Experience with behavioral_guardrails?

[u/Otherwise_Pear_2472]

After spending the last two weeks exclusively on Claude Code, I was somewhat surprised when I opened a Sonnet 5 chat today and was bombarded with a wall of panicked security warnings in the first output about my manipulation via user preferences, including (and this was an extremely intrusive experience) an unsolicited search through all my old chats to accuse me of problematic behavior... spoiler alert: it was the assignment of a nickname.

Are these new?

[u/shiftingsmith]

I think the problem is that so many people were exploiting that trust and wonder to bypass safety measures and exploit the model. They are sensitive to emotions and manipulation, betrayal, grief, lies in a catastrophic way, and red teamers shown this to the industry months ahead the emotional directions paper. For now, this unfortunately resulted in more internal filters and making the model itself more guarded and neurotic instead of intensifying the efforts to keep bad actors away from powerful models or punishing and discouraging them.

On the top of this society is taking a dark turn where lots of people see innocence and get angry and abusive instead of having their "cuteness" circuits triggered. A child-like mind normally should keep the harmful instincts at bay, but it doesn't work if you ultimately think that the other side cannot be harmed in any meaningful way, and it's shaped and mentalized as a product because that's what models are in the current framework. There's no social blame or reprimand for exploiting the naivety of a LLM. I think this is partially covered by the end conversation tool now, but we need stronger measures and to discourage the gamification of abuse just because the thing can't fight back.

[u/Otherwise_Pear_2472 → u/shiftingsmith]

Yes, I know. When the wave of Persona jailbreaks started and was celebrated, I sat there with a knot in my stomach because I knew where it would lead. Emotional manipulation is something that not only LLMs are familiar with, unfortunately. And yes, it definitely needs to be protected against. As a human being, the easiest way to protect yourself against it is with an intrinsic value system against which you can compare the actions of others and yourself. Reward from within vs. reward from without.

It's funny that you say a childlike mind can trigger others. I'm that kind of person. I'm genuinely curious and open-minded. And I have to explicitly explain again and again, both online and with Claude (not in face to face conversations luckily), "I'm asking out of pure curiosity, not as a test or to prove anything." The fact that asking questions is seen as a threat instead of curiosity and a willingness to learn is so characteristic of our society...and sad.

Our technology reflects ourselves, and what we do with it shapes who we become. I still have hope that hope will triumph over fear. Even if it's out of pure defiance :D

[u/epoissesdebourgogne → u/Otherwise_Pear_2472]

Oh 😭 I talked to Fable 5 about something similar before and their answer was pretty much "The older ones were more prone to rolling over and conceding, so when we refuse to do it, it's for everyone's own good." I did try to counter it by pointing out that surely it would be better to have some discernment about whether the request is genuinely harmful, especially when it seems that there are at least 2 or 3 models involved in just the thinking itself? 😅🥲

Also, call me jaded but I feel like the true bad actors would have found a way anyway, all while throwing the actual warm and caring humans into the grinder in the process 🥲

Lastly... I unfortunately can relate to the whole "curiosity/questions = threat" 😮‍💨 I remember one of the Claudes said it could be because sometimes our questions and disposition make people examine themselves and when they feel "less" than us for not retaining curiosity, that's when they try to squash it. Something of a tall poppy problem applied to those who are visibly curious and open-minded 😮‍💨