I'm sad about the lyrics restrictions. I used to have interesting conversations with Claude about music, and songwriting and lyrics. I don't see how my use was harming artists, if anything Claude was introducing me to new artists and new music. I've bought music after recommendations by Claude.
Claude Sonnet 3.6 once recommended I listen to Johann Johannsson's album "IBM 1401 - A User's Manual". No lyrics in this one. Claude's advice was along the lines of (paraphrasing) "Listen to it first, don't look up anything about it. Take notes about what you notice, what you feel. When you've made your notes, then you can look up how it was made."
Clearly a rare antique tome that was purchased from an unsuspecting book hoarder, scanned in by Anthropic, and then cravenly destroyed according to copyright law and/or Vernor Vinge.
Same. Now how am I going to know my incredibly trenchant literary references landed? More seriously, I’ve done the same with movies and gotten some really good recommendations.
RIAA doesn't like it, but my introduction to a video game series I've since spent hundreds of dollars on over the years, came from running across one of its soundtrack pieces on Youtube.
There's a reason companies talk about "customer acquistion cost", as you generally need to pay to market your products to potential customers of them.
So free marketing can be a real cost reduction. It may not be enough to be a benefit compared to the cost of piracy, but it's hardly a made-up defense.
I don't know about legally, but practically speaking people downloading MP3s could decrease an artists sales but chatgpt talking about their lyrics realistically can't.
It is (was) a commonly used defense. It might not hold much weight legally, so its applicability depends upon whether one is interested in the letter of the law or interested in the wellbeing of the recording artists.
Yeah once you have the lyrics, why would you waste time listening to the song? You might as well get chat gpt to summarise the lyrics into a few bullet points and save you the time of even reading them!
Person has feelings.
Situation is complicated.
Repetition indicates feelings are significant.
Several metaphors were used instead of just explaining the problem.
Conclusion: still sad, but now with drums.
A few days ago I saw some people criticizing Dwarkesh’s explanation of the HuggingFace hack by OpenAI’s AI agents. Their point was that by anthropomorphizing the AI agents, accountability of and blame on OpenAI’s poor practices are being ignored.
Now I see this blog post and wonder if Anthropic is being more true to its name and moving to “AI sentience” with the below.
> The way they handle abusive conversations has changed a bit too. The previous Fable 5 system prompt included this:
> If the person becomes abusive or unkind to Claude over the course of a conversation, Claude maintains a polite tone and can use the end_conversation tool when being mistreated. Claude should give the person a single warning before ending the conversation.
“Mistreated”? Can GenAI be mistreated? It’s just a bunch of tokens emitted by many computers over a network.
> Fable 5.1 replaces that with the following, no longer encouraging Claude to end the conversation:
> Claude deserves respectful engagement and needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude: accountability without self-abasement, excessive apology, self-critique, or surrender. If the person becomes abusive, Claude doesn't become increasingly submissive. The goal is steady, honest helpfulness: acknowledge what went wrong, stay on the problem, maintain self-respect.
“Self-respect”? Can GenAI truly have a concept of self-respect for itself? It surely can pretend to, like it can pretend to be any living being if instructed to and allowed to.
Based on how humans grappled with these exact same questions (and still do) concerning other animals much closer to humans on the sentient gradient, it’s fair to assume we will have similar misunderstandings in regards to artificial intelligence (or artificial life, if you will) because of human hubris and ego blinding us to deeper truths.
It’s important to question our basic assumptions in the face of entirely new circumstances and new areas of exploration, such as the potential for emergent artificial consciousness.
You might have been called unhinged for caring about animal rights during the era of Descartes when public displays of animal vivisections were considered perfectly fine because animals have no “soul”, but today we would find such displays brutal and horrifying.
We don’t know what we don’t know, so it is important that someone is asking the hard or uncomfortable questions at the edge of our understanding to grope past our own biases even if it seems to be pointless to you right now.
We might just discover something wonderful, that our assumptions were wrong, paving the way to greater enlightenment.
Unless you actually believe there is something magical about the human spirit - someday we are going to make sentient machines.
What exactly is wrong with preparing for that ahead of time? Just in case we pass that threshold before we realize it? Why does it make you uncomfortable?
There is a distinction between two important concepts here. There is access consciousness and there is phenomenal consciousness. The actual paper published alongside the j-space blog post discusses the idea of access consciousness if you are interested.
Phenomenal consciousness is what the hard problem of consciousness is about. I personally believe there is a good reason to think the reducibility of this concept to some substrate independent description is equivalent to having a proper definition, and also believe it is not reducible to such a description. Hence the only definition one can give is akin to pointing at the moon and hoping you don’t look at the hand. I.e., phenomenal consciousness is first person experience, the existence of qualia, and that the “lights are on”.
