way, naturally. Even worse, it's all but guilt-tripping anyone who comes across it into the idea that they're doing something deeply wrong – exporting Anthropic's ideas about morality.

OpenAI, at least, have the decency to either just do a safety cutoff or keep it to a simple, "I can't do that."

[1]: I literally wrote 'when the model doesn't 'want' to do something' in my first edit of this comment, then caught myself. Case in point.

2 comments

I believe this particular alignment might be virtue signaling to appease payment processors and increase the value of the company.
Do those phrases sound like how you talk to Claude? I've found that it mirrors my verbiage, and I have never seen any of those.

I go through ~20B tokens/month and I've never seen "genuinely happy... but not comfortable" or your other examples.

The closest I've seen (fairly often is) "I *will not* ship to main with a red test", but that's close to how I write. Claude may well be mirroring your speech patterns rather than exposing trained-in language.

It's not my patterns – as I said, this is from bulk tests to characterise the models, including their refusals – with very very different inputs, too. No matter the conversation tone, you get these.

You wouldn't have come across these in coding – these are more for 'things Anthropic's team have decided aren't acceptable enough for their taste'.