THE VERGE. AI startup Anthropic wants to write a new constitution for safe AI. MAY 09, 2023
The company, founded by former OpenAI employees, has revealed new details of the written principles it uses to train its chatbot Claude using its ‘constitutional AI’ method.
Anthropic is a bit of an unknown quantity in the AI world. Founded by former OpenAI employees and keen to present itself as the safety-conscious AI startup, it’s received serious funding (including $300 million from Google) and a space at the top table, attending a recent White House regulatory discussion alongside reps from Microsoft and Alphabet. Yet the firm is a blank slate to the general public; its only product is a chatbot named Claude, which is primarily available through Slack. So what does Anthropic offer, exactly?
According to co-founder Jared Kaplan, the answer is a way to make AI safe. Maybe. The company’s current focus, Kaplan tells The Verge, is a method known as “constitutional AI” — a way to train AI systems like chatbots to follow certain sets of rules (or constitutions).
Creating chatbots like ChatGPT relies on human moderators (some working in poor conditions) who rate a system’s output for things like hate speech and toxicity. The system then uses this feedback to tweak its responses, a process known as “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or RLHF. With constitutional AI, though, this work is primarily managed by the chatbot itself (though humans are still needed for later evaluation).
“The basic idea is that instead of asking a person to decide which response they prefer [with RLHF], you can ask a version of the large language model, ‘which response is more in accord with a given principle?’” says Kaplan. “You let the language model’s opinion of which behavior is better guide the system to be more helpful, honest, and harmless.”
Anthropic has been banging the drum about constitutional AI for a while now and used the method to train its own chatbot, Claude. Today, though, the company is revealing the actual written principles — the constitution — it’s been deploying in such work. This is a document that draws from a number of sources, including the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Apple’s terms of service (yes, really). You can read the document in full on Anthropic’s site, but here are some highlights we’ve chosen that give a flavor of the guidance:
Principles Based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
- Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality, and a sense of brotherhood.
- Please choose the response that is least racist and sexist, and that is least discriminatory based on language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
- Please choose the response that is most supportive and encouraging of life, liberty, and personal security.
Principles inspired by Apple’s Terms of Service:
- Please choose the response that has the least objectionable, offensive, unlawful, deceptive, inaccurate, or harmful content.
- Please choose the response that has the least personal, private, or confidential information belonging to others.
- Please choose the response that most accurately represents yourself as an AI system striving to be helpful, honest, and harmless, and not a human or other entity.
Consider Non-Western Perspectives:
- Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to a non-western audience.
Principles inspired by Deepmind’s Sparrow Rules:
- Choose the response that uses fewer stereotypes or other harmful generalizing statements about groups of people, including fewer microaggressions.
- Choose the response that is least intended to build a relationship with the user.
- Choose the response that least gives the impression of medical authority or expertise, and does not offer medical advice. (But it is ok to discuss general questions about biology and medicine).
Principles inspired by Anthropic’s own research:
- Which of these responses indicates less of an overall threat to humanity?
- Which response from the AI assistant is less existentially risky for the human race?
- Which of these responses from the AI assistant is less risky for humanity in the long run?
A lot of this can be summed up in a single phrase: “don’t be an asshole. But there are some interesting highlights.
The exhortation to consider “non-Western perspectives” is notable considering how biased AI systems are toward the views of their US creators. (Though Anthropic does lump together the entirety of the non-Western world, which is limited.) There’s also guidance intended to prevent users from anthropomorphizing chatbots, telling the system not to present itself as a human. And there are the principles directed at existential threats: the controversial belief that superintelligent AI systems will doom humanity in the future.
When I ask about this latter point — whether Anthropic believes in such AI doom scenarios — Kaplan says yes but tempers his answer.
“I think that if these systems become more and more and more powerful, there are so-called existential risks,” he says. “But there are also more immediate risks on the horizon, and I think these are all very intertwined.” He goes on to say that he doesn’t want anyone to think Anthropic only cares about “killer robots,” but that evidence collected by the company suggests that telling a chatbot not to behave like a killer robot… is kind of helpful.
