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Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

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Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#61

Post by SwellJoe »

whstl wrote: post #38
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Cla…

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 Claude was outdated about the case and gave me some outdated info, so I tried to update it with the info I just saw online.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 manne…

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.

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#62

Post by reinitctxoffset »

SwellJoe wrote: post #8

"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 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.

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#63

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

coldtea wrote: post #14
TylerE wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. Who tries to "win an argument" with/against AI?

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.

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.

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#64

Post by code_biologist »

SwellJoe wrote: post #8

"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"…

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.

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#65

Post by [deleted] »

stingraycharles wrote: post #58
operatingthetan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#66

Post by yaur »

SwellJoe wrote: post #8

"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"…

> 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.

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#67

Post by nrightnour »

whstl wrote: post #38
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Cla…

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 manne…

I've spent thousands of hours using Opus and have never seen this. I'd double-check your claude.md files.

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#68

Post by arvid-lind »

operatingthetan wrote: post #30
WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #25

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.

Anthropomorphizing them is the true "AI psychosis."

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.

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#69

Post by whstl »

operatingthetan wrote: post #56
whstl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this has anything to do with my answer, but ok?

An explanation for your story.

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.

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

#70

Post by mikestew »

sebmellen wrote: post #44
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Cla…

I suggest we send this fellow to the Monty Python Argument Clinic https://youtu.be/TpQlyUjp3vM .

That only took eleven minutes to the Monty Python sketch we all knew was coming, well done.
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