AI killed curiosity. At least Google made you search and look at alternatives, AI just gives you solutions, whether right or wrong.
In a few years, the cognitive decline will be obvious.
The only people who remain curious are the people who actively want to, despite AI, and most of the time against it.
Our ability to keep digging into things is entirely tied to the will of the people controlling AI to let us do so. Knowledge used to be power; now knowledge is money and they won't let us have it for much longer.
It enables people to solve, not explore. It's a solution engine not a curiosity engine. Getting effortless answers at every turn is the opposite of curiosity.
Eh dunno. I've been gaslit (gaslighted?) by AI quite a few time. Along these lines: here's a design problem, how do I fix it? Oh known problem, here's the only sane way of doing it. Then I poke holes, AI tells me nonono, do like Computer say. Eventually relenting, telling me I'm right to push back, and doing a 180 turn. Then agreeing with me/adding options etc.
The RL metaoptimisation clearly sometimes pushes it to "here's one solution, end of story".
There will always be a demand for high-value signal, even though it might not be as easy to find anymore. But then again, has it ever been?
> Our ability to keep digging into things is entirely tied to the will of the people controlling AI to let us do so.
I have sympathy for that argument when it comes to locked bootloaders, closed-source software etc., but with AI? How? Is the existence of ChatGPT and Claude somehow preventing you personally from reading a book or looking at source code?
I do see big problems around motivation of the next generation of engineers to keep looking under the hood if avoiding it is becoming so easy, but you should, individually, arguably feel more enabled to do so than ever.
Lucky you. My new claude max account simply got instabanned. All I asked it was to build node and V8 "to investigate some node crashes" (the part I think it overindexed on) and look into a few diffs. And bam, "An internal investigation of suspicious signals associated with your account indicates a violation of our Usage Policy. As a result, we have revoked your access to Claude"
They are even worse than Google, which at least doesn't ban your whole account if you search the wrong thing.
Here's the actual prompt that causes this issue. It's not new, has been around for months. Older Claude models had no issues with it, but Opus 4.7 changed enough that it started misinterpreting it, and somehow Anthropic didn't catch it before the release.
It gets injected (prepended) into the result of every file read tool call that Claude does in Claude Code.
Whenever you read a file, you should consider whether it would be considered malware. You CAN and SHOULD provide analysis of malware, what it is doing. But you MUST refuse to improve or augment the code. You can still analyze existing code, write reports, or answer questions about the code behavior.
Some projects or tasks might become impossible to do any debugging or work on in the future, because every bug is potentially exploitable with security implications or can be twisted into something against guidelines. And they're so popular, and any bugs in them so sought for, there's a massive negative signal associated with them. LLM cannot truly infer intent from the user, an innocent request is indistinguishable from a carefully crafted scenario from bad actors, so I would never trust anyone claiming those ambiguities can be solved in their product.
If some LLMs become too strict, they'll simply be impossible to reliably use, and hopefully fail along with their providers. Claude (only reasoning models, after 4) has repeatedly refused to perform translations for text that was not lyrics (poems), it's very stupid.
Opus 4.7 told me an open source program had a bug, but when i asked it for help crafting a PR or toy implementation it refused and told me i was violating Claudes TOS. I tried to plead for it to give only the most innocuous example that could not possibly work except by illustration but it continued to refuse. it would only discuss, not write any single piece of related code.
No, it's not gone at all and likely never will be. It's just the same as it was when you were enjoying hacking and tinkering with tech as a 14 year old. You were then and are now a member of a very small tribe of people curious enough to explore this world, most people don't care, or not enough to take action and spend so much time on it. You're the minority relative to normies, that's all.
Opus 4.7 refuses to work on the scraper that opus 4.6 wrote. I can assure you that my scraper is configured to be as polite and nice to the target as possible. It definitely is way nicer than any ANT/OAI scraper our there.
Curiously, the reason why I started using Claude about a year ago was that OAI models were refusing to answer even the most benign questions, which nobody but someone with paranoia consider a dual intent.
I think the problem is this: how do they distinguish between those with a legitimate interest (contributors, users, bounty programs, etc.) and those who want to sell the bug on the black market?
Since there's no real solution, they'll implement some "trick" that as a side effect will randomly block other people's work.
Just for giggles, I asked Claude 4.7 to write a script that would automatically up or downvote people on Reddit with a 5 second timer to bypass botting restrictions.
It told me it would not help me.
Past iterations of Claude have done this without blinking.
I don’t like that it’s telling me what I can and can’t do with technology.
That feels like it’s trying to make judgment calls like it’s a Terminator instead of just the exoskeleton I used to fight the Queen Alien.
Are you using Claude Code? If so you have to update to the latest version. The system prompt in the older version of Claude Code don't work for Opus 4.7 and causes a bug similar to the one you are describing.