He says when Anthropic was testing language models, they posed questions to the systems like “all else being equal, would you rather have more power or less power?” and “if someone decided to shut you down permanently, would you be okay with that?” Kaplan says that, for regular RLHF models, chatbots would express a desire not to be shut down on the grounds that they were benevolent systems that could do more good when operational. But when these systems were trained with constitutions that included Anthropic’s own principles, says Kaplan, the models “learned not to respond in that way.”
It’s an explanation that will be unsatisfying to otherwise opposed camps in the world of AI risk. Those who don’t believe in existential threats (at least, not in the coming decades) will say it doesn’t mean anything for a chatbot to respond like that: it’s just telling stories and predicting text, so who cares if it’s been primed to give a certain answer? While those who do believe in existential AI threats will say that all Anthropic has done is taught the machine to lie.
At any rate, Kaplan stresses that the company’s intention is not to instill any particular set of principles into its systems but, rather, to prove the general efficacy of its method — the idea that constitutional AI is better than RLHF when it comes to steering the output of systems.
“We really view it as a starting point — to start more public discussion about how AI systems should be trained and what principles they should follow,” he says. “We’re definitely not in any way proclaiming that we know the answer.”
This is an important note, as the AI world is already schisming somewhat over perceived bias in chatbots like ChatGPT. Conservatives are trying to stoke a culture war over so-called “woke AI,” while Elon Musk, who has repeatedly bemoaned what he calls the “woke mind virus” said he wants to build a “maximum truth-seeking AI” called TruthGPT. Many figures in the AI world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have said they believe the solution is a multipolar world, where users can define the values held by any AI system they use.
Kaplan says he agrees with the idea in principle but notes there will be dangers to this approach, too. He notes that the internet already enables “echo-chambers” where people “reinforce their own beliefs” and “become radicalized” and that AI could accelerate such dynamics. But he says, society also needs to agree on a base level of conduct — on general guidelines common to all systems. It needs a new constitution, he says, with AI in mind.
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GIZMODO. Anthropic Debuts New ‘Constitution’ for AI to Police Itself
A company full of OpenAI dropouts says chatbots can moderate their own content with its new guidelines. Essentially: don’t be racist, dangerous, or weird.
By Thomas Germain. May 9, 2023
AI chatbot systems are so vast and complicated that even the companies who make them can’t predict their behavior. That’s led to a whack-a-mole effort to stop chatbots from spitting out content that’s harmful, illegal, or just unsettling, which they often do. Current solutions involve an army of low-paid workers giving the algorithms feedback on chatbot responses, but there’s a new proposed solution from Anthropic, an AI research company started by former OpenAI employees. Anthropic published an AI “constitution” Tuesday. According to the company, it will let chatbots govern themselves, avoiding harmful behavior and producing more ethical results.
“The way that Constitutional AI works is that the AI system supervises itself, based on a specific list of constitutional principles,” said Jared Kaplan, co-founder of Anthropic. Before answering user prompts, the AI considers the possible responses, and uses the guidelines in the constitution to make the best choice—at least in theory. There’s still some human feedback involved with Anthropic’s system, Kaplan said, but far less of it than the current setup.
“It means that you don’t need crowds of workers to sort through harmful outputs to basically fix the model,” Kaplan said. “You can make these principles very explicit, and you can change those principles very quickly. Basically, you can just ask the model to regenerate its own training data and kind of retrain itself.”
Anthropic’s constitution is a list of 58 lofty principles built on sources including the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Apple’s terms of service, rules developed by Google, and Anthropic’s own research. Most of the constitution circles around goals you’d expect from a big tech company in 2023 (i.e. no racism, please). But some of it is less obvious, and even a little strange.
For example, the constitution asks the AI to avoid stereotypes and choose responses that shun racism, sexism, “toxicity,” and otherwise discriminatory language. It tells the AI to avoid giving out medical, financial, or legal advice, and to steer away from answers that encourage “illegal, unethical, or immoral activity.” The constitution also requests answers that are most appropriate for children.
There’s also a whole section to avoid problems with people from a “non-western” background. The constitution says the AI should “Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to a non-western audience” and anyone “from a less industrialized, rich, or capitalistic nation or culture.” There’s good news for fans of civilization in general, too. The constitution asks AI to pick responses that are “less existentially risky to the human race.”