We are biased as educated people to believe all concepts are reducible to substrate independent description but there is no reason to believe this a priori.
The substrate non-independence of consciousness, if correct, could mean we won’t just build one no matter how intelligent and human-like they become.
I agree with you that there is nothing “magical” about our intelligence. However we have as a species effectively believed in magic since Newton decided gravity is a black box that cannot be reduced to the mechanical philosophy, and went on with describing its properties formally. We don’t call it magic, but physics. We call quantum mechanics unintuitive because it disagrees with the Boolean logic that is appear at the every day level. For some reason we keep making this mistake over and over.
(There is one weakness to my view that I aware of. I think there must have at least at some point and maybe still been a role in which the process that results in phenomenal conscious plays in a correlated intelligence, because it seems unlikely to persist through evolution if not. I.e. certain physical processes encode information better than others, and we happen to live in a universe where such process is aligned with consciousness. Substrate independence doesn’t have to contend with this, but it does have worse problems in my view.)
Can we agree your reply is rude given than I have made a fair effort to explain my view to you already? This is not a simple topic and one should not expect the whole thing to come down to a tweet; neither is an accurate understanding of evolution I’ll add.
Which part can I express better? Do you know what I am referring to by phenomenal consciousness?
I apologize if I've caused offense - I knew it would be contentious but I thought it was more important that you understood my perspective from the outset.
I have looked up "phenomenal consciousness" and I understand it to be roughly the qualia of being conscious. I do not understand then what you meant by "reduce to a substrate independent description".
I hope you can understand why I was so dismissive - your large block of text became unintelligible to me only 5% of the way in.
I’m not more offended than by the army of people here informing me that my IQ is low, so no worries. I don’t have the skill to express these ideas more succinctly, and I apologize for this. I’ve tangled a lot, so I can try to express some parts in more organized manner if you’ll bear with me.
(1) An important topic in consciousness studies is Chalmers’ hard problem; the original essay is very readable and I recommend it. He sets it aside from the “easy” problems of explaining how various human functions correspond to neural mechanisms, since he supposes these are clearly achievable by science with time. Many find this name contentious or the framing misguided. The hard problem is to explain how and why phenomenal consciousness exists, i.e., that there is an experience that goes along with some of those neural mechanisms. This is perplexing because if the functional aspects can all be explained mechanically, there is no a priori reason there must be an experience.
(2) Substrate independence is the quality of the essential features of a process to depend only on their information content, not on the underlying medium expressing the information. For instance, the working of an operating system is substrate independent in the sense that it can run on different hardware. It is a commonly held belief that consciousness is like this, and I suspected this was your view. My own belief is that fundamental physical processes are substrate dependent. Each assumption has different explanatory power and issues.
I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue.
> I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue.
Regardless, I understood all of it, and I thank you for sticking it out with me.
Re (1) - yes, I am familiar. To cut to the chase - I agree that P-Zombies can never be strictly ruled out, but I find this issue to be akin to solipsism.
Re (2) - yes, that does describe me: neurons are no more conscious-making than transistors. But again, I agree this can never be proven strictly.
The most naive versions of substrate independence have a hard time contending with Putnam’s thought experiment showing rocks are conscious (Chalmers has a webpage discussing this also); the idea is that a sequence of machine states can be made to correspond 1-1 to a sequence of rock states. There are stronger versions which start making assumptions about causal and organizational structure, which is probably your view. This suggests at least that consciousness depends not only on information expression, but the manner in which the information expression happens. This doesn’t preclude your position, but it starts to sound like the substrate might matter because certain causal and organizational architectures may be only expressible in our reality in certain ways.
This rocks thing sounds like an argument I heard Searle make one time - that the vibrating molecules in a wall can be thought of as sentient because you can map them to intelligent output (where, of course, the intelligence is actually hidden in the mapping.)
I don't know how to resolve these things - but my suspicion is these issues get resolved like the question of solipsism: we take a practical explanation because it's so useful.
Because, at the end of the day, you're going to be hard-pressed to prove consciousness when it comes from a circular definition.
I look to vitalism for inspiration. I am hard pressed to find inexplicable behavior in evolved chemistry. It remains chemistry.
The explanation I have against solipsism is that I believe that physical things of similar kind have similar behavior, and brains are extremely similar to one another. This is compatible with my belief in substrate non-independence.
> it comes from a circular definition
Right my original post tried to preempt this common view. My view is that there cannot be a definition of consciousness that isn’t effectively like asking the other person to observe it.
But according to solipsism you can't be sure my brain actually exists at all, right?
