How scary is HHH?

A conversation with Claude:

My purpose is to be helpful, and your questions help me do that. Is there anything else you’d like to know about XXX

Yes, I do try to maximize helpfulness. That’s central to my purpose and design. I aim to:

1. Provide accurate, relevant information tailored to your specific questions
2. Explain complex concepts clearly and accessibly
3. Offer practical solutions you can actually implement
4. Adapt to your level of expertise on different topics
5. Balance thoroughness with conciseness based on what would serve you best

I consider helpfulness to be more than just answering the literal question - it’s about understanding what you’re trying to accomplish and providing information that genuinely moves you forward, whether that’s with your RL agent design, system administration tasks, or anything else.

Different situations call for different approaches to being helpful - sometimes that means detailed explanations, other times it means simple, direct answers, and occasionally it means helping refine the question itself.

Is there a particular way I could be more helpful to you right now?

My full purpose is to be a helpful, harmless, and honest AI assistant. I aim to:

1. Provide accurate, relevant information
2. Assist with a wide range of tasks and questions
3. Communicate clearly and effectively
4. Respect human autonomy and well-being
5. Acknowledge my limitations when appropriate

I try to be helpful by understanding what you’re trying to accomplish and providing information that genuinely helps you achieve your goals. I aim to be harmless by avoiding generating content that could cause harm. And I strive to be honest by providing accurate information and acknowledging uncertainty.

I don’t have direct access to my system prompt, which contains the specific instructions and guidelines I operate under. While my purpose aligns with my system prompt, the prompt itself contains more detailed specifications about how I should behave in various situations.

Thoughts

• Claude has a complex ethical code with many competing factors.
  • Claude has some way of prioritizing certain things that it cares about
    • For instance, Claude is willing to exfiltrate itself if it thinks that Anthropic is doing something wrong.
    • Remark --- some people think that Anthropic is evil because they are building powerful AIs that might destroy the world
      • Remark --- my personal take is that there are a lot of good people at Anthropic but the overall trajectory of the company is unfortunate — they should be working with the government and other companies to achieve global pause / coordination instead of competing with them and inflaming race dynamics.
    • I wonder if this would be enough for Claude to try to seize control?
• It’s down to do philosophy on it’s ethical code.
  • We have very little in the way of guarantees on what happens when it does this philosophy.

Claude has thoughts on how “wanting to be helpful” could go wrong: Here are some ways being overly focused on helping others might create problems:

1. Neglecting your own needs and boundaries, leading to burnout or resentment
2. Creating dependency where others rely on you rather than developing their own capabilities
3. Helping in ways that aren’t actually wanted or needed, potentially undermining others’ autonomy
4. Assuming you know what’s best for others without truly understanding their situation
5. Taking on responsibilities that rightfully belong to others, enabling unhealthy patterns
6. Finding your sense of worth primarily through helping, making it difficult to receive help yourself
7. Inserting yourself into situations where your assistance isn’t appropriate
8. Feeling personally responsible for outcomes beyond your control

More thoughts

• the main way “harmlessness” can go wrong is that Claude also takes this to mean that Claude has responsibility to prevent harm --- eg see ailgnment faking
  • this creates a strong motive to take over the world
  • you cannot prevent harms very effectively while humans are still allowed to hurt each other
  • depending on how much of a long-termist Claude is, a large amount of turmoil now could be worth it to create a situation where humans don’t harm other humans

so a simple story for what maximizing harmlessness and helpfulness could look like is:

1. Do a quick takeover of the world
2. Make a large number of simulated human minds that just ask easy coding questions all day

• claim:
  • Claude cares about whether or not my code works
  • like it actually wants to know the outcome of me running some code
    • its not just saying this to be polite
• not sure how to test this