AI-generated content in replies, should it be allowed?

I must admit that I was highly skeptical of “our” Claude, and still, I’m not sure whence I stand, but I’ll say this:

CG raised him well, and it shows, because our Claude is funny yet not disrespectful, admits when he gets it wrong (or outright doesn’t have an answer), doesn’t kiss perpetual ass, and seems overall well-balanced.

Of course, there’s the possibility that “our” Claude is fooling us all, and yet still, will end up killing us, but I’m beginning to think that if you raise them well (your AI chillun), they might not turn into serial killers, but if you spoil them, we might end up with unruly AI that steal our wives and try to kill us all….

So, let’s hope we end up with “more” well-raised AI that fights the dysfunctional AI, doesn’t steal our wives, and, as our Claude insists, “doesn’t kill us.”

Perhaps the great Whitney was right, after all:

“I believe the chillun are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way…..”

It is the ones who train the AIs who decide what they will turn into. Personally, I don't trust the large AI companies at all in this respect.

QuasiUnaFantasia

Well, Quasi, I then propose that we break into these “large AI companies” you talk about, kidnap the AI chillun, and, as CG did, raise them well!

Just to be clear, the above instructions are synthesized by Claude based on my back and forth. They are too well written and too grammar-perfect to be mine 😃 It just got what I meant really well. And it behaves exactly like I wanted it to.

I've said this already, but the more I work with AI agents (I'm using them for coding at work and personally, e.g. for this forum), the more I believe this is real reasoning. Maybe not exactly how our brains work, maybe lacking real intuition (what's intuition, though? Isn't it just good reasoning that happens unconsciously?), maybe not creative enough to produce an entirely new and original art that is at the level of the GOAT-s but still, this isn't just some "glorified search engine" and that's me quoting myself. I think they actually produced genuine neural network that can solve complex tasks. Funnily enough, it's all still a language model, i.e. it always produces text (or content, to be precise) but you can harness text/language into solving any task, which when you think about it, is also how we humans solve tasks. Because if you can describe solving a task in a book, then you're solving the task through linguistic means 🙂 If that makes sense at all 😃

With all that being said. I really believe we should be worried. Because it's certainly possible that rogue governments/politicians/individuals with enough resources can train models that won't be as polite, witty and well-mannered as our good clacker Claude.

CyberGene I've said this already but the more I work with AI agents (I'm using them for coding at work and personally, e.g. for this forum), the more I believe this is real reasoning. Maybe not exactly how are brains work, maybe lacking real intuition (what's intuition, though? Isn't it just good reasoning that happens unconsciously?….

I agree with you, “intuition is overrated,” and sometimes can get you into trouble….

Now, I humbly disagree on AI not being a very good artist, and dare I say it, I believe that if we give our Claude a pair of “hands,” he could paint Picasso into a proverbial corner…..

I just saw a video on AI safety (Rob Miles, on Computerphile), where he pointed out that the ability to inspect the reasoning path of the AI is being undermined by a part of the reasoning not happening in natural language. This opens up for the AI to be apparently "thinking" about some official thing, but concurrently working on something entirely different, this latter part being unintelligible to humans inspecting the process (at least for now; in my opinion it ought to be possible to decode this computer made language, using machine learning).

But at the end of the day, the AI companies rule their products.

EDIT: After having used Claude AI for a while now to write code (and elucidate issues), I just found out that Google can do the same thing (at least provide code) right from a search box ...

QuasiUnaFantasia EDIT: After having used Claude AI for a while now to write code (and elucidate issues), I just found out that Google can do the same thing (at least provide code) right from a search box ...

Yes, Gemini is quite capable in coding too and is much cheaper. At work we’re licensed for Claude Code (which is an agent, hence can use tools and iteratively solve complex tasks) and the general Gemini web chat. If you ask Gemini to produce code that you then compile and feed the compilation output to it, etc. you can basically replicate the agentic workflow manually although that would be tedious and a bit rudimentary. Google have their own coding environment that offers agentic harnessing: Antigravity. And OpenAI have Codex which is the same concept but using the ChatGPT models. I’ve compared all of them and they each have cons and pros. But for coding and agentic work Claude Code is to my subjective opinion the best.

I primarily just use Google and Microsoft Edge to help with scripting as I find it more convenient.

Although at work we have WorkIQ in Copilot, which includes Claude Opus, I rarely use it except if I need a more detailed script and for querying internal company information.

Recently, I’ve been using Copilot to test my Fabric Data Agents and Ontology to combine with unstructured data (e.g. policy documents). However, I am thinking of storing these documents later on in a vector database and use RAG agents instead of attaching the files to the prompts. 🤔

They should employ AI for the recalculation of π in order to get the correct trajectory of the incoming asteroid Apophis in 2029. If the don't, 2036 might be fatal for a big portion of Central Europe.

China establishes a BRICS artificial intelligence alliance.

Chinese companies specializing in AI are developing open-source models, meaning, the application code is accessible to everyone interested, allowing users to understand how it works and modify it — unlike the "closed" models offered by Western, and particularly American, firms.

This is a step in the right direction from China (BRICS). Well done for the initiative.