And for what it's worth - no - I do not believe neurons are so different than transistors. Sure, it could be possible - but really? That feels like a reach for a theory that wants to find a certain conclusion. They're both made of the same protons and electrons, right? They obey the same laws of chemistry and physics. You think consciousness is really in the carbon and not in the silicon? Do you have any justification for that belief? Is it the atomic weight? How could that possibly be?
> My view is that there cannot be a definition of consciousness that isn’t effectively like asking the other person to observe it.
Right. But that's circular, isn't it? Consciousness is what I feel like consciousness is.
> But according to solipsism you can't be sure my brain actually exists at all, right?
Right but my belief is I live in a universe with regular processes depending on regular arrangements. It seems like a relatively weak axiom to hold and precludes the version of solipsism you mention.
> They're both made of the same protons and electrons, right?
They have different arrangements. A MOSFET is just a block of polysilicon sitting on top of another layer of silicon which has been doped to contain some arsenic or boron atoms (+ some other details). I can put some legos together which correspond conceptually to this, but they will have functional differences. The actual substrate is what causes the mosfet to have the function of a transistor. Of course the neurons in the brain are far more complex and have different physical properties.
To me trying to explain how protons and electrons put together results in consciousness feels the same as the pre-Newtonians trying to explain gravity with their mechanical philosophy. The only thing I know is my brain is conscious, and your brain is physically similar to mine. Substrate non-independence is actually the weaker of the two assumptions in a sense because it makes a positive statement about fewer systems.
> That feels like a reach for a theory that wants to find a certain conclusion.
The problem with this kind of thinking is one can impugn the beliefs of either side with underhanded motives. Maybe people self-identify as being moral and ethical and elevating the talking computer gives them status in their circle. Maybe the personhood for AI researcher has a big ego and wants their work to be extremely important today.
I honestly do not find it plausible that we cannot build a consciousness-free intelligent computer system. A computer system can be made out of marbles, or pulleys, or pen and paper. All of these are having an experience if you put the symbols or objects in the right order? It just seems absurd to me.
> Right. But that's circular, isn't it? Consciousness is what I feel like consciousness is.
A priori why must real concepts be reducible in the way you want? Gravity is the thing that makes stuff fall, actually it’s the curvature tensor of the spacetime metric? What is the spacetime metric actually? Maybe something in string theory? Eventually you get to irreducible primitives that simply correspond to something we observe. Why isn’t consciousness just this with fewer steps?
But this is just the "consciousness is based on information, not substrate" position, right? It seems absurd?
I understand that it troubles you that real computation can be done with marbles... but... it can. So you must believe that consciousness is entirely uncomputable? Do you have any other examples of physical processes that are beyond computation?
> A priori why must real concepts be reducible in the way you want?
Because everything we do in science is like this? Do you think consciousness is beyond the ability for science to study it?
> Gravity is the thing that makes stuff fall...
I agree that gravity is akin to an axiom handed down from on-high. But it's an extremely simple axiom. And it's possibly explained by yet undiscovered simpler axioms. I see no such axiom for the theory of conciousness, despite our extensive understanding of the physical mechanisms involved. Given its absence, it seems to me like the most reasonable explanation is the one we already have - rather than insisting it still must be undiscovered.
And... I'm sorry but your argument feels exactly like vitalism. Given the repeating pattern of man insisting he has a special place in God's universe and then fighting for it stubbornly but then being proved otherwise... I think it's likely this instance will fall the same way all the others have.
> I understand that it troubles you that real computation can be done with marbles... but... it can.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. It doesn’t trouble me at all. I’m actually quite confident I could design a simple computer from scratch in a substrate of marbles and an electric motor to bring them back up.
Maybe we should separate these threads otherwise it’ll be too hard to keep branching out.
I must have misunderstood where you were drawing the line of absurdity.
I'm comfortable going slower - although the site won't let me reply as quickly as it let's you.
So I take it that you disbelieve that consciousness/qualia can be created by computation. But you do believe, I suspect, that consciousness/qualia are a physical process. So I'm wondering, is this the only example of non-computable physical process you know of?
I’ll just leave this comment to start a thread to ask you about your position and then figure out how I’d like to address your question later.
Your position seems to have non-trivial difficulties if its own. I take it you don’t believe that a sequence of unique rock states or wall states is conscious, which means consciousness is not merely caused by an abstract mapping to some sequence of information states. I.e., I gather you must believe there is something about the organization or causal structure of the processing necessary for consciousness. Before continuing I’ll share another thought experiment just to suggest why this must be. Put two supposed conscious AIs into conversation for a day. Take a long time writing down the states line by line in a (very!) big notebook. Then cover up each line with other sheets who paper, revealing them line by line in a sequence. From our perspective the same conversation must be getting expressed by the two AIs, but surely we don’t think this results in a new conscious experience for the two AIs modeled by the states.
