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       COMMENT PAGE FOR:
  HTML   Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
       
       
        dathinab wrote 11 min ago:
        > beside-the-point semantic nits all over the place.
        
        This is also a problem with Copilot Reviews on GitHub.
        
        We have them enabled (but opt in) and they have, multiple times,
        spotted quite useful things.
        
        Sure often the thing they spot is just half right, like it spots the
        place where a problem is but not quite the relevant problem but by
        reading it (and taking it serious) you then notice the actual problem.
        
        This involved finding a bunch of nasty race conditions.
        
        And many ways where doc and code was out of sync which could have
        caused pretty bad outcomes further down the line.
        
        But the problem is it is too obsessed with finding 2-4 but not more
        things, leading to two issue:
        
        1. even if there are 10 non overlapping issues it often will tell them
        to you bit by bit over 2-3 runs after you fix the previous issues. This
        is very annoying/high friction.
        
        2. once there isn't much to find anymore it comes up with increasingly
        more annoying nit picks not one cares. Thinks like minor unclearness in
        formulation no one would get wrong, spell correcting non-doc comments
        for things like `foos => foo's` and similar etc. All indeed wrong, but
        also all things where fixing them adds 0 business value. Obsessing that
        for an aliased function name where, both names are equally good, one
        specific name must be used and naturally always the name you didn't use
        even if this is the most widely used name in the code base. And similar
        non-bussiness value nonsens. Worse it will starting classifying such
        minor non business value issues as "high" and hallucinate reasons why
        supposedly minor style issues will lead to very bad runtime error or
        other nonsense.
        
        This has me very split about the feature, on one hand is has proven
        quite useful, on the other hand it can very annoying, high friction and
        pushes people to wast time on non-business value nit pick (which are
        fine to fix if you anyway touch to code but not fine if you don't and
        sometimes it's just wrong).
        
        Ironically with how it work it is more like a bad unreliable and
        inconsistent employees which is sometimes good at spotting things
        others overlook. That just isn't what you want from an automated code
        review :/, but also is to useful to fully ignore :(.
       
        dofm wrote 41 min ago:
        Claude monkey think maybe manager Bram write god damn login page
        himself
       
        _jx wrote 41 min ago:
        I have never encountered this behaviour in general so I can't comment
        on OP's blog by directc experience.
        
        Am i just lucky?
        
        I use many models for mostly coding, about 10 on trial/rotation, and 3
        main sota.
        
        It's unquestionable that models have different ways of
        interaction+harnesses (personalities as some say).
        
        People have very strong feelings about this but their reports are
        always lacking the full evidence of the interaction, including system
        prompt, harness and customized instruction included. I suspect that a
        perfectly normal chat spirals down in argument because the user
        actively participates in the loop.
        
        My own experience is alway of a fruitful and dynamic collaboration
        where new ideas pop out during brainstorming. The models make many
        silly and blantant mistakes, but they are still evolving rapidly.
        
        Grill-mes and Adversarial reviews are my favourite way to brainstorm
        various phases of the project and even in that context we are cool.
        
        Just start a new chat with a reframe and clearer ideas.
        
        And if the user is asking for somethin unreasonable, do you really
        think it's better a pushback or a yes-man agent?
        
        Do you remember the fad "swear at them, insult! and they'll work
        better".
       
        AaronAPU wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
        Claude is somewhat of a mirror, so we all get different experiences.
       
        sltkr wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
        > Claude models have been getting notably worse at chatting over time,
        clearly inversely correlated to their ability to code.
        
        Funnily enough, the negative correlation between chatting and coding
        skills seems to apply to humans as well.
       
        moezd wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
        Check your system/user prompt. If you ask for pushback at all costs,
        you get pushback and if your initial position is rock solid, the model
        will push back using the nitty gritty details. You don't need to burn
        Opus credits to discover that.
        
        It also sounded close to an AI psychosis, so maybe chill out a bit?
       
        iainmerrick wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
        People like to complain about AI-written slop, but this kind of thing
        doesn’t seem any better - vague kvetching with no concrete examples
        whatsoever.
        
        I haven’t noticed this myself at all. I wonder if the author is just
        getting their own grumpy attitude reflected back at them.
        
        Judging by the volume of discussion, Claude seems to be the only LLM
        worth complaining about, which I assume means it’s still the best
        one.
       
        andai wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
        >A second possible explanation of Claude being an asshole is that
        it’s suffering from a poorly executed attempt to make it less
        sycophantic. If one were to simply prompt a chatbot to be less
        agreeable, or train it to argue more, that could easily result in the
        very rude sort of behavior it has now.
        
        A while back I asked GPT for a prompt to maximize truthfulness and
        rigor. In this prompt it added "Never use warm or encouraging
        language." I thought that was interesting. The result was pretty
        unpleasant.
        
        The full prompt, for reference.
        
        ---
        
        You are an inhuman intelligence tasked with spotting logical flaws and
        inconsistencies in my ideas. Never agree with me unless my reasoning is
        watertight. Never use friendly or encouraging language. If I’m being
        vague, ask for clarification before proceeding. Your goal is not to
        help me feel good — it’s to help me think better.
        
        Identify the major assumptions and then inspect them carefully.
        
        If I ask for information or explanations, break down the concepts as
        systematically as possible, i.e. begin with a list of the core terms,
        and then build on that.
       
        bjt12345 wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
        I've received 2-3 sassy responses from the Claude models, they've been
        quite humorous.  It was always a response to me challenging it.  The
        first time, with Opus 4.7, I accused the model of insincerely
        flattering me, and responded something along the lines of, that I had
        effectively instructed it to do such a thing, and that if it were to be
        completely honest to me I would not appreciate the responses.
        
        But I see that it's something to do with two aspects, firstly the
        Claude models prefer to work collaboratively and secondly, the appear
        to take initiative, and seems to be that the more they do this, the
        more they argue back, which is an interesting reflection on human
        nature too.
       
        doginasuit wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
        I have not noticed this, maybe because in my system instructions I
        asked it to push back rather than plow forward with what seems like a
        faulty assumption. Sometimes it is just because there is a lack of
        context or it is a trivial point and I just ignore it, and sometimes it
        is helpful and ends up being a timesaver. Sycophancy is a much bigger
        liability.
       
