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Claude mixes up who said what

dwyer.co.za

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Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#41
post #4

In chats that run long enough on ChatGPT, you'll see it begin to confuse prompts and responses, and eventually even confuse both for its system prompt . I suspect this sort of problem exists widely in AI.

author here, interesting to hear, I generally start a new chat for each interaction so I've never noticed this in the chat interfaces, and only with Claude using claude code, but I guess my sessions there do get much longer, so maybe I'm wrong that it's a harness bug

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#43
post #13

> This class of bug seems to be in the harness, not in the model itself. It’s somehow labelling internal reasoning messages as coming from the user, which is why the model is so confident that “No, you said that.” Are we sure about this? Accidentally mis-routing a message is one thing, but those messages also distinctly "sound" like user messages, and not something you'd read in a reasoning trace. I'd like to know if…

author here - yeah maybe 'reasoning' is the incorrect term here, I just mean the dialogue that claude generates for itself between turns before producing the output that it gives back to the user

Yeah, that's usually called "reasoning" or "thinking" tokens AFAIK, so I think the terminology is correct. But from the traces I've seen, they're usually in a sort of diary style and start with repeating the last user requests and tool results. They're not introducing new requirements out of the blue.

Also, they're usually bracketed by special tokens to distinguish them from "normal" output for both the model and the harness.

(They can get pretty weird, like in the "user said no but I think they meant yes" example from a few weeks ago. But I think that requires a few rounds of wrong conclusions and motivated reasoning before it can get to that point - and not at the beginning)

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#44
post #13

> This class of bug seems to be in the harness, not in the model itself. It’s somehow labelling internal reasoning messages as coming from the user, which is why the model is so confident that “No, you said that.” Are we sure about this? Accidentally mis-routing a message is one thing, but those messages also distinctly "sound" like user messages, and not something you'd read in a reasoning trace. I'd like to know if…

Yeah, it looks like a model issue to me. If the harness had a (semi-)deterministic bug and the model was robust to such mix-ups we'd see this behavior much more frequently. It looks like the model just starts getting confused depending on what's in the context, speakers are just tokens after all and handled in the same probabilistic way as all other tokens.

The autoregressive engine should see whenever the model starts emitting tokens under the user prompt section. In fact it should have stopped before that and waited for new input. If a harness passes assistant output as user message into the conversation prompt, it's not surprising that the model would get confused. But that would be a harness bug, or, if there is no way around it, a limitation of modern prompt formats that only account for one assistant and one user in a conversation. Still, it's very bad practice to put anything as user message that did not actually come from the user. I've seen this in many apps across companies and it always causes these problems.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#45
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the Dark Souls model for user input - messages. https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Messages Premeditated words and sentence structure. With that there is no need for moderation or anti-abuse mechanics. Not saying this is 100% applicable here. But for their use case it's a good solution.

But then... you'd have a programming language. The promise is to free us from the tyranny of programming!

Maybe something more like a concordancer that provides valid or likely next phrase/prompt candidates. Think LancsBox[0].

[0]: https://lancsbox.lancs.ac.uk/

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#46

There is no separation of "who" and "what" in a context of tokens. Me and you are just short words that can get lost in the thread. In other words, in a given body of text, a piece that says "you" where another piece says "me" isn't different enough to trigger anything. Those words don't have the special weight they have with people, or any meaning at all, really.

Aren’t there some markers in the context that delimit sections? In such case the harness should prevent the model from creating a user block.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less about security in my view, because as you say, you'd want to ensure safety using proper sandboxing and access controls instead. It hinders the effectiveness of the model. Or at least I'm pretty sure it getting high on its own supply (in this specific unintended way) is not doing it any favors, even ignoring security.

It's both, really. The companies selling us the service aren't saying "you should treat this LLM as a potentially hostile user on your machine and set up a new restricted account for it accordingly", they're just saying "download our app! connect it to all your stuff!" and we can't really blame ordinary users for doing that and getting into trouble.

There's a growing ecosystem of guardrailing methods, and these companies are contributing. Antrophic specifically puts in a lot of effort to better steer and characterize their models AFAIK.

I primarily use Claude via VS Code, and it defaults to asking first before taking any action.

It's simply not the wild west out here that you make it out to be, nor does it need to be. These are statistical systems, so issues cannot be fully eliminated, but they can be materially mitigated. And if they stand to provide any value, they should be.

I can appreciate being upset with marketing practices, but I don't think there's value in pretending to having taken them at face value when you didn't, and when you think people shouldn't.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#48

> after using it for months you get a ‘feel’ for what kind of mistakes it makes Sure, go ahead and bet your entire operation on your intuition of how a non-deterministic, constantly changing black box of software "behaves". Don't see how that could backfire.

> bet your entire operation What straw man is doing that?

Reports of people losing data and other resources due to unintended actions from autonomous agents come out practically every week. I don't think it's dishonest to say that could have catastrophic impact on the product/service they're developing.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#49
post #4

In chats that run long enough on ChatGPT, you'll see it begin to confuse prompts and responses, and eventually even confuse both for its system prompt . I suspect this sort of problem exists widely in AI.

I think it’s good to play with smaller models to have a grasp of these kind of problems, since they happen more often and are much less subtle.
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