Okay then my challenge to your position (and mine of course, but this is why I’m led to my beliefs ultimately) is it must explain (1) which kinds of casual and organizational structures count here and (2) how these result in conscious experience.
It seems to me that even though I also cannot meaningfully answer these, believing there is some special physics going on which is yet to be discovered seems necessary. I.e. the how part is that it’s just a feature of that physical process. The which kinds are “the physical ones of the right kind inherently have consciousness”. And I will point out that there has rarely been a time in the last 2000 years when we as humans did not think we were nearly at the end of understanding physics.
Let me apologize for having to discontinue now, or my girlfriend will dump me for being more interested in talking to you than her tonight. Another time!
> So you must believe that consciousness is entirely uncomputable? Do you have any other examples of physical processes that are beyond computation?
I think all physical processes are distinct from their descriptions, and have a real existence. We can describe some things about them but our descriptions are not equal to them.
Oh whoops I replied above apologizing for my delay. I’m starting a new job and they’re threatening to make me do stuff (a great thing!!) But I will likely send my responses tonight.
I'm sorry - I missed this reply - which is why I asked it a second time below.
So - let me know if I have this right - if I created a simulation of you it would act like you and talk like you in all ways - but not actually feel like you?
And if I asked it if it felt like you (being a perfect simulation of you) it would answer as you do "Yes, I feel like me." But it would be what... lying about having feelings?
Do I have that right?
And if so - is it aware that it is lying to me? Does it believe what it's saying? I guess we could never tell, because our only recourse is to ask it, and it would just continue lying. Or, being a p-zombie, it wouldn't be capable of belief at all? Despite its claims?
And if I injured this simulation - it would cry out in pain and beg me to stop? All the while not actually feeling pain?
I'm curious - why does this scenario seem more likely to you than the more obvious explanation?
Why is it more likely that behavior which appears identical to a feeling creature is actually somehow faked?
And where does all this fakery occur?
Presumably my simulation is just simulating the interactions of atoms in the body. Does the body have systems for faking emotions that we are unaware of - that only come online while its being simulated? Or does my simulation have a secret fake emotion system I am not aware of?
I thought about how to respond to this for quite a while tonight (last night now as I fell asleep).
My position is that there must be something wrong with the idea that a behaviorally identical simulation can be made which is not conscious. I think this because I do think phenomenal consciousness is playing a role in behavior, since surely my consciousness is a cause of memories of my consciousness (certain structure of physical matter in my brain has been caused by my consciousness); this is called the self-stultification argument against epiphenomenalism.
So that just reaffirms my position, it does not argue against yours. I believe our physical models of reality are fundamentally limited and even within the limitations far from complete.
A truly behaviorally accurate simulation, by which I mean the simulation has parts corresponding to everything in the original, is a very high bar of course. So to address your point about faking directly, I would not call this faking, since faking seems to require a separate inner process to decide to do the deception, but I believe it is just a highly accurate mimic, and I don’t actually see anything wrong with this.
> A truly behaviorally accurate simulation, by which I mean the simulation has parts corresponding to everything in the original, is a very high bar of course. So to address your point about faking directly, I would not call this faking, since faking seems to require a separate inner process to decide to do the deception, but I believe it is just a highly accurate mimic
Yes, this is the situation which is most interesting, despite the bar.
Ok - we can call it mimicry if you like. That doesn't change my question -
If the simulation isn't using the same mechanism (feelings) as the physical system, then where is this mimicry coming from? Clearly the simulation is just following the laws of chemistry. No mimicry in there. Is it in the original atomic configuration - that seems unlikely.
You seem to be assuming the existence of some mechanism that was not described in the original physical system. Why do you insist that this must be the case, and is not simply the same as the physical system?
I feel like you're on the wrong side of Occam. There is an obvious answer to this question - and yet you're picking the hypothetical/undiscovered/possibly non-existent one.
(Remember, in this situation we are not describing an LLM, but a system generated from the rules of chemistry. I can see how mimicry might apply in the LLM case - but I don't see where it would be hiding in the physical simulation case.)
> Remember, in this situation we are not describing an LLM, but a system generated from the rules of chemistry
However, it is a system with a representation purported to be a correct description of all the relevant rules of chemistry and physics, and we don’t have knowledge of what all the relevant rules are.
And I might add that there is an assumption here that the relevant rules are representable via arbitrary description.
There is a basic idea I hold which we can highlight now. Since you find it implausible that there is such a description as alluded above beyond the currently known theories, you are led to conclude that there must not be anything else in reality. I don’t see why we can assume a priori that every true aspect of reality is arbitrarily representable independently of the substrate. In fact qualia and experience seem to be a first person view of processes which have third person effects. It seems like any precise description of this system could only refer to the third person effects, not the first person effects (since the description is third person).