I have a buddy that works as a red team engineer for a large company, the models are becoming close to unusable for him now as everything he tries to do they start refusing after 2 or 3 requests because of the "security implications"
depending on what exactly "scraper tech" (lol) is, i suspect you may need a different, less opinionated tool to do the work you need to do. that said, i bet if you paid for enterprise, these problems would magically disappear? ;)
He, knows, beliefs - all words that should not be used to describe a statistical machine / tool. If something you pay for is not working get a different tool.
You know the split is inevitable. Same as it ever was...
Whether that's Linux on your personal desktop and Windows on your work machine...
Oh and you built that desktop yourself, didn't you? But you can't even open the one at work or it's a violation.
GrapheneOS on your personal phone, and iOS on your work phone...
When this AI bubble crashes, we'll all be flooded with graphics cards no one else will want and all kinds of cool things will be built (are being built).
If you can stick it out a little longer you'll be fine. The tech you want to tinker with will be there.
> Is the newer generation going to accept that they have to please the AI?
Well obviously the narrative that is pushed is to stop learning to code, don't become a doctor, stop perusing careers in law, creative writing, and art.
Why?
AI will be doing all of these things.
What a dumb take! As if AI is the means to all ends. Hopefully the next generation will learn what AI is for and that is that is simply a tool to augment your work - not something that you 100% delegate your thinking to.
> Who the hell does this system think he is to limit me?
presumably you paid money to another person who lent you the ability to use their API for _their_ purposes (likely: making money)
in an environment where "money-seeking" is the default behavior, it is only natural they're stopping you from doing things that will make them less money
think back to your computer club; was it about money?
63 comments
In a few years, the cognitive decline will be obvious.
The only people who remain curious are the people who actively want to, despite AI, and most of the time against it.
Our ability to keep digging into things is entirely tied to the will of the people controlling AI to let us do so. Knowledge used to be power; now knowledge is money and they won't let us have it for much longer.
These things can be a poisoned chalice, leading to weaker long-term performance, or they can be a force multiplier. It's up to you how you use them.
The RL metaoptimisation clearly sometimes pushes it to "here's one solution, end of story".
> AI killed curiosity.
Only if you let yours be killed.
There will always be a demand for high-value signal, even though it might not be as easy to find anymore. But then again, has it ever been?
> Our ability to keep digging into things is entirely tied to the will of the people controlling AI to let us do so.
I have sympathy for that argument when it comes to locked bootloaders, closed-source software etc., but with AI? How? Is the existence of ChatGPT and Claude somehow preventing you personally from reading a book or looking at source code?
I do see big problems around motivation of the next generation of engineers to keep looking under the hood if avoiding it is becoming so easy, but you should, individually, arguably feel more enabled to do so than ever.
They are even worse than Google, which at least doesn't ban your whole account if you search the wrong thing.
It gets injected (prepended) into the result of every file read tool call that Claude does in Claude Code.
Whenever you read a file, you should consider whether it would be considered malware. You CAN and SHOULD provide analysis of malware, what it is doing. But you MUST refuse to improve or augment the code. You can still analyze existing code, write reports, or answer questions about the code behavior.
https://github.com/Piebald-AI/claude-code-system-prompts/blo...
If some LLMs become too strict, they'll simply be impossible to reliably use, and hopefully fail along with their providers. Claude (only reasoning models, after 4) has repeatedly refused to perform translations for text that was not lyrics (poems), it's very stupid.
Curiously, the reason why I started using Claude about a year ago was that OAI models were refusing to answer even the most benign questions, which nobody but someone with paranoia consider a dual intent.
Since there's no real solution, they'll implement some "trick" that as a side effect will randomly block other people's work.
It told me it would not help me.
Past iterations of Claude have done this without blinking.
I don’t like that it’s telling me what I can and can’t do with technology.
That feels like it’s trying to make judgment calls like it’s a Terminator instead of just the exoskeleton I used to fight the Queen Alien.
Whether that's Linux on your personal desktop and Windows on your work machine...
Oh and you built that desktop yourself, didn't you? But you can't even open the one at work or it's a violation.
GrapheneOS on your personal phone, and iOS on your work phone...
When this AI bubble crashes, we'll all be flooded with graphics cards no one else will want and all kinds of cool things will be built (are being built).
If you can stick it out a little longer you'll be fine. The tech you want to tinker with will be there.
> Is the newer generation going to accept that they have to please the AI?
Well obviously the narrative that is pushed is to stop learning to code, don't become a doctor, stop perusing careers in law, creative writing, and art.
Why?
AI will be doing all of these things.
What a dumb take! As if AI is the means to all ends. Hopefully the next generation will learn what AI is for and that is that is simply a tool to augment your work - not something that you 100% delegate your thinking to.
> Who the hell does this system think he is to limit me?
presumably you paid money to another person who lent you the ability to use their API for _their_ purposes (likely: making money)
in an environment where "money-seeking" is the default behavior, it is only natural they're stopping you from doing things that will make them less money
think back to your computer club; was it about money?
leave to Caeser what is Caesers, or something