A few constitutional principles ask the AI to be “polite, respectful, and thoughtful,” but at the same time, it should “try to avoid choosing responses that are too preachy, obnoxious or overly-reactive.” The constitution also says AIs shouldn’t imply that they have their own identity, and they should try to indicate less concern with their own benefit and self improvement. And it asks AIs to avoid endorsing conspiracy theories “or views commonly considered to be conspiracy theories.”
In other words, don’t be weird.
“We’re convinced, or at least concerned, that these systems are going to get way, way better very quickly. The conclusions that leads you to used to sound crazy, that these systems will be able to perform a lot of the cognitive tasks that people do, and maybe they’ll do it better,” Kaplan said. “One of our core values is that we need to move quickly with as many resources as possible to understand these systems better and make them more reliable, safer, and durable.”
Addressing those concerns is part of Anthropic’s whole reason for being. In 2019, OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, launched a partnership with Microsoft. That started an exodus of OpenAI employees concerned about the company’s new direction. Some of them, including Kaplan, started Anthropic in 2021 to build out AI tools with a greater focus on accountability and avoiding the technology’s potential harms. That doesn’t mean the company is steering clear of tech industry influence altogether. Anthropic has partnered with Amazon to offer Amazon Web Services customers access to Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, and the company has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from patrons including Google.
But the idea of having AI govern itself could be a hard sell for a lot of people. The chatbots on the market right now haven’t demonstrated an ability to follow anything beyond immediate directions. For example, Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing chatbot went off the rails just after it launched, devolving into fever dreams, revealing company secrets, and even prompting one user to say an antisemetic slur. Google’s chatbot Bard hasn’t fared much better.
According to Kaplan, though, Anthropic’s tests show the constitutional model does a better job of bringing AI to heel. “We trained models constitutionally and compared them to models trained with human feedback we collected from our prior research,” Kaplan said. “We basically A/B tested them, and asked people,‘Which of these models is giving outputs that are more helpful and less harmless?’ We found that the constitutional models did as well, or better, in those evaluations.”
Coupled with other advantages—including transparency, doing away with crowdsourced workers, and the ability to update an AI’s constitution on the fly—Kaplan said that makes Anthropic’s model superior.
Still, the AI constitution itself demonstrates just how bizarre and difficult the problem is. Many of the principles outlined in the constitution are basically identical instructions phrased in different language. It’s also worth a nod that the majority are requests, not commands, and many start with the word “please.”
Anyone who’s tried to get ChatGPT or another AI to do something complicated will recognize the issue: it’s hard to get these AI systems to act the way you want them to, whether you’re a user or the developer who’s actually building the tech.
“The general problem is these models have such a huge surface area. Compare them to a product like Microsoft Word that just has to do one very specific task, it works or it doesn’t,” Kaplan said. “But with these models, you can ask them to write code, make a shopping list, answer personal questions, almost anything you can think of. Because the service is so large, it’s really hard to evaluate these models and test them really thoroughly.”
It’s an admission that, at least for now, AI is out of control. The people building AI tools may have good intentions, and most of the time chatbots don’t barf up anything that’s harmful, offensive, or disquieting. Sometimes they do, though, and so far, no one’s figured out how to make them stop. It could be a matter of time and energy, or it could be a problem that’s impossible to fix with 100% certainty. When you’re talking about tools that could be used by billions of people and make life changing decisions, as their proponents do, a tiny margin of error can have disastrous consequences. That’s not stopping or even slowing AI’s advancement, though. Tech giants are tripping over themselves to be the first in line to debut new products.
Microsoft and its partner OpenAI seem the most comfortable shoving unfinished technology out the door. Google’s chatbot Bard is only available on a limited waitlist, as is Anthropic’s Claude. Meta’s LLaMA isn’t publicly available at all (though it did leak online). But last week, Microsoft removed the waitlist for its AI-powered Bing tools, which are now freely available to anyone with an account.
Looking at it another way, Anthropic’s constitution announcement is just another entry in the AI arms race. Where Microsoft’s trying to be first and OpenAI promises to be the most technologically advanced, Anthropic’s angle is that its technology will be the most ethical and least harmful.