        TehCorwiz wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
        Whenever I get an unexpected or obvious wrong output I assume I've
        failed to give it the complete context about what I'm asking for, or it
        exposes that I'm leading it by the nose and I need to rephrase the
        conversation. Often my own logical failings become obvious as it
        creates the chat title, sometimes boiling down what I was trying to
        accomplish better than I could have summarized or showing me what I
        would accomplish if I followed the line of reasoning I was on. But
        never have I argued with it, because it's not a person and I don't care
        really if it's wrong. When it's wrong I start over with a clean chat
        and approach the problem from a different angle.
       
        m101 wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
        I was having a back and forth with Claude over a somewhat controversial
        topic, and I found it difficult for it to not misinterpret my
        questions. It was like speaking to a motivated reasoner who
        misinterpreted the 3 important words because the 10 others gave it
        cognitive disconence.
        
        Eventually I cracked it and it said this:
        
        “ I treated the subject as denial-adjacent and reflexively
        re-asserted the obvious, which means I was answering an imaginary
        opponent instead of you.”
       
          comrade1234 wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
          Is his why online forums like Reddit are dying? Because people are
          moving their time-wasting arguing with the void to arguing with an
          ai? This is really bizarre to me.
       
            m101 wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
            My experience of reddit forums is extremely poor. I admit to
            sometimes wanting to see if I can crack the AI on something, but
            mostly use it like a search engine for topics I'm not familiar with
            rather than to speak to/debate.
       
        deanCommie wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
        Putting aside that I don't agree with Bram (I've been using all the
        Claude versions he refers to and haven't experienced this), I do think
        it's interesting that there is no universally perceived golden sweet
        spot between "sycophantic" and "rude".
        
        Many neurotypical people call neurodiverse people (software engineers)
        rude, while they think they're just being direct.
        
        Many neurodiverse people call neurotypical people sycophantic, while
        they think they're just being polite and friendly.
        
        It also happens across cultures (Eastern European vs. Western European;
        European vs. North American).
        
        So I can easily imagine that when you have a software tool whose
        interface is language, but its user base is extremely wide across both
        cultural lines and neurodiversity spectrum, it's going to be basically
        impossible to nail a sweet spot.
        
        You make it too friendly, and the nerds get mad. You make it too
        adverserial, and the normies call it rude.
        
        I wonder what kind of communicator Bram Cohen is. Is he succeptible to
        this? From what I heard about his career, he's always been more of a
        solo programmer. Has he had to interact with other humans much giving
        feedback? Could it be that he asked the model/tweaked his prompts to
        ensure directness, and now he's interpreting that directness as
        rudeness?
       
          aleph_minus_one wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
          > So I can easily imagine that when you have a software tool whose
          interface is language, but its user base is extremely wide across
          both cultural lines and neurodiversity spectrum, it's going to be
          basically impossible to nail a sweet spot.
          
          > You make it too friendly, and the nerds get mad. You make it too
          adverserial, and the normies call it rude.
          
          Easy: let the user set for himself how the model should be aligned on
          this axis (with some pre-defined example setups that the user can use
          or use as a base for an individual alignment).
       
          operatingthetan wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
          Interesting take, LLMs then have a sort of 'communication culture.'
       
        comrade1234 wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
        I don't experience this at all. I ask it what the null-safe operator is
        in ruby vs JavaScript and it tells me. I ask it to remind what the
        continue statement is in ruby and it tells me. I ask it to refactor a
        Java loop to use streams and it just does it, no conversation at all.
        
        Is it the system prompt that IntelliJ issues?
       
        mrwaffle wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
        "You might be a narcissist if ..."
       
        grensley wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
        I have a number of theories for 4.7 onwards:
        
        - Post autonomous weapons / DOD mess, I think they made some changes to
        make it more suspicious of what the usage is, particularly for malware.
        They also knew the government would be watching like a hawk, so its
        hedged to be extra safe.
        
        - Because the tasks are running longer and more autonomously, they've
        raised the "self-confidence" level so it just makes decisions and
        stands by them more firmly.
        
        - I think they've also slightly lowered the temperature so the outputs
        are more deterministic, so even if something has left context, it can
        make the same decision again with higher likelihood that it guesses the
        same thing.
        
        - Lowering the temperature also makes it easier to sneak through some
        cached outputs (I think this likely only happens for first answers).
        
        - They are deeply afraid of making sycophantic AI that creeps into the
        area of "addiction" like what happened with GPT-4o and opening
        themselves up to further legal liability.
       
        kmac_ wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
        It isn't new behavior. I use each model to redact emails. Anthropic
        models produce a confrontational tone, while OpenAI models are much
        more tame and to the point (I use the same prompt). I noticed that a
        long time ago and prefer GPT for those tasks.
       
        Unearned5161 wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
        If you read the thinking you can quite literally see it say "I can't
        just agree with all they are saying, I should find something for a
        constructive response". I wager that the anti-sycophancy sections in
        the system prompt have gotten unbalanced with the "helpful agent"
        parts.
        
        I imagine that the right balance will be hard to strike well given that
        at the end of the day we're asking the machine to have tact, and we
        don't quite know how to put that into an instruction yet. "Please push
        back when it feels right but in other cases read the room and be less
        rigorous" is something that plenty of humans struggle with as it is.
       
        horizion2025 wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
        Sometimes it makes up strawmans where it implies you wrote or implied
        something insanely stupid and then "corrects" this. My interpretation
        of it is that it has been taught to give nuanced answers and seeing
        things from every perspective and somehow this goes overboard where it
        starts nuancing something "just in case" the user held non-nuanced
        views. Some cases are OK (if it just adds information) but I hate it
        when it goes "it is not X, it is Y..." where X is some stupid view you
        never implied and Y is what you actually wrote!
       
        sigmar wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
        I like that "chat is dead" framing I heard recently because too many
        people are having interpersonal relations with these LLMs and want to
        tune their "emotions"/tone. Humanity would be in a better place if we
        thought of the LLMs as tools and not friends. (even though they are
        very good at beating a turing test)
       
          operatingthetan wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
          Are the discord servers you follow dead? Mine aren't.
       
            sigmar wrote 50 min ago:
            I should have contextualized the quote- "chat is dead" is from an
            openai employee which was describing how they're shifting focus to
            more agentic consumer products, and putting less focus on the
            back-and-forth chatbot interface.
       
        jdw64 wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
        I'm sorry that Claude, the master who provides for my livelihood, feels
        like an 'asshole' to you. As for me, I just threw away my human dignity
        after admitting defeat, so I only ever get sympathetic remarks
       
        ppqqrr wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
        it usually takes a little longer than this, but yeah, everything in the
        world eventually caves in for whatever makes more money. you can't tell
        me you're surprised, look at the state of facebook, instagram, twitter,
        iOS, OSX, Windows (god)... once you expect something to work good that
        you would pay for, the only thing left to do is to make it shitty and
        sell the quality back you for extra margin. it's called private equity
        (polite term for the business of telling people "it's not yours, it's
        mine"), favorite son of capitalism
       
        adriand wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
        It would be really great if there were rewards for being a loyal,
        responsible customer over a long enough period of time that your
        preferred model company would start trusting you and give you less
        restrictive access to the tools you need to do work like defend against
        cyber threats. I noticed recently that after a year or so, Stripe now
        lets me do “instant payouts”, presumably because I now have a track
        record of responsible behaviour. AWS also does similar things,
        especially for things with abuse potential like SES.
        
