David Althaus's Shortform

I had to cancel my Claude subscription (and signed up for ChatGPT) because Claude (3.5 Sonnet) constantly refuses to transcribe or engage with texts that discuss extremism or violence, even if it's clear that this is done in order to better understand and prevent extremist violence. 

Example text Claude refuses to transcribe below. For context, the text discusses the motivations and beliefs of Yigal Amir who assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister in 1995.

God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish People," he explained, and he, Yigal Amir, was making certain that God's promises, which he believed in with all his heart and to which he had committed his life, were not to be denied. He could not fathom, he declared, how a Jewish state would dare renege on the Jewish birthright, and he could not passively stand by as this terrifying religious tragedy took place. In Amir's thinking, his action was not a personal matter or an act of passion but a solution, albeit an extreme one, to a religious and psychological trauma brought about by the actions of the Rabin government. Though aware of the seriousness of his action, Amir explained that his fervent faith encouraged and empowered him to commit this act of murder. He told his interrogators, "Without believing in God and an eternal world to come, I would never have had the power to do this." Rabin deserved to die because he was facilitating, in Amir's and other militants' view, the possible mass murder of Jews by consenting to the Oslo peace agreements. This made Rabin, according to halacha, or Jewish law, a rodef, someone about to kill an innocent person and whom a bystander may therefore execute without a trial. Rabin was also a moser, a Jew who willingly betrays his brethren, and guilty of treason for cooperating with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority in surrendering rights to the Holy Land. Jewish jurisprudence considers the actions of the rodef and moser among the most pernicious crimes; persons guilty of such acts are to be killed at the first opportunity.

This type of refusal has happened numerous times. Claude doesn't change its behavior when I provide arguments (unless I spend a lot of time on this). 

I haven't used ChatGPT as much but it so far has never refused.

I hope Anthropic changes Claude so I can continue using it again; I certainly don't like the idea of supporting OpenAI.