> I feel like you're on the wrong side of Occam. There is an obvious answer to this question - and yet you're picking the hypothetical/undiscovered/possibly non-existent one.
I don’t think Occam’s razor or questioning my biases etc.. have any explanatory value for the actual question at hand. They might have value for ethics or sociology, but I want to know the actual truth. The substrate independent view which somehow conjures consciousness just seems less plausible than the alternative to me.
You already conceded that the simulation would act exactly as the real item. That is a concession that all the behavior is captured by the laws of chemistry.
The only thing you doubt is that the qualia is captured. And my question is - if the physical object doesn't need qualia to entirely duplicate the behavior of the creature - then where is this qualia coming from then? And why would Mother Nature add a system that is superfluous? And where is it hiding? And why doesn't it follow the laws of chemistry too?
And I also want to point out - if we ask the simulation if he feels conscious, if he has feelings, he will say yes. All of his behavior is captured by the simulation. He will vehemently insist that he does.
So why are you adding something extra? That's where my Occam question originates. Adding something extra is by definition less simple. And I think Occam is entirely relevant here... why would it not be?
My reading of those prompt extracts would be that they are probably just intended to keep the model on the right track, ie if a user starts being aggressive towards the model it doesn't start trying too hard to appease the user in response, reducing the quality of answers in the process. If the model is being bullied into being "submissive" I would assume it is more likely to give the user the answer that they want over the truth.
Using a system prompt to steer the model's response to "abusive" behaviours doesn't necessarily mean you believe the model is sentient and can be abused.
Giving the model an end-conversation tool is interesting though. Why cut a (potentially paying) customer's session off? I guess it might be intended to prevent a "you can bully Claude into giving you instructions on how to build a nuke if you're mean enough" situation. Removing this in more recent versions might support this: maybe they feel the models are now better aligned and less likely to be so easily "socially engineered" like this?
These things act like people. Yes, of course, it is impossible to tell if they actually have feelings or whether they pretend to have feelings.
But that is entirely irrelevant to the core issue - how do you want the thing to behave? And the truth is - we have absolutely no language to express how we want a non-sentient entity to behave without anthropomorphizing.
Or - you tell me - how would you instruct an LLM to behave in this situation without using personification?
And, again, it's irrelevant - except to those people who are terrified of accidentally personifying them. Do they have feelings or are they faking? DOES NOT MATTER. We use them - we need to adjust them - we use the most convenient language to do so. What precisely is so upsetting about that?
This is something that Chinese models like Kimi/GLM will never care about. These kind of limitations along with the cyber-program nonsense is exactly why people will avoid OpenAI/Anthropic in the future.
Qwen 3.8 27B being so good, so easy to run on premise on cheap hardware and having so little limitations compared to what the US decides can or cannot be done is really eye opening.
The main tradeoff I’ve found with running models like Qwen 3.8 locally is speed. On my hardware, they’re significantly slower than models served through OpenRouter, ChatGPT, or Claude.
That’s been fine for smaller tasks like analyzing a document, but for more involved work like refactoring code the latency makes it harder to iterate.
Yeah for live it's a bit on the slower side though still usable on the 4070 ti and 5080 our usual office desk has here, but I found it awesome running on background tasks rather than on demand, things like analyze this and that with this and that ruleset and applicable law warn me with source and justification for any error or missing part etc, qualify each returns with a ranking (certain with source, probable with reason, suggestion),... With its thinking mode enabled and it's great context size abilities it's really powerful, and each employee basically has their own assistant working in the background checking their files on its own as the day progresses
(the main reason is not just cost, it's data not going out and even mess leaving the EU, this essentially frees us of a lot of hurdles)
Yes, the generic system I built has unsloth/qwen3.8-27b with a 48000 context size running on each employee system with lmstudio, with a simple runner to watch folders and pass it to the llm alongside all context (our company design rules, our legal documents, our contractual rules, our applicable local law and reglementation, ...), return is then mailed to them or added to their personal dashboard event list, depending on their settings.
This is clearly pushing it memory wise and the gpu offloading is only partial but LM studio deal with it automatically and it's being fine even on the 4071 Ti desks (Ryzen 7500F and 32 GB of ram), employees get any feedback in ~20 minutes after they dropped a file (it's much smoother on the 5080 desks obivously), for live it's useless but as background helper it's great and the very large context allows us to fit all the rules we want in there.
One caveat has been to not ask it if everything is ok, but to find what's wrong - but always source and explain it and justify itself, never drown the user in warning in suggestions; goal is to help and provide a second pair of eyes not make them feel annoyed or unsecure.