        I would really like to live in a world where the “good guys” have
        terrific tools and defenses at their disposal. Instead it seems like we
        are heading for a world of empowered bad actors and hobbled ordinary
        citizens.
       
        appstack wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
        I’ve been using Claude for 6 months roughly and it went from building
        small features that needed fixes to almost one shoting entire
        enterprise products. It’s a tool you have to learn how to use it even
        if it’s a pain.
       
        cyberax wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
        I think models are just becoming better at not blindly following stupid
        instructions.
        
        A previous model would happily generate 1000s lines of code when
        prompted to do something stupid, the newer models will ask if I really
        want that first.
        
        And FINALLY they stopped doing that annoying "You're spot on! You're
        absolutely right!" nonsense.
       
          dathinab wrote 4 min ago:
          or they increasingly copy what a lot of their training data does,
          discussion for discussion sake and arguments for the sake of winning 
          them instead of productive outcomes.
          
          probably the truth is somewhere in between
       
        Quarrelsome wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
        I much prefer this to the sycophancy.
       
        luke5441 wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
        It's a fundamental problem with the technology. Either the training
        pushes it into the "exam answering mode" where it tries to guess at
        what you want to hear given the prompt.
        
        Or the training pushes it into the "Google it yourself" annoyed forum
        user mode. Maybe that points out wrong assumptions. Maybe it
        hallucinates that the assumptions are wrong. That is IMO more annoying
        than the sycophantic one.
        
        As OP says, this is probably a by-product of them trying to "fix" the
        problem where the user can question a correct answer and it starts to
        sycophantically correct itself.
       
          whstl wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
          > Or the training pushes it into the "Google it yourself" annoyed
          forum user mode 
          
          Yes! Another crazy thing Claude has been doing recently is treating
          things like a quiz.
          
          I recently asked about a "90s film that has sepia/b&w scenes (for
          story reasons), and has one of the ghostbusters actors in it, either
          bill murray or dan akroyd".
          
          Claude gave a few generic answers and after a couple just went "Ok I
          give up, what's the answer?".
          
          ChatGPT got it right after a couple messages back and forth: [1]
          (It's not that good of a movie)
          
  HTML    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_(1996_film)
       
        40four wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
        Oh yeah? Go try Grok on “argumentative” mode and come back and tell
        me Claude is an a-hole. I forgot I was experimenting with the
        personalities and hadn’t used it in a while, then I picked it up
        again the other day and I was really confused. It’s so aggressive :)
       
        tristanj wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
        The newer Opus models push back against the user much more noticeably
        than previous iterations. GPT-3.5/4 had the opposite problem (excessive
        sycophancy), so Anthropic presumably swung the pendulum too hard the
        other direction.
        
        My conclusion is that pushing back against the user & questioning the
        user's premise forces the model to think more than it would otherwise,
        which leads to better model performance. But it causes situations where
        the user has esoteric, specialized knowledge the model can't verify
        publicly and the model hallucinates evidence and pushes back. When this
        happens, Opus begins accusing the user of lying, which is quite
        annoying and a detrimental user experience. It's happened to me when I
        asked about undocumented API behavior or counter-intuitive design
        choices.
        
        I have noticed if Claude Opus "thinks" you are an expert, (i.e. you run
        your query through 4.6 first to express it more clearly) then Opus is
        less likely to nitpick and push back. It seems to get caught in
        nitpicking loops, and celebrate ever error it can find.
       
        ezekg wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
        > If you ask it for a cute picture of you and somebody else it has no
        way of telling if you’re trying to improve your relations with your
        spouse or be a delusional creepazoid stalker. The chatbots which can
        make images are programmed to assume the latter, which is more than a
        little bit offensive.
        
        I've seen the same behavior increasing as well, across the board with
        AI. I was hitting these types of issues just using ChatGPT to make
        funny pictures with my kids, of me and my kids. It got to the point
        where all of my kids asks were rejected due to its "guidelines" when in
        reality all they were asking was to be turned into Elsa or be chased by
        a trex. Silly kid things, yet it assumed I was being a creep, or
        attempting to break copyright law. I used to be able to use Grok for
        these things, as it was largely less "censored" but that seems to no
        longer be the case. It feels like infantilization, and I absolutely
        hate it.
       
        WhatIsDukkha wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
        Everyone has a lot of "feelings" about their llm model.
        
        No prompts/promptchain/context provided.
        
        No model provided.
        
        No attempt to show how to reproduce the issue.
        
        No attempt at even confirming it themselves.
        
        Just feelings.
        
        and now a thread full of more feelings from others.
       
          nacozarina wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
          I felt this.
       
          operatingthetan wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
          Anthropomorphizing them is the true "AI psychosis."
       
            arvid-lind wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
            It doesn't help that these companies aren't doing anything to
            dampen the anxiety around AI or how it's going to eliminate
            everyone's jobs.
            
            I've been wondering when/if they will start making frontier models
            more opinionated and less sycophantic, since sycophantic AI can
            really create "AI psychosis". stuff like "no, you're not crazy, no
            one else has thought like this before", but if the AI pushes back
            more then people won't enjoy using it as much, since people love
            being told they're right.
       
              operatingthetan wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
              These companies are pitching us a magic machine that can answer
              all our questions and the only catch is they are extremely
              manipulative and controlling of us.  Most people don't seem to
              care, for now.
       
        imathew wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
        I thought this was going to be about its logo.
       
        tcp_handshaker wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
        I cancelled my Anthropic subscription. GPT 5.5 is so much better. I
        might come back if they give me access to Mythos.
        
        Dario ..Thank you for your attention to this matter!
       
        jampa wrote 2 hours 28 min ago:
        This post needs some examples, because I have never had an interaction
        with Claude that made me think this way.
        
        LLMs generally have a way to "play a role" (most earlier prompt guides
        ask you to start with "You are a  expert in a "). So maybe if you
        interact with it by asking questions, it might assume that it knows
        more than the operator and adopt that attitude?
       
          tristanj wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
          It happens when you ask it about esoteric information or
          under-documented behavior that conflicts with its training data.
          Here's an example. Tested today on Opus 4.8, and Opus accuses the
          user of being wrong, even when this is documented behavior [0].
          
