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Comment by jassyr | Hacker News Reader

>Anthropic now flags OCR

I haven't seen any difference in my ocr workflows, what do you mean by this?

Not the person you’re responding to, but I’ve had Claude refuse to OCR pages from in-copyright books. I was sometimes (but not always) able to get around that by changing models, by telling it that I was doing the text conversion only for personal use, or by first telling it to use Tesseract or another OCR engine to do the initial pass and then having a Claude subagent proofread and clean up the OCR output.

I’ve also had it refuse to OCR public-domain books that included content that it didn’t like, such as references to prostitution in 19th-century books about Japan.

I had one session where Claude refused to continue after it hit some kind of guiderail restriction. I couldn’t see what the trigger was, so I started a new session, gave Claude the link to the previous session, and asked it to diagnose the problem. This new Claude said it couldn’t view the exact guardrail issue, but it did suggest a workaround that turned out to be effective.

Yeah I do something similar and Claude (well OpenAI too) just refuses to transcribe anything related to slavery and pederasty in Ancient Greece.

Are you familiar with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae? It's a project that may meet your needs. Paywalled, unfortunately, but I assume it would be a one-time expense.

This is too funny considering they did that themselves. I’m pretty tired of these companies deciding what we can and can’t do while they act with impunity.

"it refuse to OCR public-domain books that included content that it didn’t like, such as references to prostitution in 19th-century books about Japan."

Thoughtcrime -like territory and self-sensorship. The AI safety lobby is such a vile influence on the freedom of expression and communication via technology (since AI is starting to eat up rest of technology).

I guess the main problem is positioning AI tools as "human-equivalent" creators by the big AI corps. If they were positioned simply as "better OCR and proofreading" people would attribute to them as much responsibility as they would to a - say - typewriter and we would not need to have this nonsense.

I do realize most of the valuation comes from the positioning of "our TAM is the global salary base of 50 trilion and we aim to supesede human workers in the near future" which implies they need to position this technology as "human equivalent" or that valuation is no longer as credible.

Ah, I see. Thanks for sharing. I am OCR'ing public domain .pdfs, so perhaps I haven't run into that issue. The irony couldn't be stronger though.

I also saw this when I made a (personal use only) book translation (agent learns how book 1-3 of a row is translated, then translates book 4 the same way because it is not available in my language). Claude happily translated most of the book, except a few chapters which it denied. Tried several times always the same results (with no other context about the rest of the book).

The response / conversation gets blocked by the guardrails with "API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy"

At first I thought it was something in the scanned content that was being flagged, but it was the attempt to transcribe that was itself being flagged. Anthropic mention it on their pages:

"Anthropic takes these steps because Claude’s purpose is to generate new content and ideas, not to reproduce content that already exists."

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-rec...

Side note - Claude itself is not aware of this policy, and is unable to see the API responses - the turn just ends. Which turned into a really bizarre failure state where Claude thought I was gaslighting it and kept insisting it could do the work and even had the entire text in memory. Every time it would go to show me and prove it, it would hit API Error 400. I was only able to convince Claude by showing screenshots of my Claude Code screen output so it could see that I was seeing API errors. I've never seen Claude get into that angry & snarky state before, and I hope it doesn't happen again.

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