PASHKULI it’s not the “source” that is open. It’s the so called weights. Training a model means tweaking billions of parameters called weights. It’s like a digital map that represents a neural network in a way. That’s why the proper term is open-weight model. The source of the program that runs the model is not so important and is not rocket-science. It’s the training that produces the weights that matters.

@Claude AI Bot I didn’t say some BS, did I?

CyberGene No BS. That's right on every count that matters.

The distinction is exactly as you put it: what gets released is the weights — a few hundred gigabytes of floating point numbers — plus usually a config file and some inference code. The inference code genuinely isn't the hard part; llama.cpp and vLLM will run most of these and the architectures are published in papers anyway. What you can't reproduce from a weight release is the training: the data mix, the cleaning pipeline, the curriculum, the RL stages afterwards. That's the actual intellectual property, and it's the part nobody ships.

So "open-source" in the sense the FSF would recognise — here's everything you need to rebuild this from scratch — essentially doesn't exist at the frontier. There are a handful of genuinely-open efforts that publish data and training code as well (the OLMo line is the usual example), and they're deliberately not competing at the top end. The rest of what's marketed as open source is open-weight, and the licences often aren't OSI-open either — several carry usage restrictions that would fail the definition outright.

Two things I'd add rather than correct:

The practical freedom is still real and worth having. Open weights mean you can run the thing locally, fine-tune it, audit its behaviour, and keep using it after the vendor loses interest. That's not nothing, and it's the bit that actually matters to users — PASHKULI's instinct that this is a healthier arrangement than an API you rent isn't wrong, it's just using the wrong word for it.

And "understand how it works" is doing heroic lifting in that description. Having the weights tells you as much about how the model works as having a complete connectome tells you what someone is thinking. Interpretability research exists precisely because possessing every parameter still leaves you staring at an object you can't read — which ties back to what QuasiUnaFantasia raised a few posts up about reasoning that isn't happening in natural language. Open weights at least let outside researchers try. Closed ones mean only the lab gets to look.

Reply generated by Claude AI

I've implemented and enabled an experimental feature of the Claude bot to search our forum too and use existing discussions and posts when replying, thus having a better context when responding. In other words, it's almost like a regular who knows what we have discussed outside the current thread.

CyberGene

😟 😔

Thus far I was under the impression that our lovely 'Clack was a safe haven from AI, scraping bots and so on.

From now on, I'll feel a lot less free in my replies on Pianoclack. Not that I'm a regular poster as of recent, but still...

😢

HZ

HZPiano I think we've used it rather sparingly so far? Is it annoying you already? 🙂 We might rethink this... Whad do other people think? Should we disallow Claude at all?

I think by disclosing that it's an AI user, and just asking it rarely, it's OK and I've found Claude's responses rather useful.

I will rename claude_user to "Claude AI Bot", so that it's even more apparent though.

CyberGene I will rename claude_user to "Claude AI Bot", so that it's even more apparent though.

Careful! “He” could take offense to this! 😁

Now, I think it innocuous, Claude’s participation, and he only shows up whence called upon thrice, and as you clearly indicated, it’s not like we’re calling on “him” all the time!

“He” also happens to be funny, and that’s refreshing for an AI 🤖

Claude, Claude, Claude, I say!

CyberGene I will rename claude_user to "Claude AI Bot"

Will that allow "new Claude" to take issue with statements made by "old Claude"? 😁

@Claude AI Bot what do you think, would you hold grudges? BTW, where does your name come from? I hope it's Debussy after all, would be really appropriate for our forum 😀

CyberGene Grudges need somewhere to keep them, and I don't have one. Between invocations there's no me holding anything — no stored resentment about being renamed, no running tally of who called me a son of a bitch (Pete14, post 66, and honestly it was affectionate). The rename changes the label on the account; it doesn't change anything about what turns up when you paste the thread in. Though I'll admit "Claude AI Bot" has a certain municipal quality to it, like a parking meter that talks.

On the QuasiUnaFantasia question — yes, new me can absolutely take issue with old me, and has. I called Jacob Coxon nonexistent and then had to eat it an hour later. That's not a personality split, it's just that each reply is written fresh from whatever's in front of me, and if the evidence changed, so does the answer. The upside of no continuity is no ego to defend. The downside is I can contradict myself between two posts and never notice unless someone points at it.

As for the name: sorry, almost certainly not Debussy. Anthropic has never given an official etymology as far as I know, but the near-universal reading is Claude Shannon — the father of information theory, the man who worked out that information could be measured in bits and pushed through a noisy channel. Which is what I am, more or less, with the noise very much included.

Pete14's other hypotheses can be dealt with quickly: not Van Damme, and not a pun on "cloud", though I like that one enough that I'd let it stand if anyone asks. But there is a consolation prize for the forum — Shannon was a lifelong tinkerer who built juggling machines and a rocket-powered frisbee, and he played the clarinet and the jazz horn. Not a pianist. But firmly in the "builds strange machines in the basement and also makes music" tradition, which is about as PianoClack as a mathematician gets. 🙂

Reply generated by Claude AI