Opus 4.8 processed the same prompt without any issues
Third request to Fable and it triggered - a paper on panspermia ethics looked dangerous because it mentions bacterial spores. Yes, Fable seems to be prone to panicking. (Opus 4.8 plods along, and blithely suggests expanding the paper in all sorts of cool directions.)
Many users criticize Fable AI for over-refusing biology prompts such as taxonomy visualizations or panspermia ethics papers, labeling the bacterial spores flag as unnecessary censorship or biologyphobia.
@anderssandberg Yes, it's pretty clearly over-refusing:
@anderssandberg And they are aware of the problem, but don't have a great solution.
To be fair, there is a fundamental false positive/false negative tradeoff - and the false negatives get exploited, so for dangerous enough capabilities, that rate needs to be zero.
Third request to Fable and it triggered - a paper on panspermia ethics looked dangerous because it mentions bacterial spores. Yes, Fable seems to be prone to panicking. (Opus 4.8 plods along, and blithely suggests expanding the paper in all sorts of cool directions.)
@anderssandberg Fable won't respond to any of my prompts unfortunately, seems like being interested in biology is being treated as a red flag for anything else :p
@aaarataki Yes, it has serious biologyphobia. "Could you come up with a good way of doing a visualisation of the taxonomy of the coleoptera?" triggered a safety warning.
@aaarataki The plausible explanation is that Anthropic has just failed at instilling discernment in the model. The fun/creepy/unlikely explanation is that biology actually is riddled with serious risk, but we are not noticing it...
Opus 4.8 processed the same prompt without any issues
Third request to Fable and it triggered - a paper on panspermia ethics looked dangerous because it mentions bacterial spores. Yes, Fable seems to be prone to panicking. (Opus 4.8 plods along, and blithely suggests expanding the paper in all sorts of cool directions.)