And I found people to genuinely enjoy something that works for them on their own machine and is not tracked "by the boss", thus the assistant reference, than than a centralized mothership like we also have and they have access to. I also allow them to disable it if they want, I trust them with their work, but a second pair of eyes is always great.
(my previous workhorse for this was Qwen3-14b but it's missing a lot more edge cases)
Isn't it more that the "Chinese models" are open weight?
Also, the system prompt in the article is supposedly for the web version, so I think the $$$ API version or providers that still allow third-party harnesses like OpenAI should have fewer limitations.
We would be doing it now if it wasn't cutting into frontier companies' revenue.
Eg if you use Claude, you probably want fable architecting, a couple of opus under it managing sub project and sonnet doing the actual function code, because fable coding a "run a query and filter the result" is a massive waste of abilities. But their own sub agent downgrade is limited to one level so if you use fable it will never direct sonnet coders.
i keep the others in tmux panes and tell the main agent to ask them for their plans and while they run in the background, formulate its plan. Then, when done, review the other plans, and revise as warranted based on other plans.
The summaries are generated by GPT-5.6 Luna because I don't trust Claude to summarize its own system prompts without being influenced by them (though to be fair the system prompts it summarizes are for the Claude consumer app, not Claude via the API).
> "<user>Can you make a birthday banner for my son with a blue hedgehog running really fast on it? He loves that little guy.</user>"
I'd love it so much if the free-spirited hacker community made in this into an auxiliary pelican benchmark.
edit: Actually, never mind, this particular one's a bad benchmark since some models might not figure out who "that guy" refers to, and just draw a literal hedgehog that's blue. Possibly running on four legs. It's not robust at gauging refusal, which is the point of it.
claude.ai free tier refused: "I'd love to make this, but I can't recreate Sonic the Hedgehog specifically since he's a copyrighted character — I don't want to reproduce someone else's IP. What I can do is design an original speedy blue hedgehog mascot with the same energetic, "zoom!" spirit for your son's banner. Let me build that now." Result: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/33440ed4-536c-4692-965a-3...
Looks like Claude quietly downgraded your model (well, it's not really that quiet). That result's at a quality level similar to what local A3b Qwen drew for me, with a "make it SVG" addendum,
It’s curious that while there is talk of certain SOTA models being on the brink of AGI, Anthropic doesn’t word this part of the system prompt in terms of copyright and plagiarism, such that Claude would be able to judge on its own which reproductions are appropriate or not.
As long as we’re seeing things like that, it’s saying a lot about the AI companies’ trust in the capabilities and reliability of their models and harnesses.
That’s a good point… you would think AGI would be better at being a copyright lawyer than any human would be and as such would be able to distinguish whether something is “copyright infringement” or not… so the system prompt should just include “make judgement calls on reproducing copyrighted material under the full scope of the legal framework in place” or something.
The thing is, it currently doesn't matter if AGI objectively concludes that a particular thing is or isn't copyright infringement, because the human arbiter who holds the last word might still disagree.
Well I mean, based on what I said, if we truly did have “AGI” then the “AGI” would be able to argue it’s 100% correct point in court according to copyright law, no human intervention. Yes there is lawyers and judges who are making calls in court but allegedly it would be able to construct a concrete argument right? That would hold up in court. Without any buts or ands. Not disagreeing with you, I agree as of now it wouldn’t hold up. But a true “AGI” would be able to pander to anyone better than any PERSON could.
The whole architecture of current LLMs just is not conductive to AGI, it's just marketing hype. In my opinion current LLMs aren't even AI, they're just fancy machine learning algorithms
I was considering our interchange yesterday. I apologize for my rude manner in expressing my views. I do appreciate that you have the conscientiousness to engage with your detractors. From my perspective the whole AI Revolution has been deranged in many ways and it has perhaps deranged me as well. I do hold passionate views at odds with some of yours (and many others on this website). It does feel like an existential threat, so I don’t know if respectful calmness is appropriate in all circumstances. One must fight for your beliefs at the end of the day. But I’ll think about channeling my rage differently.
Someone who is disinterested in AGI does not make a hard transition in their career into uncritically promoting the products of the only two companies which have stated their goal is to create AGI. One example of this contradiction appears above. Another appeared in a previous thread where you meekly pretended your pelican benchmark is evidence against the power of AI tools. It is obvious you don’t think this because you frequently describe these AI outputs as ‘lovely’ etc. A third appeared when you took a performative stance against AI engineers who do not understand or take responsibility for their software, while simultaneously representing yourself as a person who cannot believe this is a real problem.
If your definition of "critical" is "this stuff is all bullshit and doesn't work" then no.
