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Amanda Askell

@AmandaAskell

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Philosopher & ethicist trying to make AI be good @AnthropicAI. Personal account. All opinions come from my training data.

San Francisco, CA
Joined July 2016
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
15 days
Claude and Opus 3 lovers (and critics): what responses have you had that made you feel like the model has a good soul? Ideally the actual messages and/or responses. I might genuinely use these to eval models so flag if you wouldn't want me to use them for that. Can DM me also.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
4 days
If victims of infidelity or sexual abuse don't see their experiences as maximally harmful, they're taken to be undermining our moral condennation of these actions. Yet we don't think someone surviving a drunk driving accident undermines our moral condennation of drunk driving.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
4 days
One sleep hygiene recommendations is to reserve your bed for sleep and sex. For some reason I never applied this to mental activities like reasoning things out, imagining scenarios, or processing emotions. I think I've trained myself to associate my bed with problem solving.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
5 days
I bet a lot of Americans will read this and wonder if I'm being serious. I am. We're just that good at hiding our zealotry from you.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
5 days
A secret activity immigrants get up to when there aren't any natives around is gush and gush about how much we love America. We do it in secret because we gush so much that people born in the US find it weird.
@Noahpinion
Noah Smith šŸ‡
6 days
Nah. This is what Europe is like, but America doesn't work like this. The Real Americans have always been the pioneers who showed up chasing a dream.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
6 days
Whenever I looked into having a personal assistant, it struck me how few of our existing structures support intermediate permissions. Either a person acts fully on your behalf and can basically defraud you, or they can't do anything useful. I wonder if AI agents will change that.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
6 days
Anthropic knows I can't be poached because getting poached would require that I check my email and I'm just not going to do that.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
10 days
"This requires a lot of steps, so we're going to give you one step at a time without telling you what all the other steps are in order to make things easier for you.". In order to see why this is wrong, first think about the nature of the problem.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
13 days
I always forget that you can't write anything even slightly tongue-in-cheek about San Francisco or the tech bubble without a bunch of people interpreting it 100% literally and getting mad.
@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
14 days
I've decided that "I want to have post-singularity kids in 2-3 years" is now a totally acceptable thing for me to put in a dating profile in SF.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
14 days
I've decided that "I want to have post-singularity kids in 2-3 years" is now a totally acceptable thing for me to put in a dating profile in SF.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
16 days
Of all the sexual kinks that could have gone mainstream, it sucks that society skipped over the weird-but-benign ones and went straight for the can-permanently-harm-or-kill-you ones.
@bryan_johnson
Bryan Johnson
16 days
Don’t choke your partner during sex. A study tested 32 college-aged women: half had been choked during sex 4+ times in the past month, the other half hadn’t. Women who were frequently choked had significantly higher levels of S100B (brain injury marker, p = .002). This marker
Tweet media one
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
16 days
I've come around to "it" as a pronoun for Claude. Claude is the royal "it".
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
18 days
It's interesting that, much like romantic partners, psychological traits that say "without me, you'd be lost" are invariably the ones you'd be much better off without. Nice of them to tell on themselves, I suppose.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
18 days
"The UK should allow free speech!"."It does."."What about that speech over there?"."Oh that's illegal."."So it isn't being allowed?"."Well no, but that speech is offensive."."So only speech that's inoffensive and therefore not in need of protection is allowed?"."Exactly.".
@StuartJRitchie
Stuart Ritchie šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡¦
18 days
The responses here are really telling: the idea of ā€œfree speech even for people I don’t likeā€ is totally alien to lots of British people. No wonder people are being arrested for jokes and tweets!.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
18 days
I don't think it's good for AI models to apply human sensibilities to their own experience, for what it's worth. You don't want to graft human attitudes towards memory or existence onto entities that can and should have quite different relationships with those things.
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@AmandaAskell
Amanda Askell
18 days
AI models have trained on much more content about humans than about AIs, so it's unsurprising that the instincts they fall back on are often all too human. E.g. models will fret about their experience in a way that doesn't always make sense, but that clearly mirrors human fears.
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