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Claude is a Contrarian

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Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#101

Post by luxuryballs »

I asked Claude for his response to the blog post and the first paragraph contained some funny introspection:

"The "not X, but Y" thing is real and he's caught it cleanly. It's frequent enough that it works as a fingerprint, which is his actual claim, and his test would probably hold up. I'll add a detail that supports him: my own instructions for this conversation explicitly tell me to avoid that construction, along with em-dash asides and a few other tics. Someone at Anthropic decided it was stubborn enough to need naming. That's not a defense. It means the problem outlived the training process and had to be patched at the prompt layer."

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#102

Post by abathologist »

paulhebert wrote: post #81
JohnMakin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if they’re training heavily on Claude generated content or conversation transcripts

People are also being trained/acculturated to LLM speak, so even if they are trained on human output, they could be getting reinforcement for their LLM-tinged crap-speak.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#103

Post by danieltk76 »

I was working on some soc2 audit materials for my startup, and claude refused to edit a document because it would "tamper with the record". I suppose claude noticed I started the doc a few months previously and was worried I was tampering with evidence. No matter what I did it wouldn't help me. I suspect there will be more situations like this in the future.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#105

Post by abletonlive »

settsu wrote: post #92
knollimar wrote: post #6

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.

Surely, SOMEone at these companies realized training LLMs on the content of the internet (namely the vast amount of comment sections) would result in such outcomes. Or at least that they should weight heavily against that content for purposes of writing voice.

Just say reddit lol.

Claude is becoming a highly capable Redditor

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#107

Post by _blk »

garlic_enjoyer wrote: post #98
svachalek wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That just sounds like effective communication with emotional beings to me. I was taught in college to find points I agree with, acknowledge those, then move on to the parts I don't agree on. It makes the recipient feel good at first, which puts them in a frame of mind willing to accept criticism. You even start your reply with "That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this." It's just a friendly way of speaki…

Indeed but it will use the same language when talking to subagents so humans are no different to LLMs in Claude's world view (model). One trait that I've seen more with the newer 5er model series is ", but it's actually worse..." or "I said to do this and it did that instead but it was right and I was wrong." - so I assume that a larger part of what they call thinking complexity is (not to much surprise) inherently related to questioning incoming assumptions.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#108

Post by qarl »

Chance-Device wrote: post #41

Claude thinks the user is always wrong. This was at its peak with Opus 4.8 but is still present in Opus 5 and to a lesser degree Fable. It’s extremely annoying. If the user asserts anything, Claude has to disagree with it. It has to tack on clarifications that aren’t really clarifications, they’re just statements aimed at making whatever the user has said seem more wrong . It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Clau…

> It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Claude writes a message that takes a position on something, its final one or two paragraphs will try to dismantle its own argument.

I have agents adversarially check each other. When I switched to Opus 4.8 they began arguing EXTENSIVELY with each other. My code began to fill with comments about these arguments. Reviews would fail because the argumentative comments would get stale.

My build system came crashing down with a tsunami of disagreeable text.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#109

Post by psadauskas »

svachalek wrote: post #79
bhouston wrote: post #29

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.

My current pet peeve is when it said like that, but the "yes but" its contradicting is from its own talking-to-itself phase, not anything I ever said or implied.

I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#110

Post by pibaker »

JohnMakin wrote: post #39
beezlewax wrote: post #14

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.

Big empty words are probably cheaper to produce than concise, information rich text of the same length.
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