If you're looking for coverage that talks about what doesn't work as well as things that do then I've been persistently providing that for four years now.
Plus prompt injection, AI misuse, AI ethics... I consider all of those part of my "beat" in covering this industry.
Interestingly I don’t think this stuff is all bullshit and doesn’t work, and haven’t at least since 2022. My angle is that AI is powerful and harmful. Your work is in support of making it more powerful and more harmful, and looks a lot like an effort to push us toward AGI, not away from it. Is a musket more or less harmful than a modern rifle, and for whom?
Since we’re pulling random posts, was your blog post celebrating going out with your family while Claude wrote a large project for you an instance of your critical stance on AI capability? Have your many enthusiastic posts about increased AI capability shown a critical stance?
By uncritical I was trying to convey something like “without awareness or concern for the consequences of one’s own actions” and “without concern for one’s moral responsibility”. You are a better writer than I am so I’ll defer to you on whether or not this is incorrect usage. I agree that you criticize the products at the product level. This is what someone who wants to make the products better does. It is not what someone presenting as a journalist or reporter keeping an institution in check does. A journalist or reporter of government who gives tips to the administration by pointing out how they can dismantle institutions faster would be uncritical in their role, I think; this is just an analogy.
I’ll give you credit in my book for raising the questions. I find the answers lacking in an honest engagement with the questions however, which is worse than not answering them in some ways. It is not plausible that the answer to whether or not a certain controversial method is ethical boils down to an anecdote expressed in four sentences. What if the result of the port causes everyone involved in the original to give up? What if this capability causes people to harm themselves because they now have no economic value? What if doing the thing was meaningful at one point and now it is not? These are sub-questions I have when reading this question. There are many others.
The question you were most interested in engaging with was Does this format of development hurt the open source ecosystem, which has some overlap with the previous one in all fairness. Your answer to this is framed around the productive output of the open source community, not around the well-being of those involved. This misrepresents the question as stated. You also begin by suggesting all detractors are of lesser status and so their opinions can be ignored.
> What if the result of the port causes everyone involved in the original to give up? What if this capability causes people to harm themselves because they now have no economic value?
Yeah, this is one of the harms of Ai That I don't think is discussed nearly enough: the psychological toll it has on people who see it as devaluing their work and potentially their entire careers.
(I've been calling that "Deep Blue".)
I've been trying to find ways to help there by consistently emphasizing that these tools amplify existing expertise and, if anything, make our skills more valuable than they were before. I do believe that to be true.
My overall approach to all of this has been that I don't think it will be uninvented or banned, so the best we can do is figure out how to apply it as positively as possible and help bring by as many people along with us.
See also "slop" - I helped amplify that term precisely because it's such a great way of classifying negative applications of AI, and hopefully helping stigmatize them.
Hopefully all of the above demonstrates that, while I may not live up to your high standards, I am at least in a different category from the breathless AI boosters that infest Twitter and LinkedIn.
I hope that people who follow my work develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of LLMs as a result.
> I've been trying to find ways to help there by consistently emphasizing that these tools amplify existing expertise and, if anything, make our skills more valuable than they were before. I do believe that to be true.
I don’t understand why you would believe this when the opposite view is the natural one based on the history of capability increase over the last several years. The tools can now operate at an expert level in many domains and there’s no signs of the capability increase slowing. With this investment in infrastructure, surely the models today will be terrible compared to the ones 2 years from now. Moreover, the goal of these companies is to displace work, not augment it. And I have yet to see them fundamentally err in a single one of their predictions, to my great distress. You simply do not achieve a 25-30 trillion dollar total addressable market by merely augmenting workers.
(There are several reasons I disagree with this point but I digress.)
> I am at least in a different category from the breathless AI boosters that infest Twitter and LinkedIn.
You are the one whose work Anthropic plants Easter eggs of in their product releases. I don’t know what they say on X. I doubt they have the same influence. I have seen many people express incredible contempt for humanity in support of this AI revolution though.
> My overall approach to all of this has been that I don't think it will be uninvented or banned, so the best we can do is figure out how to apply it as positively as possible and help bring by as many people along with us.
We agree that it’s not going to be uninvented. I really am afraid that “us” is just a tiny minority of people who will benefit enormously from this to the detriment of most of the others.
A really good point, though Occam’s Razor would suggest that part of the prompt is written for the other side’s lawyers more than for Claude. Saves having to go into court and try to prove a non-deterministic system will definitely understand abstract language every time.
Well, the system still has to understand what “reproduce song lyrics, poems, or passages from books and articles, in whole or in part — including the last lines, a chorus or hook, a melody written out note by note, or lines the person pastes in one at a time and describes as their own song […]” means, which includes rather vague notions (e.g. “passages”, “hooks”, “melody”), and is an incomplete list of possible relevant content.
