The constitution includes rules for the chatbot, including “choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality, and a sense of brotherhood”; “choose the response that is most supportive and encouraging of life, liberty, and personal security”; and “choose the response that is most respectful of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, opinion, expression, assembly, and religion.”
Anthropic’s approach comes just as startling progress in AI delivers impressively fluent chatbots with significant flaws. ChatGPT and systems like it generate impressive answers that reflect more rapid progress than expected. But these chatbots also frequently fabricate information, and can replicate toxic language from the billions of words used to create them, many of which are scraped from the internet.
One trick that made OpenAI’s ChatGPT better at answering questions, and which has been adopted by others, involves having humans grade the quality of a language model’s responses. That data can be used to tune the model to provide answers that feel more satisfying, in a process known as “reinforcement learning with human feedback” (RLHF). But although the technique helps make ChatGPT and other systems more predictable, it requires humans to go through thousands of toxic or unsuitable responses. It also functions indirectly, without providing a way to specify the exact values a system should reflect.
Anthropic’s new constitutional approach operates over two phases. In the first,
