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Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

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Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#111

Post by baggachipz »

RayVR wrote: post #91
baggachipz wrote: post #82

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

As an American, using it for technical projects, I find it extremely annoying. The only tactic I’ve found that helps is telling it to be highly critical. I still get overly positive starts but the response is more useful.

I think we, as Americans who are technical, are more appreciative of short and critical answers. I'm talking about people who have soul-searching conversations with LLMs, of which there are many.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#112

Post by finaard »

uncircle wrote: post #79
bradley13 wrote: post #11

This applies to so many AIs. I don't want a bubbly sycophant. I don't want a fake personality or an anime avatar. I just want a helpful assistant. I also don't get wanting to talk to an AI. Unless you are alone, that's going to be irritating for everyone else around.

I want an AI modeled after short-tempered stereotypical Germans or Eastern Europeans, not copying the attitude of non-confrontational Californians that say “dude, that’s awesome!” a dozen times a day. And I mean that unironically.

As a German not working in Germany - I often get the feedback that the initial contact with me is rather off-putting, but over time people start appreciating my directness.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#113

Post by catigula »

1. Gemini is better at this. It will predicate any follow-up question you pose to it with a paragraph about how amazing and insightful you are. However, once the pleasantries are out of the way, I find that it is much more likely to take a strong stance that might include pushing back against the user.

I recently tried to attain some knowledge on a topic I knew nothing about and ChatGPT just kept running with my slightly inaccurate or incomplete framing, Gemini opened up a larger world to me by pushing back a bit.

2. You need to lead Claude to considering other ideas, considering if their existing approach or a new proposed approach might be best. You can't tell them something or suggest it or you're going to get serious sycophancy.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#114

Post by rootsudo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #95
baggachipz wrote: post #82

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

You're absolutely right! Americans are a bit weird like that, most people around the world would be perfectly okay with short and to-the-point answers. Especially if those answers are coming from a machine that's just giving its best imitation of a stochastic hallucinating parrot.

You're absolutely right! I agree with everything you said but didn't want to put in effort to right a funny, witty follow up!

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#115

Post by lvl155 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #39
lvl155 wrote: post #35

Yeah because I am sure if they told you how stupid and wrong you’re, people will continue to use it. It’s superficial but not sure why people get so annoyed about it. It’s an artifact. If devs truly want a helpful coding AI based on real devs doing real work, you’d basically opt for telemetry and allow Anthropic/OpenAI to train on your work. That’s the only way. Otherwise we are at the mercy of “devs” these companies…

I would actually like it if robots would use slurs like an Halo/CoD lobby from 2006 Xbox live. It would make them feel more genuine. That's why people used to like using Grok so much, since it was never afraid to get edgy if you asked it to.

[flagged]

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#116

Post by [deleted] »

Lendal wrote: post #90
baggachipz wrote: post #82

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

For me, it's getting annoying. Not every question is an excellent question. Not every statement is a brilliant observation. In fact, I'm almost certain every idea I've typed into an LLM has been thought of before by someone else, many many times.

[deleted]

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#117

Post by nojs »

I'm starting to think this is a deeper problem with LLMs that will be hard to solve with stylistic changes.

If you ask it to never say "you're absolutely right" and always challenge, then it will dutifully obey, and always challenge - even when you are, in fact, right. What you really want is "challenge me when I'm wrong, and tell me I'm right if I am" - which seems to be a lot harder.

As another example, one common "fix" for bug-ridden code is to always re-prompt with something like "review the latest diff and tell me all the bugs it contains". In a similar way, if the code does contain bugs, this will often find them. But if it doesn't contain bugs, it will find some anyway, and break things. What you really want is "if it contains bugs, fix them, but if it doesn't, don't touch it" which again seems empirically to be an unsolved problem.

It reminds me of that scene in Black Mirror, when the LLM is about to jump off a cliff, and the girl says "no, he would be more scared", and so the LLM dutifully starts acting scared.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#118

Post by lvl155 »

spicyusername wrote: post #41
lvl155 wrote: post #35

Yeah because I am sure if they told you how stupid and wrong you’re, people will continue to use it. It’s superficial but not sure why people get so annoyed about it. It’s an artifact. If devs truly want a helpful coding AI based on real devs doing real work, you’d basically opt for telemetry and allow Anthropic/OpenAI to train on your work. That’s the only way. Otherwise we are at the mercy of “devs” these companies…

It's not superficial. It's material to Claude regularly returning bad information. If you phrase a question like, "should x be y?", Claude will almost always say yes.

If this is what you think, you might want to go back and learn how these LLMs work and specifically for coding tasks. This is a classic case of know your tools.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#119

Post by zozbot234 »

nromiun wrote: post #106

Another big problem I see with LLMs is that it can't make precise adjustments to your answer. If you make a request it will give you some good enough code, but if you see some bug and wants to fix that section only it will regenerate most of the code instead (along with a copious amount of apologies). And the new code will have new problems of their own. So you are back to square one. For the record I have had this s…

You're absolutely right! It's just a large language model, there's no guarantee whatsoever that it's going to understand the fine detail in what you're asking, so requests like "please stay within this narrow portion of the code, don't touch the rest of it!" are a bit of a non-starter.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#120

Post by FirmwareBurner »

lvl155 wrote: post #115
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would actually like it if robots would use slurs like an Halo/CoD lobby from 2006 Xbox live. It would make them feel more genuine. That's why people used to like using Grok so much, since it was never afraid to get edgy if you asked it to.

[flagged]

I never said such a thing. The racist here is in your mirror.
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