Comment by areoform
1 day ago
> Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for
Why?
> and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR
Why?
Why are we celebrating and encouraging the walling off of the global intellectual columns?
The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?
I would be OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the Government to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.
Who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?
Perhaps I'm naive, but I think it's better for humans and the machines if we can all think, learn and build. But then again, I'm the kind of person who rejects the doomer pill.
Reject this.
Because there are good and bad people in the world, and if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine" and it gives me a thorough recipe, it doesn't know if I'm being intellectually curious or trying to become the next Pablo Escobar. They're Anthropic, and because they made Claude, they get to say what we can do with it. Which, I agree, is total bullshit. If I buy a Ford car and I can do whatever I want with it. Drive to work, drive for Uber, set it on fire; plowing into a crowd of protestors is covered by existing laws against vehicular manslaughter. Ford doesn't get a say. But because cars are so ubiquitous and a known technology, there's no blowback to Ford if I commit crimes with my car that I bought from them. If I commit crimes and Claude helped, Anthropic is gonna get sued (there's already litigation against the labs for deaths), and they don't want that.
In a properly free market, we'd have regulations that prohibit labs from vertical integration so they have to release and sell a model and another company hosts it and sell access to it. Americanism, America's implementation of capitalism doesn't have such regulations though (and how would that even work?) so we're stuck with Anthropic having that power.
The fear, justified or not, is that a terrorist is going to use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience? I don't think I could, but fortunately for me, I don't work at Anthropic so don't have to answer that real life trolly problem.
>if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine"
I am amazed at how a technical gloss can obscure basic rights. That's legal! It's in chemistry / agronomy books, freely available in libraries. I have the right to tell you how that is done, and you have the right to read what I write.
Because this is how the world works
An LLM isn't a book. You can still go buy the books you want. An LLM, especially as they get more advanced, are agents. You can ask them do to things and they can interact with tools to do things.
You're free to print a cocaine book. You're not free to incorporate it into a cocaine making machine without violating numerous laws.
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Ford actually will tell you now if you can or cannot do something with their vehicles. They’re also likely tracking you.
That said - there likely were the same issues with cars in early days and then we got a body of settled case law that let the car companies off the hook for this and put responsibility on the user unless a manufacturing defect was the cause.
In the case of models, knowledge has historically always been dangerous! Is the library liable if a kid figures out how to do chemistry and builds a device? What about YouTube? I find it hard to believe this would hold up in court over time. So far, the only cases I’ve seen are when AI has encouraged self-harm which does in fact seem like a legit defect.
Gatekeeping knowledge like this will only serve to enable those that break the law, not protect, in my judgment.
And just so this isn’t pure fodder for the machine - torch staple must of course infant music verb noun right? :)
>use Claude to make sarin nerve gas and bomb subway stations, or the digital equivalent. Could you live with that on your conscience?
People have always been able to do this before Claude. The information is out there and if you use a VPN there's not much they can do. The existence of information isn't the blocker for why attacks don't happen.
This is so undershooting of what LLMs are capable of it's no wonder you're thinking they are just like books.
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> The idea that you can't reverse engineer things, make things, learn about biology or physics without permission is strange to me. These machines have been trained on the sum intellectual output of humanity, the global intellectual commons, and are being used to close off that commons?
I mean this is the standard of biochem research right now. You can't just order 50 gallons of TNT off Amazon and neither can you get live viruses from a lab just because you want to do research.
OK, so then no problem, why are Anthropic restricting my ability to learn and reason?
Because they can and there is no law against it.
And really they aren't restricting any of that. I've never had Claude stop me from going to the library and reading a book.
You don't have a legal right to do anything you want with their model. And if you don't like that you are going to have to convince politicians to enact new laws to change that.
Because morons end up using Claude to write down how to plan crimes and then people get up in arms over that.
Because AI-assisted hacking is not something we should allow to run rampant with the most advanced models, prior to AI-assited cybersecurity catching up.