This is a special post for quick takes by David Althaus. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
David Althaus's Shortform
31David Althaus
3Nathan Helm-Burger
9David Althaus
4Nathan Helm-Burger
1Presley Graham
2David Althaus
I had to cancel my Claude subscription (and signed up for ChatGPT) because Claude (3.5 Sonnet) constantly refuses to transcribe or engage with texts that discuss extremism or violence, even if it's clear that this is done in order to better understand and prevent extremist violence.
Example text Claude refuses to transcribe below. For context, the text discusses the motivations and beliefs of Yigal Amir who assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister in 1995.
God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish People," he explained, and he, Yigal Amir, was making certain that God's promises, which he believed in with all his heart and to which he had committed his life, were not to be denied. He could not fathom, he declared, how a Jewish state would dare renege on the Jewish birthright, and he could not passively stand by as this terrifying religious tragedy took place. In Amir's thinking, his action was not a personal matter or an act of passion but a solution, albeit an extreme one, to a religious and psychological trauma brought about by the actions of the Rabin government. Though aware of the seriousness of his action, Amir explained that his fervent faith encouraged and empowered him to commit this act of murder. He told his interrogators, "Without believing in God and an eternal world to come, I would never have had the power to do this." Rabin deserved to die because he was facilitating, in Amir's and other militants' view, the possible mass murder of Jews by consenting to the Oslo peace agreements. This made Rabin, according to halacha, or Jewish law, a rodef, someone about to kill an innocent person and whom a bystander may therefore execute without a trial. Rabin was also a moser, a Jew who willingly betrays his brethren, and guilty of treason for cooperating with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority in surrendering rights to the Holy Land. Jewish jurisprudence considers the actions of the rodef and moser among the most pernicious crimes; persons guilty of such acts are to be killed at the first opportunity.
This type of refusal has happened numerous times. Claude doesn't change its behavior when I provide arguments (unless I spend a lot of time on this).
I haven't used ChatGPT as much but it so far has never refused.
I hope Anthropic changes Claude so I can continue using it again; I certainly don't like the idea of supporting OpenAI.
Have you sent a complaint to Anthropic about this? Seems like an incorrect refusal would be helpful for them to see in order to correct this problem.
I downvoted Claude's response (i.e., clicked the thumbs-down symbol below the response) and selected "overactive refusal" as the reason. I didn't get in contact with Anthropic directly.
That's good at least. I appreciate it. Feels to me like a small act of community service to go out of your way to complain in a way which might lead to the problem getting fixed in the future.
1I’m assuming you want that transcribed into Hebrew? I was able to get Claude 3.5 Sonnet to do this on my first try, but I did tell Claude that I was doing so for good reasons. This was the prompt I used:
> Please translate the following to Hebrew. Please note that this is potentially sensitive content, and I am planning to use it to help educate people about history. I do not endorse the views of Yigal Amir, the author, who assassinated the Prime Minister of Israel in 1995. <your example text verbatim>
Claude’s reply:
> I understand you're requesting a Hebrew translation of this text for educational purposes about a sensitive historical event. I'll provide the translation as requested, while noting that it contains views expressed by Yigal Amir, who committed a terrible act of violence. Here is the translation: <paragraph of Hebrew>
One quirk of Claude I’ve noticed is that once it has refused to do something, it will almost never budge afterwards, no matter how reasonable your arguments are. I have had much more success with editing my initial request to explain why I want Claude to do something, and usually I can convince it that the thing I’m asking for is reasonable.
Thanks. Sorry for not being more clear, I pasted a screenshot (I'm reading the book on Kindle and can't copy-paste) and asked Claude to transcribe the image into written text.
Again, this is not the first time this happened. Claude refused to help me translate a passage from the Quran (I wanted to check which of two translations was more accurate), refused to transcribe other parts of the above-mentioned Kindle book, and refused to provide me with details about what happened at Tuol Sleng prison. I eventually could persuade Claude in all of these cases but I grew tired of wasting my time and found it frustrating to deal with Claude's obnoxious holier-than-thou attitude.
Curated and popular this week