Last I checked u can just dictate exactly what u want the llm to be concerned with and flatly dismiss any pushback as being out of scope of the intended goal.
Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
171–180 of 194 posts
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly that. I provided a question, and when given an incomplete answer, I provided with more info. It refused to accept the additional info due to limited access to Youtube. There was nothing more than that. There were no expectations. The hostility and the amount of assumptions here are very strange. ...almost as strange as having a website accuse me of hallucinating a video and trying to gaslight it :D
You need to think this thought through all the way to the end. What it has said also influences what it will say. If it has consistently made combative responses, then the most likely thing to do is to continue to be combative. I don't think there is any way back after the conversation takes a turn like that so there is no point in arguing with it. The only thing you can do is to fork the conversation before it made…
> "The only thing you can do is to fork the conversation before it made the first mistake and give it more context or tell it to look things up."
This is a key detail that many folks don't seem to understand about LLMs in general. The generation of a response happens based on the model weights and the context window (the system prompt + everything it's fed about the conversation thus far + any additional data included as part of the overall prompt). Each response technically stands alone and is generated entirely from only that context given to it and the model's existing "token space" weights. The illusion of an ongoing conversation is maintained "behind the scenes" by keeping that "context window" updated with the current state of the conversation as context for the next prompt, but the next response is technically an entirely new generation of text.
What it all means in a TL;DR sense is that the fix for a refusal is not to continue the "argument", but simply to remove that entire interaction from the conversation entirely as if it never happened and try a different tack with new / updated / more complete context to get the response you're expecting / seeking.
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#173Earlier 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…
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."
You're so totally 1000% right about that, but they're really good at faking it, to such a degree that entirely too many people (even including some so-called "experts" in the field) have been utterly fooled by the mathematical "trickery" that performs the illusion of "intelligence".
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The rest is semantics and metaphysics.
It's really just all mathematics and physics. There's no metaphysical anything about LLMs or how they do what they do. It's all just a bunch of fancy math "behind the curtain". An LLM can actually explain a lot of how it works "under the hood" if you ask it just the right questions in just the right ways. ;)
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#175Earlier 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…
>> A machine cannot "argue" with me > programmed to mimick interaction as if it HAD those beliefs and experiences We spend far too much time debating the essential nature of consciousness when it doesn't matter if it's real (whatever that means) or simulated. I get far better results in my projects by encouraging the model to argue, to push back, to poke holes in the design, to think creatively about corner cases, to…
> "I get far better results in my projects by encouraging the model to argue, to push back, to poke holes in the design, to think creatively about corner cases, to be a devil's advocate, to do lateral web search to find alternatives, to challenge assumptions, to passionately advocate for what it believes is right."
> "But I don't want to engage all these assholes myself, so I spin them all up as critic subagents with another subagent to listen patiently and be the judge/arbiter."
This is the way...
No, seriously. That "sycophancy" you mention immediately after this part drove me nuts before I really understood how these things work (it's taken me a while and a lot of [painful; I hate math] research, but well worth the learning effort), but after a better understanding of the "nuts and bolts" of it all, it's fairly easy to get exactly the kinda results one should expect outta these things. If not, then "you're just holding the tool wrong". ;)
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#176> One place where the threat is more real is in the possibility of vibe coding a pandemic virus, but that should be narrowly targeted at generating DNA sequences for viruses. Labs which generate custom DNA should also have reasonable heuristics for detecting likely dangerous product. The chances of covid coming from a lab leak are in the maddening 25-75% range which vaguely means ‘We don’t know’, but ‘lab leak’ includes a lot of things.
No it didn't. It differs by 1,000 base pairs from the closest known relative virus that we knew about before the pandemic, and we have no good idea what all those mutations wind up doing. And the PRAAR furin cleavage site was a previously unknown sequence and not one that humans would have guessed.
And we don't have good heuristics for what mutations would completely inactivate a virus versus enhancing its virulence.
Actual scientists won't be able to vibecode up some pandemic viruses because we have no idea how to do that and LLMs are just going to hallucinate.
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#177Because you didn't read the directions, and don't realize that there's a custom instructions mechanism that is used to specify the personality you prefer to interact with?
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#178[flagged]
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
What then is your LLM "thinking" about between answers? The answer is nothing. Your definition of thinking does not match the one humans normally use. >That how we know another person is thinking too. By their output. We don't put a debugger into their brain. We know thoughts exist in their brain between the ones they choose to verbalize. Avoiding the distraction of solipsism. For the LLM the "thinking" phase is just…
>What then is your LLM "thinking" about between answers? The answer is nothing.
Between answer it's thinking something else, somebody else asked :) You think that hardware sits idle?
That aside, what is a human thinking while unconscious? Does having been unconscious (e.g. for an operation, or fainting or whatever) means somebody doesn't think in general?
>We know thoughts exist in their brain between the ones the choose to verbalize
And we also know that if we run an LLM in a loop, didn't give it a cutoff for stopping their output, and didn't force it to print everything in the end, thoughts would exist in their "brain" too between the ones they chose to verbalize.
In fact, that's exactly how some LLMs in "thinking mode" appear.
Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> The rest is semantics and metaphysics. It's really just all mathematics and physics. There's no metaphysical anything about LLMs or how they do what they do. It's all just a bunch of fancy math "behind the curtain". An LLM can actually explain a lot of how it works "under the hood" if you ask it just the right questions in just the right ways. ;)
>There's no metaphysical anything about LLMs or how they do what they do. It's all just a bunch of fancy math "behind the curtain".
That's my point, but about the human brain as well. It's just a bunch of fancy math, just ones expressed with chemicals and electrical activations instead of, well, logic gates and electrical activations.