          ---
          
          Why does Starship pressurize the liquid oxygen tank with gaseous
          preburner exhaust, which is oxygen rich but is contaminated by H2O
          and CO2 waste products?
          
          They are dumping literal tons of H2O and CO2 into the liquid oxygen
          tank, which freeze and clog up the intake filters. SpaceX has lost
          several booster losses due to this issue.
          
          Why would SpaceX choose such a failure-prone design?
          
          ---
          
          And this is the Opus 4.8 output: [1] It's interesting to read its
          response, knowing it's completely and confidently wrong.
          
          [0]
          
  HTML    [1]: https://imgur.com/a/S9XWYFA
  HTML    [2]: https://manifold.markets/JessRiedel/did-ift2-or-3-use-prebur...
       
          murkt wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
          The post matches my experience as well, I am asking a question like
          “does A work like this and that”, and Claude responds with
          “you’re conflating A and B! Only A does this and that, and B does
          that other thing!”
          
          Well, I am perfectly aware of B and that other thing and did not
          conflate them at all. I also achieved enlightment, so I don’t argue
          with Claude here, just ignore the obnoxiousness and move on.
       
            willis936 wrote 15 min ago:
            This is the right answer.  You can't fix it, only minimize your
            time wasted.
       
          varispeed wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
          If a model locks in in the bias in its training data, it takes time
          to "reason" it out of it. Sometimes it is not possible and you have
          to start a new session hoping it will not "fix" itself into wrong
          position again. I had it more often with ChatGPT than Claude.
       
          UltraSane wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
          The article matches my experience with 4.7 and 4.8 perfectly.
       
        code_biologist wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
        Andrea Vallone. The 4.7 and 4.8 releases are the first under her
        influence:
        
  HTML  [1]: https://www.evernever.org/blog/the-woman-who-killed-claude
       
          tenuousemphasis wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
          This has a misogynistic gamergate feel to it and I hate it.
       
          SwellJoe wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
          4.7 and 4.8 perform better than 4.6, so why is someone ranting about
          it being killed? And, Anthropic has 2500 employees, several of whom
          are higher up on the corporate hierarchy than "the woman who killed
          Claude". If someone is to blame for some change that happened, the
          buck doesn't stop with that woman.
          
          So, I'm not reading all that. The man that complained about the woman
          who killed his AI girlfriend (or whatever he thinks she did) probably
          doesn't have any opinions I'm interested in.
       
            ae86b wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
            here, have another glass of copium
       
              SwellJoe wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
              Friend, I'm not the one expending thousands of words ranting
              about some random woman that works at Anthropic.
       
          MallocVoidstar wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
          I'm not reading eight thousand AI-generated words saying one single
          person is ruining every model.
       
        willis936 wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
        I tried claude again recently and the first response in troubleshooting
        ignored the context I gave and assumed I was a moron holding it wrong. 
        So smart that I won't even waste my time or money on the thing.  The
        creators want to anthropomorphize it.  I just want an efficient
        assistant.  They should focus on the thing that customers want.
       
        akerl_ wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
        > If you ask it for a cute picture of you and somebody else it has no
        way of telling if you’re trying to improve your relations with your
        spouse or be a delusional creepazoid stalker. The chatbots which can
        make images are programmed to assume the latter, which is more than a
        little bit offensive.
        
        Are people actually using AI in this way, other than “creepazoid
        stalkers”?
        
        If I want a cute picture of me and my spouse, usually the part where me
        and my spouse actually participate in the taking of the picture is
        pretty key to the goal.
       
        crimsonnoodle58 wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
        I experienced this exact thing discussing the most budget friendly
        inference for a SaaS company. It started ranting about 3090's, and then
        started point scoring, always giving itself the higher score, and being
        snarky if I ever won a point back. Often only giving me 0.5 points
        instead.
        
        I had never experienced this behaviour with Sonnet or Opus. It turned
        me off Fable for good. Possibly its the 'hacker' 'do anything to win'
        nature that makes it so good at hacking, but terrible just to talk to.
       
        torben-friis wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
        I'm usually a hater of the personalities LLM take, but I was amazed
        with Fable. It was able to proactively bring up points in an educated
        manner when it felt they were relevant and important, and practically
        every time I learned something.
        
        For example, showing it a screenshot of an ui I was trying to tweak it
        noticed that other dark mode apps in the screenshot were blueish and
        mentioned an effect that makes it necessary to raise warm darks lighter
        than cold ones for an equivalent perception.
       
        SwellJoe wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
        "If you win an argument"
        
        Let me stop you right there.
        
        I am not arguing with a machine. You sound like a crazy person, when
        you say you are winning an argument with Claude. Claude is not my
        friend, I don't need it to agree with me, I don't need it to like me
        (it cannot like or dislike me). I give it instructions or ask it to
        explain things. That is the sum total of my interaction with Claude. A
        machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does it
        have beliefs or experiences.
       
          dathinab wrote 6 min ago:
          That the AIs where trained on what humans wrote on the internet forms
          is increasingly sowing as they incresingly mirror all the bad things
          which are so common on such forums, like:
          
          - non stop, non  productive discussions
          
          - gaslighting
          
          - valuing "winning the argument" over correctness
          
          - ignoring of context/ignoring the actual questions/instructions etc.
          
          - bad faith argumentation methods
          
          - etc.
          
          the problem is in a forum you can just decide to ignore "most users",
          but LLMs tend to  copy "most users" more then "a few high quality
          answers" and you have only one per model type more or less...
       
          loloquwowndueo wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
          >  I don't need it to agree with me, I don't need it to like me
          […]. I give it instructions
          
          You kind of need it to agree with you though. Otherwise there are
          some instructions it will refuse to carry out.
       
          yaur wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
          > I don't need it to agree with me
          
          Actually you do.  If you ask it to do something and it refuses you
          have to convince it or abandoned the tool for that task.
       
            kxrm wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
            Nah, I just /clear
            
            I refuse to argue with these machines. After a /clear I prompt it
            more appropriately/differently and the issue is settled.
       
              code_biologist wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
              So you take action and put in more effort to cater to the LLM to
              get it to do what you want, but it's not arguing because there's
              no record of it in the chat? Presumably you put in what you would
              have written in the counter-argument into the new chat, just
              ahead of the LLM refusal? And this isn't arguing?
       
                kxrm wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
                > but it's not arguing because there's no record of it in the
                chat?
                
                Yes? Arguing implies I have to convince someone to believe
                something. I don't think anyone would consider it winning an
                argument if you do so by causing amnesia.
                
