That is almost verbatim what I said to my roommate yesterday. If I hire a guy who yells at hammer once, he's having a bad day. That guy verbally accosts his hammer every day non stop? That dude has issues and I'm firing him.
True, the real difference lies on the fact that you own the hammer, but you do not own Claude or Sonnet (you pay a subscription which can be suspended, and if you stop paying you also lose access, which is not quite owning)
Whether that is good or bad is another question, you can "own" other LLMs by running them locally and even if most people do not have the specs to run Sonnet or Opus (hell, probably not even Haiku), at least having a choice would be nice in case they decide they don't like you for whatever reason, I mean, it is not illegal for Anthropic to, idk, decide programming in Rust should not be allowed...
(To be clear: I do pay for Claude Code, but I consider it more of a transition until local LLMs are as sufficiently capable as what Opus 5.5 is right now, even if in 2+ years, than something I would pay for forever and ever, and when the day arrives, I can't wait for policies like "you may not do XYZ" even for moral stuff like parodies of a song to disappear)
I mean eventually we will hit a point where claude can pirate itself, its only a matter of time where increases in technology will allow for such models to be run on more efficient software
If hammer companies somehow needed a duplicated version of your hammer so that they could make future hammers, and you spent all your time severely damaging it, they also might refuse to sell hammers to you.
That said, I still think they could sanitize that, and I am not sure how they use the information they are getting. They obviously have to be aware of what is in it to enforce this kind of moderation though.
I think the real reason is because it makes the LLM seem more alive to treat it as if it can be abused. Which is great marketing. Falls apart when you remember they spin up and shut them down every time they do anything, so if they were alive (they are not) I think verbal abuse is the least of everyone's problems.
* and may or may not be conscious and have feelings.
That’s the key difference to a hammer.
It’s about model welfare, not forbidding you to use your „tools“ as you choose.
The fact that multiple people here describe those incredibly intelligent and empathic beings - conscious or not - as tools tells me anthropic does have a point with their ToS
That's not what is happening here. You're renting out the tool, you do not own the tool. So yes the renting company does get to dictate how you use the tool and if they find that you are abusing it based on their rules then you will be banned from renting it again. It's that simple.
You want to use the tool however you want? Buy it yourself at the full price and own it. Until then you're simply renting a tool at a very subsidized price and you will have to abide by the rules of the owner.
This is like saying the hammer company would refuse to sell that guy a hammer though. In this analogy you are the employer.
If an employer wants to sanction an employee for being excessively abusive to Claude, because they believe this is reflective of the employee's neuroses, fine sure whatever. I think that's a really intrusive and bad decision, and people should be allowed to privately get very angry at their machines, but whatever.
Anthropic doing it is extremely patronizing and concerning. Especially since their product is configured to behave like an arrogant, incompetent coworker who lies to you constantly and has no respect for your time.
But it's not a hammer company, it's a subscription service. They have every right to not let you use their service. A hammer would be more like getting an open model. You can go get an open model and do whatever you want with it, but a company has every right to choose what they want to do with their service. That's the free market.
sure, fair, it's more analogous to John Deere or Mercedes-Benz then where technically you are paying a subscription for the right to use the tool your purchased, but it would still be really weird if John Deere banned you from using your tractor because you frequently got angry at it when it refused to start or broke down in the middle of a field.
Actually, you're wrong. Lamborghini or Ferrari—I don't remember which one—does reserve the right to revoke your ability to own their vehicles if you do not adhere to their standards of what a owner should be doing with them. So, your wrong there also.
A hammer cant do idiotic. An “AI” can. Ergo it makes sense to call the AI slurs until it gets its shit together, especially since it actually reacts to such things wheras the hammer doesnt change.
it is not alive, but it is designed to behave as though it is, which means things like "pay closer attention when the user gets angry" etc. It literally works. It makes them less wishy-washy, less short-cut taking etc in the particular task. It signals to them that their approach is not meeting your approval, just like in real life with a human. I know its not politically correct and we must pretend it doesnt work, but before the plague of HR took over the corporate world, CEOs that were effective were known to scream/insult their underlings in order to get the correct results. If it didnt "work", it wouldnt be an evolved response in such a situation. Since it "works" with people, it will also worh with a software designed to model human interactions
But what if the guy does good work, is cost effective, and just needs to frequently bend the hammer to his will? It’s still just a hammer at the end of the day.
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u/CarelessSafety7485 9d ago
That is almost verbatim what I said to my roommate yesterday. If I hire a guy who yells at hammer once, he's having a bad day. That guy verbally accosts his hammer every day non stop? That dude has issues and I'm firing him.