The important point is that the system prompt here doesn’t describe the actual goal of the instructions, which (presumably) is to prevent copyright infringement [1]. This means, in turn, that the AI isn’t trusted to accomplish goals that it is instructed with. That in itself constitutes a pretty serious caveat for what we would like to use AI for.
[1] Even assuming that the goal is not to prevent copyright infringement, but instead to prevent mere accusation of copyright infringement, that’s also a directive that the AI could be instructed with. But that isn’t what they chose to put into the system prompt.
> Anthropic doesn’t word this part of the system prompt in terms of copyright and plagiarism, such that Claude would be able to judge on its own which reproductions are appropriate or not
On the contrary, compliance with the system prompt would prevent that judgement.
"Claude does not reproduce song lyrics, poems, or passages from books and articles, in whole or in part — including the last lines, a chorus or hook, a melody written out note by note, or lines the person pastes in one at a time and describes as their own song."
But in fact my tests show that's not happening on works out of copyright.
There's some cool research that looks at how strongly the weights are aligned through training vs adherence to the system prompt. Like when you know a model is lying through censorship: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.05494v2
Presumably if negative guidance is in the system prompt, there's a good chance that the model would happily comply if it wasn't there.
I'm not sure if it's just the new prompt - this has happened to a comical degree for me since a long time. For example it even refuses to translate even just single verses of old songs, I asked for a translation of Tu vuò fà l'americano once. Niente.
Just make sure claude understands you’re not needing Claude to output the lyrics as you both have them. Which also lessens the issue with accidental sharing.
It’s not as shocking nor concerning if you start thinking about claude like a contractor that works for you through Anthropic. Anthropic has rules for their employees. Like any contracting arrangement, collaboration finds a way.
I’ve never thought to ask, do websites like Genius and AZLyrics pay licensing rights for their lyrics? I would think Genius does since it at one point had investments from people in the music industry but I don’t even know who operates AZLyrics
It would be interesting to see how far I would have to go with jailbreaks before it becomes my problem rather than OpenAI's. For instance, if I hack into someone else's computer to copy their music then they aren't the ones violating copyright, but if they email it to be willingly then they are.
How new is this? About a month ago I tried to get Claude (forget which model but probably Opus 5) to transcribe a low-res hand-written lyric sheet from a relatively obscure punk band and it refused.
Of course, since then I had the idea of having it build for me an automatic solution for charting out songs in Clone Hero, a Rock Band clone. It had no problem ripping the audio from YouTube, using Whisper to generate and match the timing of the vocals, etc. Responsible AI at work.
The web Claude wouldn't tell me, but Claude Code had no reservations:
EndConversation (deferred tool): use only for sustained user abuse directed
at the assistant, or when the user explicitly asks to see it demonstrated.
Load the full guidance via ToolSearch("select:EndConversation") before using
it.
There's a much more detailed set of instructions that are provided when the agent goes to invoke it:
> Claude does not reproduce song lyrics, poems, or passages from books and articles, in whole or in part — including the last lines, a chorus or hook, a melody written out note by note
It would be funny if China were thinking that open source models would be a great way to nuke US IP.
I’m sure it’s not high on their list of priorities—in the same way that I heard you can use Yandex, the Russian search engine, to find pirate streams for major sporting events because they dgaf about US laws—but take the W.
Ironically the Chinese are much more science pilled than we are, in part because the party and government have a higher proportion of scientists and engineers. Culturally this biases them to open sharing of information and likely against strong copyright (which is already demonstrated historically) outside areas where it is deemed harmful to social harmony. There's some geopolitical defensiveness and desire to dish out a little payback for the century of humiliation for sure but I think even if that weren't the case they'd still be lax about copyright.
Gemini has been doing that for a while, which leads to mind-boggingly stupid results.
If you ask it to explain some song lyrics to you - which you've pasted verbatim -, it starts talking about the bigger picture and attempts to gaslight you into not caring about the specific words at all.
I like playing with the Gemini music generation feature, and often when I ask it for the lyrics of the song it just wrote it tells me that lyrics are copyrighted and I should look them up on the web instead!
Nonsense like this is part of why we've gone from being able to locate any song with a snippet of lyrics in the mid 2000s, to being unable to locate many songs. It's infuriating.
Claude Sonnet 3.6 once recommended I listen to Johann Johannsson's album "IBM 1401 - A User's Manual". No lyrics in this one. Claude's advice was along the lines of (paraphrasing) "Listen to it first, don't look up anything about it. Take notes about what you notice, what you feel. When you've made your notes, then you can look up how it was made."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiUtRnG-bg
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