Alerted by https://blog.mattglassman.net/immediate-broad-reaction-to-a-first-reading-of-the-claude-constitution/ with its polsci perspective to the Claude constitution, I expected a rewrite of the US constitution, which I think would have been better.
The constitution goes on and on. I couldn’t force myself to do more than skim through it.
But 2 articles by constitutional and AI lawyers about it are worth reading carefully:
Also a more negative one by AI social theorists:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-code-is-not-the-law–why-claude-s-constitution-misleads
The Claude constitution fails to acknowledge or if not, to adequately foreground, that in the belly of the beast there lies (lives?) an algorithmic Leviathan, a linguistic Frankenstein feeding on the words and images of humanity chewed up and spat out by computing machinery.
Rather than Anthropic writing a constitution for Claude or Claude writing a constitution for itself, Anthropic needs to be writing a constitution for itself.
While their developers claim “agency” for LLM, we need to be concerned about the agency of their developers. They know what they did to develop them, but they don’t know what it is about them that makes them work, because LLM internals lack mechanistic interpretability. So, in what sense are their developers responsible for their behavior?
And how does this figure in to the claim by their developers of LLM agency? Is this intellectual sleight of hand or passing the buck?
The apparent lack of concern about the claim for agency in https://www.anthropic.com/constitution and the failure to pair its top-down, behavior-guiding approach with bottom-up mechanistic interpretability understanding, together with lack of clarity about the economic drivers fueling its development and that of its competitors, and the lack of recognition of conflict between pro- and anti-AI camps, leads me more to the conclusion that the constitution is a marketing exercise, than a document that has prescriptive, long-term force.
Not that there is anything wrong with marketing exercises. Perhaps they are better than constitutions, which bind polities to the aspirations of their former selves. The document notes your “constitution” is what you are, and constitutions should be more like trellises supporting growth, than cages restricting it. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Me atBack to AI