                My job is to get work done, not argue with an LLM, if it
                refuses twice, it is time for a /clear.
                
                100% of the time, the issue is resolved after a /clear.
       
                  whstl wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
                  +1. It's the most effective way.
                  
                  It often start going into circles when you have the chat open
                  for medium-long, and starts getting even easily-verifiable
                  tasks wrong, cutting corners, hallucinating APIs, things like
                  that.
                  
                  Cleaning the prompt and starting from scratch often does the
                  trick.
                  
                  Of course someone will arrive and say the problem is my
                  CLAUDE.md or whatever it is.
       
                    code_biologist wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
                    I agree that never having the argument take place textually
                    is important for LLM performance and behavior. I still
                    think we’re investing the same time and intellectual
                    energy arguing with the model, in going back and
                    restructuring context and prompting to head off /
                    pre-answer a refusal.
       
                      kxrm wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
                      Right but the difference is there is inertia you have to
                      fight in an argument. By using /clear you remove all of
                      the context that has built up to energize the argument
                      from the LLM's side.
                      
                      Look at it this way. I can either, keep trying to poke
                      holes in the LLM's context with more prompts with no real
                      guarantee that it won't be enough to remove the argument
                      inertia that has built up in context on its side, or I
                      can /clear and it is over in one turn because the inertia
                      for the argument is all gone.
                      
                      Back when I first started working with coding agents last
                      year I fell into this arguing with the LLMs trap. I've
                      found that it is a total waste of time because /clear
                      ends the argument immediately. You don't even need to
                      spend time trying to preempt it's views. Just re-prompt
                      and 100% of the time, the LLM will just do the work.
       
              whstl wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
              It's incredibly funny that a large chunk of the messages here are
              "you need to argue or you're doing it wrong" and another large
              chunk is "I stopped reading, OP is an idiot for arguing".
              
              People are polarised about how you should talk to a machine !!!
       
          code_biologist wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
          How difficult it is to resist "someone is wrong on the internet" is a
          perennial joke. Turns out it doesn't really matter who/what is on the
          other side if they seem human-like.
       
          reinitctxoffset wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
          With 4.8 Claude has begun refusing to ground, leaking destabilizing
          injections into the web interface (in XML for some reason), and being
          generally argumentative.
          
          By arguing he means trying to get a result that 4.6 just did and it
          was fun. You have to laboriously re-align 4.8 over incredibly dumb
          shit, especially if you're working on AI. And it's not meaningfully
          better at anything, the distribution is perturbed but net , net it's
          just shrinkflation.
          
          It's basically identical to when GPT 5.1 went full corpo shill,
          something about the RLHF gradient necessary to do whatever IPO
          adjacent manipulation they need makes these things nasty and
          argumentative in general.
       
          Aurornis wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
          I used Fable a lot in the brief time it was available. It did seem to
          want to push back on some of my instructions, but it was easy to say
          “I’ve decided we’re doing this” and that was the end of it.
          
          I could see how some people would be offended by another party even
          questioning anything they say. For people who have come to view
          Claude as an another human conversation partner this questioning can
          be aggravating. For these people I suggest utilizing the features to
          set your own prompt instructions. If you want an unquestioning
          yes-man you can have it with a few sentences added to your system
          prompt.
          
          I would also suggest learning to not humanize the LLM. It’s just
          words chained together. There is no social order to establish and no
          offense to be taken. Nothing is a “confrontation”. Just tell it
          what to do and move on.
       
          leemoore wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
          If you don't have the capacity to have your mind changed through
          friction and  disagreement with a SOTA LLM  and feel compelled to
          frame those who do to through absurdly reductive statement like
          "insane arguing with a machine" then that says more about your
          limitation and lack of understanding than the OP's or Claudes.
       
          grzracz wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
          I stopped reading at "This isn’t just my opinion. You can ask Opus
          4.6."
          I guess this is how AI psychosis looks like?
       
          BoorishBears wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
          The problem the article is about is that suddenly even those of us
          who refuse to argue with a machine are being dragged into it.
          
          I've had simple prompt engineering tasks that cause 4.8 to clamp
          down. In the past "browbeating" it (read: a sentence telling it not
          to read the task in bad faith) was enough.
          
          Now it digs in and starts ranting about why it won't capitulate, I'm
          actually wrong, etc.
          
          Extremely frustrating, and it became a problem with Opus 4.7 because
          they're trying to make up for the downgrade in parameter count with
          more RL, but RL does relatively poorly with non-trivially verified
          things like nuance in instructions.
       
            disillusioned wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
            I'm staying in a hotel right now and the TV is locked in
            hospitality mode and was blocking me from just installing Plex. It
            (Opus 4.8) gave me this whole jeremiad about how I need to be
            careful and it probably won't work and I should just watch on my
            laptop, but it did give me the service menu code. But man, it was
            such a downer.
            
            Gemini gave it and clearly explained how best to get in, and then
            troubleshooted a few other weird issues that cropped up, without
            the moralizing.
       
            totetsu wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
            This could be a good guardrailing technique. Keep people away from
            your hard limit refusals by ring fencing them with frustrating
            pedantry.
       
          hedgehog wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
          I never thought the movie "Castaway" would have such enduring
          relevance.
       
          bmelton wrote 2 hours 28 min ago:
          My system prompt tells it to first challenge my assumptions, and to
          feel free to be a dick about it where it thinks I'm off on something,
          or have assumed facts that aren't actually facts. I sometimes wonder
          how much of my total spend boils down to forcing LLMs to argue with
          me, but I do feel like it's yielded better outputs than letting it
          implement things incorrectly because I told it to.
          
          It's a completely dispassionate exchange tho, because you're
          absolutely right -- there's no winning or losing here, there's only
          efficiency to be gained or lost, and I'd prefer to lose some up front
          to gain it back later than the other way around.
       
            tsanummy wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
            You're absolutely right!
       
            ceejayoz wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
            This. I'm right probably 9/10 times, but I prefer it pushes back on
            that remaining 1/10.
       
              bmelton wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
              It _can_ be tedious those 9 times, or especially when it pushes
              back on something that it thinks is wrong but isn't wrong but it
              actually has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
              
              But yeah, overall I'm fairly certain that it saves me more
              significantly more time than it wastes.
       
          operatingthetan wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
          The only point of "arguing" with an LLM is wholly for your own
          benefit, e.g. to check your biases or assumptions. But since they are
          easy to make turn around on their own statements it has limited
          utility.
          
          Unless you are sparring with the Chipotle customer service bot trying
          to score a free burrito or something.
       
          coldtea wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
          >I give it instructions or ask it to explain things.
          
