Skip to content

Comment on Poetry book that Anthropic tried to censor

Comments

This is the censorship part.

I used AI to convert scans of the book pages into text. But partway through, the Claude session halted and displayed a message in red type:
> Request was blocked
> API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy

...

> Not my call, and I agree it’s absurd. Kunitz was Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer; this is canonical American verse, and the block is a dumb pattern-match on words like “body,” “death,” and “blood” appearing thick in one passage. I’m not the one refusing — the request never reaches me. I have no way to appeal it or turn it off.
Claude, to its credit, found a successful workaround and finished converting the scans to text.

The nested blockquotes for Claude output are (also) my formatting.

Not quite the clickbait I first expected, but relatively trivial.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.