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Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

bramcohen.com

101–110 of 194 posts

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

#101
post #95

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…

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.

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

#102
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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...

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

#103
post #89

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.

> 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…

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.

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

#104
post #89

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.

> 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…

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.

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

#105
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.

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

#106
post #80
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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 !!!

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

#107
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 langua…

>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.

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

#108
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.

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

#109
post #80
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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?

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

#110

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.

I felt this.
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