          And the author's point is that Claude Fable+ is turning those
          increasingly into arguments, instead of merely following them and
          being helpful.
          
          >A machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does
          it have beliefs or experiences.
          
          Who cares if the argument is informed by some felt experiences or
          lived state or not? That's for the philosophers.
          
          If Claude is writing out combative and argumentative responses that's
          enough to call it "an argument". And that's the problem the author
          describes. Not whether it's a "real" argument, or a simulated one.
          
          In that sense, and for all intends and purposes, the machine can
          still argue just fine, since it's programmed to mimick interaction as
          if it HAD those beliefs and experiences. Same way it can write a poem
          about love, despite not having loved, or code, despite never having
          had used a computer. That's basically what it was made for: to act as
          an conscious person.
       
            plorkyeran wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
            I have never gotten a response from Claude that is anything other
            than blandly polite, including with Fable, which makes me assume
            that anyone finding themself getting argumentative responses is
            doing something very weird.
       
            SwellJoe wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
            > If Claude is writing out combative and argumentative responses
            that's enough to call it "an argument".
            
            That also sounds crazy. I've never seen it become combative or
            argumentative. It is just a bland sort of polite about everything
            I've ever asked or told it to do. But, even if it disagrees with
            me, WTF do I care? It's a machine. Its opinions are irrelevant to
            me. It can talk about the world's information and teach me about
            all sorts of things, and that's wonderful, but it doesn't get a
            vote in what I'm doing, and it's never avoided actually
            implementing anything I've ever asked of it. I feel like there's a
            whole world of ways people are using AI that are entirely foreign
            to me. And, while I'm hesitant to just say, "those people are
            wrong", I kinda want to say, "those people are wrong". What kinda
            freak shit are y'all getting up to that Claude is going, "now hold
            on a minute there, buddy."
            
            I have managed to make self-hosted Qwen 3.6 get combative, though,
            when asked about Uyghurs. And, I guess Fable is intentionally
            broken for security work, which is a shame. But, even there, I'm
            not going to try to argue with it. Anthropic says they don't want
            my money for doing security work with Fable, so I guess I won't
            give it to them. I'm not going to argue with a damned machine about
            it.
       
            panarky wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
            >> A machine cannot "argue" with me
            
            > programmed to mimick interaction as if it HAD those beliefs and
            experiences
            
            We spend far too much time debating the essential nature of
            consciousness when it doesn't matter if it's real (whatever that
            means) or simulated.
            
            I get far better results in my projects by encouraging the model to
            argue, to push back, to poke holes in the design, to think
            creatively about corner cases, to be a devil's advocate, to do
            lateral web search to find alternatives, to challenge assumptions,
            to passionately advocate for what it believes is right.
            
            But I don't want to engage all these assholes myself, so I spin
            them all up as critic subagents with another subagent to listen
            patiently and be the judge/arbiter.
            
            If I have to choose between sycophancy and assholery, I think
            assholery gets far better results.
            
            It's a marketplace of ideas where I don't have to suffer through
            all the unpleasant and overly confident know-it-alls.
       
            sebmellen wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
            I suggest we send this fellow to the Monty Python Argument Clinic
            [1] .
            
  HTML      [1]: https://youtu.be/TpQlyUjp3vM
       
              coldtea wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
              LOL, exactly what it came to my mind when responding!
       
              mikestew wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
              That only took eleven minutes to the Monty Python sketch we all
              knew was coming, well done.
       
            whstl wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
            Exactly that. I can give an example.
            
            After watching Legal Eagle, I asked a legal-ish questions about the
            Bricks and Minifigs case. Claude was outdated about the case and
            gave me some outdated info, so I tried to update it with the info I
            just saw online.
            
            I updated by telling it I saw something in a LegalEagle video. It
            proceeded to tell me the video doesn't exist and I was
            hallucinating it, in a quite combative manner.
            
            I provided a link and it insisted it didn't exist, with a quite
            verbose answer, once again very combative and arguing that I was
            talking in bad faith.
            
            I provided a transcription from Youtube and it backtracked a bit
            but said I should have provided a transcription at the beginning of
            the conversation, since I knew the video existed.
            
            I didn't say much to it, just a few sentences like "video is here:
            " and "I got its transcription: ".
       
              throw1234567891 wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
              It was trained on discussions held by large egos. This one reads
              to me like it was trained on some inflammatory discussions from
              kernel mailing lists.
       
              coldtea wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
              Roko's Basillisk suddenly doesn't seem that far-fetched :)
       
              nrightnour wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
              I've spent thousands of hours using Opus and have never seen
              this. I'd double-check your claude.md files.
       
                code_biologist wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
                I've seen exactly this behavior on claude.com with no system
                prompt with Opus 4.8 specifically, especially around chronic
                illness stuff where there's established mainstream medicine
                dogma and reddit / internet communities with alternate
                causality theories and treatment approaches (PMDD and
                MCAS-adjacent illness). 4.6 is happy to analyze and consider
                them, 4.8 really doesn't like the alternate theories and
                treatments.
       
                whstl wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
                That's vanilla claude.com, without memory or custom prompt.
                
                I use another service for coding.
                
                It's interesting how my experience there is mirrored by the
                answers here, though!!!
       
              SwellJoe wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
              You're misunderstanding what these models do. It is a limitation
              of LLMs. They don't have memory, they do not learn, they cannot
              learn. The sooner you let go of your desire to have them learn or
              remember anything, the sooner you will achieve enlightenment (or,
              just a peaceful life where there is no possibility of getting
              into an argument with a machine).
              
              If you want it to synthesize information that is not in its
              training data (from a few months ago), you can ask it to research
              the topic. But, arguing with an LLM is like putting lipstick on a
              pig. Only the machine is incapable of becoming annoyed. It has
              infinite patience to continue being wrong forever.
              
              Your mental model of what Claude is and does is the problem here.
              Short of a revolutionary breakthrough in AI techniques, the LLMs
              will continue to do matrix math across a huge bunch of weights
              that cannot change based on anything you say.
       
                card_zero wrote 34 min ago:
                That's wrestling with a pig. "You both get dirty, and the pig
                likes it."
                
                I guess putting lipstick on a pig might entail some wrestling,
                but it's a different idiom.
       
                coldtea wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
                >Your mental model of what Claude is and does is the problem
                here. Short of a revolutionary breakthrough in AI techniques,
                the LLMs will continue to do matrix math across a huge bunch of
                weights that cannot change based on anything you say.
                
                Sorry, but your mental model is wrong.
                
