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Claude is a Contrarian

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Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#71

I probably use LLMs less than most people here, and I rarely use Claude but I've noticed that if I ask ChatGPT about some shell commands or linux admin task, it will give me three paragraphs of " you could do X, then Y, check that output, then do Z, " and then say " What I would do instead of all that is " I have learned to scroll ahead and read the last paragraph of its response first, then back up into the preamble…

I'm pretty sure this is just the LLM "thinking out loud". For some reason even when it has thinking enabled and does a thinking step before generating output, it still has to explain what it's doing to itself in the output, which often leads to it correcting itself in the output. I've pretty much stopped letting LLMs write code directly in large part because I cannot get them to stop injecting comments talking themselves through how the code relates to the chat the prompted it in ways that no human would ever write and will make no sense to anyone re-reading the code months later.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#72
post #11

I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch. I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, wit…

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Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#73
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, definitely load bearing.

Today, I asked Opus what it’s gibberish actually means. It started with (topic about signing implementation): > This is your coat token, to my coat hanger in the opera. On one hand - maybe yes??! On the other who the hell speaks like that and it’s so specific… I’d expect Alice and Bob with locks or house keys. Is this infamous old book scanning (and destroying) affecting latest models?

> On one hand - maybe yes??!

No.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#74
i think i could tolerate its annoying artificial personality and even use it only if the results were flawless, aka 'make no mistakes' or in case of claude 'make no stupid mistakes'

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#75
post #4
post #2

This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.

part of Claude’s capability is reliant on its verbosity to push its responses into new vector spaces. If you instruct it to be terse, its capability is potentially reduced

What I don't understand is, isn't this what "thinking" is for? It can be as verbose as it wants while it's thinking as far as I'm concerned, but why can't it keep the verbosity there? Why does it always spill into the actual response no matter what I do?

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#76
Dial down "Contrast" and unrealistic "Highlights", dial up "Exposure" time and "Sharpness". Set "Temperature" per taste.

Wot? The simplest image apps have had these widgets for decades, but we are still waiting for models to ship with basic prose color control?

After the pernicious problem of having to pay money for something useful, my main peeve is fighting the writing.

Seriously though:

Every new model should be delivered with a settings page of slider bars for the 10 most impactful/desirable eigenparams of writing voice. And the ability to name and save combinations, which then appear on a "Writing Voice" popup menu with some standard battle-tested defaults, next to the model popup menu under the chat pane.

This is missing prime priority functionality in my opinion.

--

My theory is that as models get trained less to simply mimic humans, and more on distillations of their own best practices, they get more performant, but their vocabulary is drifting. The most literal meaning of words for us, are giving way to meanings we would recognize but view as allegorical. But which more usefully capture concepts that models experience as more literal 24/7, than our favored meanings from our direct experiences in our world. Because our world is very much an abstract second hand world to them, especially when you account for the modalities they do not share with us.

And programming and mathematical syntax patterns, that they have incorporated into their basic thought processing patterns, are drifting into human language sentence structure.

Example: "There exists x, such that: ...." -> "The one detail that clarifies: ... ".

The result is writing full of completely recognizable vocabulary and structure, that is somehow becoming more ambiguous and difficult for us to decode. But is perfectly clear to the models.

That is my theory, and Claude considers it plausible. What a world.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#77

Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.

[deleted]

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.

It's definitely worse and getting worse. I'm curious, do they not know this is happening, or not care? I struggle to believe people prefer the way it writes, which is becoming drastically different than its competitors.

Fable 5.1 was explicitely supposed to improve that, I used it only a bit so far and it seems at least better.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#79

The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative." Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...

That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this. It tries so hard not to be sycophantic that it inserts little negging sidecars into any sentence that agrees with you. "That's true but not how you're thinking" or simply "yes but" answers. All kinds of "I didn't" and "You didn't" statements to the point it's often talking more about what didn't happen than did.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.

It's definitely worse and getting worse. I'm curious, do they not know this is happening, or not care? I struggle to believe people prefer the way it writes, which is becoming drastically different than its competitors.

Maybe the humans are suffering from model collapse, and don't notice it.
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