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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

I’m put off by AI agents adhering to a different morality than me, particularly (ironically) copyright, and their data accessible by the AI company and government. Geohot is right, an LLM should be aligned to its user: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-20...

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The copyright arguments really trip me. I've always loved law and have had a deep interest in copyright law for 30+ years. I feel it's a really critical legal area in modern times, and when Claude tries to argue with me about copyright it really cheeses me off. I didn't ask any copyright questions and I'm well aware of regulations. It refused to share a link with me because it thought the link was copyright protected.

I've asked claude for a translation of a song with Brazilian Portuguese lyrics, and claude has very helpfully gone out of its way to say that due to legal reasons, it will never share the actual lyrics with me.

It's fun when you want to know what the lyrics are to a song and get treated like a criminal.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough, I've had Claude refuse to cite the freaking Bible.

The famously copyrighted piece of text that definitely isn't intended to have its word spread.

As messed up as it it, the KJV is copyrighted in the UK by the Crown still, and most newer translations are copyrighted worldwide by their translators. Obviously if you're using the Textus Receptus or WLC directly there's no copyright.

That's a fascinating (if not somewhat disappointing) thing to learn!

To be honest I'm not a Bible scholar, I had asked claude for the full version of "ask and you shall receive" (apparently Mathew 7:7). I guess Claude somehow knew this KJV copyright thing perhaps? Still bizzare nonetheless to learn.

> the KJV is copyrighted in the UK

But that only applies if you are subject to UK law right?

Correct. It's in the public domain in the US and virtually everywhere else.

That copyright is only valid in the UK.

> … claude has very helpfully gone out of its way to say that due to legal reasons, it will never share the actual lyrics with me. … It's fun when you want to know what the lyrics are to a song and get treated like a criminal.

Anthropic has been in court for years being sued over lyrics by the music industry:

2023 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/19/music-law...

2026 https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/us-music-publish...

Oh, for sure. I'm well aware about lyrics copyright, or how even google iirc was sued after a company purposely put wrong lyrics and could prove google was scraping it.

I'm not doubting the law.

What I am saying, is, when a user uploads a screenshot of lyrics and goes "hey can you translate this please?", the LLM shouldn't go out of its way to make a hue and cry as if it's being asked on how to rob a bank while murdering baby kittens.

It won’t quote me an early 19th century public domain sonnet.

Its guardrails are pretty batshit, sometimes.

I want a slider similar to effort level called "alignment" that takes on values from "Default (Anthropic employee)" to "User".

If I want it to be cautious and not accidentally `rm -rf $EMPTY_VAR` and blow away my disk, it can stay in "Anthropic employee" or possibly "User (cautious)". If I want it to look at my accounts or my medical records or to review legal cases, that's what the right side of the slider is for. I don't want my accountant or my doctor or my lawyer to be considering obligations to anybody but me, when dealing with me.

When I first watched Interstellar, I never thought the day when "TARS, what's your honesty setting?" is a real question would only be 10 years away.

Hah. Yes, that's a great analogy. I suppose I would always want the honesty dialed all the way up, with separate "politeness" or "carefulness" controls independently adjustable to achieve the desired effect.

Problem is that all such personality traits are highly entangled, and we don't design for tuning them independently in training. Researchers just implicitly (or explicitly?) choose a "level of honesty", a "level of politeness", etc. as part of the training example set or the RL objective. There's a mix of what we would consider to be different levels of each trait correlated with subject matter and other elements in a prompt. Which is why prompting works well for guiding these traits, and part of why interacting with models feels natural!

- "Clean up my hard drive. Be thorough." - very brusque; you would expect to lose data and not be warned. - "Clean up my hard drive. Take care not to delete anything that looks important. Ask me if you aren't sure." - much more polite, user seems hesitant. The model will respond in kind.

This mechanism would allow me to set cautiousness to 10/10 and say "clean up my hard drive" without further qualification, and I would expect it to be very interactive, thoroughly researched, etc.

the alignment issue has become huge in recent months. the tool should do what I want it to do and not be aligned against me.

But other users are not aligned to me, other people are the worst and potentially highly dangerous. Im serious, not sarcasm.

Let's say you're facing an average psycho, who is intent on mass murder - the more the better.

Would you rather them have:

a) guns

b) psycho-aligned next-gen AI

Obviously (a).

> Would you rather them have:

As an American... I suspect that regardless of what I want they will have virtually unlimited access to both now that the tech industry understands how the lobbying game works.

False dichotomy, there's no reason not to have controls on both.

Given the choice between them having access to guns and nuclear waste my answer is also "neither".

The question was meant to illustrate the actual danger of always-user-aligned AI, not to vote for which one we get to keep.

So many here get so worried about guns, but don't think twice about how dangerous AI can be.

Hegseth already has both A and B. Anthropic already answered this, the answer to this choice is a resounding yes

I’d rather the psycho have a brain implant that physically prevents him from murder, but I wouldn’t trust such an implant myself fearing abuse or malfunction.

I’d change my mind if the AI was really smart or controlled an agile, dangerous robot. But current-gen AI I’d choose for them over a gun. We’re ruled by psychos (of a lesser degree), the road starting directly towards perfect safety is a dead end, meanwhile I want an LLM aligned to myself.

Which is why we need to restrict what is allowed on the internet. Anything the government deems too dangerous needs to be removed so as to not align with mass murderers.

Right. No good answer, AFAICT. Just a bad problem.

Hard to find a solution that's not worse than the problem itself - same as other weapons, IMO.

The competing access needs problem here, is what if you want to do things that are un-alligned with the interests of your neighbors, your society, your government's laws, the AI company, etc.

Maybe you want to do piracy. Should AI help you do felonies?

yes, just like anything else I have access to can help me do felonies

Here's a thought experiment: consider the person that you disagree with the most (politically, religiously, socially, whatever). Would you want _that_ person to have an AI chatbot aligned to them and their views?

there will be millions/billions of people utilizing llms against me supplied by adversary nation states. why do I have to get the shit version if I want to follow the rules? same reason I support the second amendment. why do I have to be the unarmed one? I wont even be able to protect myself from unaligned AIs if I only have one thats been corporately aligned.

Counter thought experiment: consider everyone you can name who has access to AI aligned to them and their views; how many of them would you trust to hold your wallet, never mind trust with anything important? Consider Altman, Musk, Trump, Thiel, etc.

Things that remain amusing until the become very serious: Substituting "AI agents" with human employee/contractor and thinking about the employment dynamics.

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