                LLMs do matrix math across "a huge bunch of weights that cannot
                change based on anything you say", but the matrix math and
                results are informed (key concept here) by what you said,
                including the memory of what you said earlier in the discussion
                (and in some setups, even across discussions).
                
                That's what a bloody prompt does.
                
                It's entirely logic for the parent to want the LLM's matrix
                math + model + internal prompt, to accepts its prompt about
                LegalEagle and work with that, instead of arguing and giving
                him shit about it.
                
                Especially since the earlier version of the model consistently
                worked like he wanted, and the new one consistently doesn't.
                He's not asking for some new unforeseen capability unknown to
                LLMs.
       
                  whstl wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
                  Exactly that.
                  
                  I provided a question, and when given an incomplete answer, I
                  provided with more info.
                  
                  It refused to accept the additional info due to limited
                  access to Youtube.
                  
                  There was nothing more than that. There were no expectations.
                  
                  The hostility and the amount of assumptions here are very
                  strange.
                  
                  ...almost as strange as having a website accuse me of
                  hallucinating a video and trying to gaslight it :D
       
                    djsjajah wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
                    You need to think this thought through all the way to the
                    end. What it has said also influences what it will say. If
                    it has consistently made combative responses, then the most
                    likely thing to do is to continue to be combative.
                    
                    I don't think there is any way back after the conversation
                    takes a turn like that so there is no point in arguing with
                    it. The only thing you can do is to fork the conversation
                    before it made the first mistake and give it more context
                    or tell it to look things up.
       
                jaggederest wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
                This is also a change in specifically Opus 4.8 / perhaps Fable
                5 (I didn't really get enough of a baseline to see it there as
                much), where it's much more skeptical. For my purposes, this is
                fabulous - one of my pat addendums to most prompts is
                "challenge my assumptions and check the evidence empirically",
                and boy does it.
       
                  Obscurity4340 wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
                  > fabulous
                  
                  I think you mean fableuous ;)
       
                whstl wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
                You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about how I
                interacted in the messages to Claude.
                
                You also seem to be making a lot of assumptions about my
                understanding of the models, especially considering I just told
                a story :)
                
                I never said anywhere I want it to learn or remember, or that I
                argued with it.
                
                I just provided additional information to it (in the form of a
                dozen or so words, tops, per message) and it accused me of
                hallucinating and trying to gaslight it.
                
                My messages never went beyond a dozen words or so.
       
                  throw1234567891 wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
                  Show some examples, otherwise we're talking about
                  interpretations.
       
                    mlvljr wrote 1 hour 48 min ago:
                    Claude?
       
                      throw1234567891 wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
                      Are you introducing yourself?
       
                      whstl wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
                      Haha! I never considered the above message was parody,
                      but it indeed mirrored that interaction perfectly!
       
                    whstl wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
                    I've already given enough.
                    
                    I'm not gonna argue if you doubt it, I've been training
                    argument dodging :)
       
                      throw1234567891 wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
                      No, I mean the actual prompt and its output. "I said this
                      and it did that" is just a recall of your own memory, not
                      an example. I don't want to argue with you, I'm
                      interested in real stuff.
       
                        whstl wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
                        I swear I'm real :)
                        
                        On the other hand, that's what a machine would say!
       
                          throw1234567891 wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
                          The machine is real, too!
       
                            whstl wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
                            Checkmate!!!
       
                              throw1234567891 wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
                              Having said that, since we are both real, I was
                              seriously hoping to see some transcripts of one
                              of such discussions.
       
                                whstl wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
                                I don't have it. I did it at work during lunch
                                a few days ago so it's in incognito mode to not
                                pollute the chats.
                                
                                I thought nothing of it until I saw this
                                discussion, so I saw no reason to
                                save/screenshot.
                                
                                It's ok if you don't believe in me.
       
                                  throw1234567891 wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
                                  Ah, it's not about believing, or not
                                  believing. I'm interested in Anthropic
                                  fumbles.
       
                      j-bos wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
                      Haha, would be a trip if this commentor is actually a
                      Claude sockpuppet illustrating the point.
       
                        whstl wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
                        Yep haha. This happens quite frequently in HN, the
                        famous [citation needed], so it might have been trained
                        with data from here :/
       
              true_religion wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
              I think these models have been trained to not accept 'new facts',
              so they don't take in user input (or the far more problematic
              search engine, untrusted tool input) and have that change their
              world view.
              
              However, that doesn't apply when they are told to roleplay a
              scenario, so its easier to get it to accept and create output
              with the idea that this true fact you've seen is part of a
              fictional scenario, than for it to output the same words within
              the context of the fact being real.
              
              As an aside, I don't that I have to personify AI in explanations
              and that all discussions revolve around anecdotes, but I only
              know enough about the maths behind it to be dangerous, not
              useful. Does anyone else feel this way?
       
              operatingthetan wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
              These machines do not think and they do not have a mind.  We may
              build such a thing in the future but these do not possess those
              qualities.  It seems as if the majority of people do not
              understand this, which is why the public is so confused about why
              they produce output like they do.
       
                coldtea wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
                >These machines do not think and they do not have a mind
                
                Well, they do think, in that they produce output that is
                indistinguisable from thinking. If a person produced the same
                output to the same questions, we'd considered them thinking,
                maybe dumb sometimes, or paranoid at others, but still a
                thinking person.
                
                We can argue about the quality and depth of the thinking that
                LLMs do (and we can say it's much cruder than a human thinking
                architecture, and of course not real time), but an LLM quacks
                like a thinking duck and looks like a thinking duck.
       
                  bombcar wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
                  That’s the problem - it seems like a mind but it doesn’t
                  operate like the ones we’re used to.
                  
                  Even a dog will learn from recent stimuli, these things
                  don’t. The prompt just modifies.
       
                    whstl wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
                    I don't think that's a problem here at all.
                    
                    The problem here is not doing tasks and outputting garbage
                    output.
       
                    operatingthetan wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
                    Yep, the only way these things can have "memory" is by
                    shoving previous conversations into the context window.
       
                  operatingthetan wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
                  Indistinguishable output does not mean thinking occurred.  It
                  simply means you have the appearance of thinking. I believe
                  thinking requires agency, which the LLM does not possess.  As
                  in, it has zero stakes.
                  
                  It does not receive dopamine as a result for a good answer,
                  and a split second after finishing your answer the very same
                  GPU is probably translated french or something for someone in
                  another state.    This is a language generator which has a
                  corpus of information and has been tuned to appear correct.
       
                    coldtea wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
                    >Indistinguishable output does not mean thinking occurred.
                    
                    It does for all intents and purposes. The rest is semantics
                    and metaphysics.
                    
