AI Constitutions are a tool to reduce societal scale risk

As AI systems become more integrated into society, we face potential societal-scale risks that current regulations fail to address. These risks include cooperation failures, structural failures from opaque decision-making, and AI-enabled totalitarian control. We propose enhancing LLM-based AI Constitutions and Model Specifications to mitigate these risks by implementing specific behaviours aimed at improving AI systems' epistemology, decision support capabilities, and cooperative intelligence. This approach offers a practical, near-term intervention to shape AI behaviour positively. We call on AI developers, policymakers, and researchers to consider and implement improvements along these lines, as well as for more research into testing Constitution/Model Spec improvements, setting a foundation for more responsible AI development that reduces long-term societal risks.

TL:DR - see the section on Principles which explains what improvements we think should be made to AI constitutions in detail.