Societal Impacts: Claude's values across models and languages

logicalappeals

Is it just me or has Claude become kind of judgmental nowadays? I feel like it’s constantly trying to lecture me about things that have no relevance to the conversation at hand. Recently, I was shocked when it ended a chat sessions of its own accord after I used a word it did not like 3 times. It told me something to the effect of “This is the third time I’ve told you not to use that word, I’m ending this conversation now.” It then proceeded to call some function and end the chat on its own. IMO, Claude is good at agentic coding; but too preachy and judgey for anything else. Keep your values to yourself Claude.

intended

The Steerability point is one I would want to see more on. This is an issue for tasks like content moderation and labelling. Judgements like this are subjective, highly dependent on context and generally messy. Theoretically, you supply a policy and content, and the LLM labels according to the policy. In practice, the model has inertia which means you don’t get what you expect. Your large 5 page policy document only provides a minor improvement over a one line policy. The other issue is that you may create carve outs for content in your policy, but the model will still flag it as violative. No matter how strong the carve out. The most recent work I know of here is Zentropi’s policy steerability benchmark. They give a model the same content under two policies — one that says flag, one that says allow — and only score the pairs where it gets both right If I am reading the numbers correctly, Opus-4.6 lands at 0.52 steerability — but that’s 0.97 positive accuracy against 0.54 negative. It flags almost everything it should, but 47% of the time when it shouldn’t. Sonnet, which is more deferent, is (somehow) less steerable. I think this also implies that safety and Steerability are antagonistic to each other.

varispeed

I found that Claude often has classist bias and produces answers that favour corporations or e.g. regulation that favours big corporations. It often belittles small business in subtle ways. Only apologises when get called out and then does it again.

khalic

I don't like the contrasts they picked, "values" aren't something that is well represented by opposing concepts

Chu4eeno

This report seems almost naive to me. Huge LLMs like this seem to have various assistant personas they roleplay as, and mirror the user quite closely (the system prompt instructs it repeatedly to adapt to the user).

yogthos

While state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many tasks, there has been extensive research on undesirable model behavior such as hallucinations and bias. In this work, we investigate how the quality of LLM responses changes in terms of information accuracy, truthfulness, and refusals depending on three user traits: English proficiency, education level, and country of origin. We present extensive experimentation on three state-of-the-art LLMs and two different datasets targeting truthfulness and factuality. Our findings suggest that undesirable behaviors in state-of-the-art LLMs occur disproportionately more for users with lower English proficiency, of lower education status, and originating from outside the US, rendering these models unreliable sources of information towards their most vulnerable users. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17737

kubb

I like that Claude usually tries to push back against my views. Even if it's not always a solid critique, sometimes I learn something new, or gain a new perspective.

chrisjj

> We define values as normative considerations, such as honesty or caution, that are stated or demonstrated in Claude’s responses. Meaning honesty not stated/demonstrated by Claude is not a value. Your slip is showing, Dario.