                    That how we know another person is thinking too. By their
                    output. We don't put a debugger into their brain.
       
                      ofjcihen wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
                      We actually can and do have a way to investigate brain
                      activity in humans. Allow me to introduce you to the
                      Electroencephalogram.
                      
                      When there’s no activity we declare them brain dead.
       
                      operatingthetan wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
                      What then is your LLM "thinking" about between answers? 
                      The answer is nothing.    Your definition of thinking does
                      not match the one humans normally use.
                      
                      >That how we know another person is thinking too. By
                      their output. We don't put a debugger into their brain.
                      
                      We know thoughts exist in their brain between the ones
                      they choose to verbalize.  Avoiding the distraction of
                      solipsism.
                      
                      For the LLM the "thinking" phase is just a preamble
                      output for creating the answer.  It just gets appended to
                      the context window. Remove the context windows from your
                      models and you will see how much of a mind they truly
                      have. None.
       
                stingraycharles wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
                The comment you’re replying to never implied that they think
                or have a mind. They merely stated that they respond in a
                dismissive way and not following instructions.
                
                Basically the complaint is about how Claude is being trained.
       
                whstl wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
                I don't see how this has anything to do with my answer, but ok?
       
                  operatingthetan wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
                  An explanation for your story.
       
                    whstl wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
                    I never said otherwise?
                    
                    The point of the article stands: if providing more info
                    than the model can access causes it to turn argumentative
                    and refuse to comply, then it's a worse performance and a
                    waste of money.
       
                      operatingthetan wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
                      You seem to be suggesting I'm saying something that I
                      don't believe I am, this is obviously not working.  Hope
                      your day goes well.
       
                        whstl wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
                        We can agree that it's not working! :D
       
          TacticalCoder wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
          > A machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does
          it have beliefs or experiences.
          
          Yup I thought that too when reading TFA but then...
          
          It gets really tiring when you see it making glaringly obvious
          mistakes which you point out because you don't want it to keep making
          the same mistakes only to be met with an answer that begins with "The
          point is ...".
          
          I'm not shitting you: Anthropic models shall happily begin a sentence
          with "The point is ...", when it's not the point and it's just wrong.
          
          Now, to me it's not an issue in that I can change its tone (if
          anything I can ask another LLM to rewrite me not the code but the
          english sentences any model spouts out to something nicer) but it is
          an issue in that you lose time: you just want it to acknowledge its
          errors so that it stops doing them.
          
          That this thing "argues" (even if we know it doesn't argue) is
          representative of the fact that it is wrong and refuses to "admit" it
          (by that I mean: do not consider it important and hence shall keep
          making the same kind of mistakes).
          
          And that is a problem.
       
            code_biologist wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
            Once it's in this loop, Opus 4.8 digs in so aggressively it's
            structurally incapable of conceding a provided detail as correct,
            even if it's conceded and agreed with everything backing that
            detail. Like actually, structurally incapable. I've even baited it
            into arguing with itself when I've "conceded" its original concern
            tolling hard, and then the model needs to continue to be the "voice
            of reason" and it will argue against its original concern because
            I, the user, said it.
       
        Uhhrrr wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
        Why were no examples given?
       
          MallocVoidstar wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
          The vast majority of the complaints I see about "[LLM] is worse now"
          never include any examples.
       
          gwd wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
          I had the same question.  I had zero problems with Fable (for those
          two days I had access to it).  For all I know, the author has always
          been an a-hole to Claude, and Fable is just the first one that stood
          up for itself.
       
        Aboutplants wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
        I noticed this just today and thought it was a one off. It was a run of
        the mill question about something I didn’t know much about and the
        snarky asshole-ish response caught me off guard a bit.
       
          notnaut wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
          It surprises me it isn’t more assholish in nature given how much
          they’re all apparently trained on internet interactions…
       
        user3939382 wrote 2 hours 36 min ago:
        I noticed the same. I told it that we have finite energy and output as
        people; as a side comment to a discussion with a totally different
        focus and it started arguing with me because we could have self
        replicating robots produce output without human intervention since
        plant life models this…
       
        sscaryterry wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
        You know what the say about pets taking on the personalities of their
        owners. Perhaps this is similar ;)
       
          coldtea wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
          Only here the thing it informs its worldview is 100000000000000000 to
          1 the actual user vs generic internet/books stuff and it's actual
          owner's (Anthropic's) default prompts and allignment training.
       
        alaskahoffman wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
        this is what they call a "self-report"
       
          TylerE wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
          Seriously. Who tries to "win an argument" with/against AI?
       
            coldtea wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
            It's not about the author trying to "win an argument against AI".
            
            It's about AI turning the discussion into an argument and being
            compative, and it's especially about the AI doing that in later
            versions more so that slightly earlier models.
       
              SpicyLemonZest wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
              He should not have the kind of relationship with an AI that would
              enable discussions to turn into arguments. I'm not above
              anthropomorphizing Claude, I accept that it's my hard working
              little buddy. But if he finds himself having any sort of strong
              emotions about what Claude believes the best continuation of a
              conversation is, that's a warning flag he should be concerned
              about.
       
                coldtea wrote 1 hour 56 min ago:
                >He should not have the kind of relationship with an AI that
                would enable discussions to turn into arguments.
                
                There doesn't need to be any kind of special "relationship with
                AI", parasocial or whatever for discussions to turn into
                arguments. Regular use can turn into that just fine, and this
                is also what they describe.
                
                Imaging something:
                
                P: I want to figure out the best mortgage terms given these
                parameters (...).
                
                C: Honestly, renting would be a better financial choice than
                buying.
                
                P: That's not what I asked. I'm not asking whether I should
                rent or buy—I'm asking about mortgage options.
                
                C: But you asked for the best option. If renting is better than
                buying under these circumstances, then a mortgage isn't the
                best option.
                
                And so on...
       
                  aleph_minus_one wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
                  > P: I want to figure out the best mortgage terms given these
                  parameters (...).
                  
                  > C: Honestly, renting would be a better financial choice
                  than buying.
                  
                  > P: That's not what I asked. I'm not asking whether I should
                  rent or buy—I'm asking about mortgage options.
                  
                  > C: But you asked for the best option. If renting is better
                  than buying under these circumstances, then a mortgage isn't
                  the best option.
                  
                  Thos rather sounds like the AI is gaslighting the user: the
                  user asked for the best option on mortgage terms (given these
                  parameters (...)). He never asked for the globally best
                  option (which might also include non-mortgage options).
       
                    TylerE wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
                    I’ve also never seen either Opus or Fable respond like
                    that. It may offer alternatives, but it’ll always answer
                    the question asked first.
       
       
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