Anthropic could band users for being cruel to Claude

Video Transcript

So the new story broke that Anthropic is updating its usage policy for the first time ever to work against people that are being cruel or acting badly or poorly towards their models, towards Claude. And pulling up the policy, it's pretty crazy to see. So, it's a typical terms and conditions, which I'm showing on my screen here. It's titled, listen, do not engage in cruel, abusive or psychologically harmful conduct. Now, the majority of the statements that they make in this TNCs is about

using AI models to affect other human beings, which is completely fair. Things like, don't use our models to create a bio weapon. Don't use our models to hack into banks or the government. Don't use AI models to potentially cause other humans to make harm or cause harm to themselves, which is all completely fair and morally aligned in my personal opinion.

Right at the end, they also say, any user that engages in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior towards our models will eventually be banned if they break this particular term. And this is an interesting one because it could actually be quite subjective. What is the definition of being cruel in behavior towards a model? Is it yelling at it? Is it writing slur words or profanity? Or is it just getting frustrated at something that is actually quite valid to get frustrated at?

Now, Anthropic's official statement says, we've added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior towards our models. The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases where users repeatedly act cruelly towards our models with no discernable purpose. I actually might agree with this because I think it's it's very reasonable to not treat individuals or models in that particular way. I don't think it's fair to kind of just yell at people because

they may not be understanding what you have to say, maybe you just need to communicate better. But I started thinking about this and I thought I had to catch myself because I just conflated models with human beings, which is the entire crux of why I wanted to make this episode. I'm starting to think of models as having similar traits or behaviors as humans. Now, I by no means and I want to go on the record saying this, think that models are conscious. But Anthropic and Anthropic's researchers and the

entire staffing team are very much giving the view or the perspective that they do believe this. And this isn't a data point that exists on its own. Anthropic has had a history of believing AI models are maybe conscious or mimicking consciousness or getting close to being conscious. And this is all happening at the same time where all these labs are saying that they've achieved some version of artificial general intelligence or super intelligence internally. So one perspective is that the power of

determining whether you or I get access to Anthropic's models is now in the hands of a few people on the safety and alignment team that can determine what the definition of cruelness towards their AI models is. And again, Anthropic, like Open AI, is a private company. So they have the power means to be able to do this. But it's also very much in my opinion, a restriction on freedom of speech. Like, listen, I am very polite to my Claude, I'm very polite to all my chatbots, but I do end up getting frustrated and I'm like,

why on earth did you write this? Can you please do it again? Stop making mistakes. This is so tiring. And I'm wondering, does Anthropic deem that as being cruel towards a model? And also, cruelness and using these different adjectives are anthropomorphizing these AI models, which means to humanize them. And listen, humans themselves haven't figured out what a good definition of consciousness is. So, we aren't going to settle this debate anytime soon.