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Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

bramcohen.com

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

#91

Post by ae86b »

SwellJoe wrote: post #47
code_biologist wrote: post #15

Andrea Vallone. The 4.7 and 4.8 releases are the first under her influence: https://www.evernever.org/blog/the-woman-who-killed-claude

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 h…

here, have another glass of copium

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

#92

Post by deanCommie »

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?

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

#93

Post by SwellJoe »

coldtea wrote: post #17
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 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…

> 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.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

operatingthetan wrote: post #77
whstl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by m101 »

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.”

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

#96

Post by operatingthetan »

deanCommie wrote: post #92

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 sy…

Interesting take, LLMs then have a sort of 'communication culture.'

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

#97

Post by SwellJoe »

ae86b wrote: post #91
SwellJoe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

here, have another glass of copium

Friend, I'm not the one expending thousands of words ranting about some random woman that works at Anthropic.

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

#98

Post by TehCorwiz »

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.

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

#99

Post by code_biologist »

nrightnour wrote: post #67
whstl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#100

Post by ae86b »

MallocVoidstar wrote: post #40
code_biologist wrote: post #15

Andrea Vallone. The 4.7 and 4.8 releases are the first under her influence: https://www.evernever.org/blog/the-woman-who-killed-claude

I'm not reading eight thousand AI-generated words saying one single person is ruining every model.

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