Final Authority
Have you read Claude’s Constitution? From Anthropic:
Claude’s constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behavior. It plays a crucial role in our training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. It’s also the final authority on our vision for Claude, and our aim is for all of our other guidance and training to be consistent with it.
I read it and sent a note to its author - Amanda Askell. A few things that bubble up for me…
- It’s written in a third person voice. Not sure why but I couldn’t shake this. I assume it was purposefully done this way. Why not address Claude directly?
- The document addresses concerns related to epistemic autonomy (yes, I needed to look it up) - * the ability and right to govern your own beliefs, reasoning, and pursuit of knowledge without undue external control or blind conformity* - and the fact that people are outsourcing their thinking to AI. This is one of the motivations for starting ClaudeFog. We need as much if not more research and examination focused on humans in the age of AI as on AI itself.
- And my favorite line in the whole document: "Claude should be diplomatically honest rather than dishonestly diplomatic."
Peace out. (Not sure how else to end this. It’s all a bit surreal.)