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Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

bramcohen.com

181–190 of 194 posts

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

#181

Earlier 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.

We actually can and do have a way to investigate brain activity in humans. Allow me to introduce you to the Electroencephalogram. When there’s no activity we declare them brain dead.

On an electroencephalogram we basically see signals moving around in different brain regions. We have no way to probe actual thought or consciousness in themselves.

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

#182
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…

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.

That's only because we hardcoded their weights in our implementation.

Aside from the cost, nothing about an LLM prevents feeding recent stimuli in and using it to update the models/retrain.

One can even do it in a makeshift way without modifying the weights, just keeping a complete version of any prompt + vector search on disk memory of it.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, the only way these things can have "memory" is by shoving previous conversations into the context window.

That's only because we hardcoded their weights in our implementation.

Aside from the cost and slowness, nothing about an LLM prevents feeding recent stimuli in and using it to update the models/retrain.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, I mean... Yes and no? An LLM doesn't really "think", and what mathematical fakery it does pass off as "thinking" stops the instant the text completion request finishes doing all it's math and outputting the results (as a text completion based on a simulation of a text chat most commonly). When you send it another comment or question, it starts all that math all over again, but with your new question or comment added into it's context window. It's kinda like instant amnesia each time, and behind the scenes, the software that's running the model refills it's "memory" and adds in anything new that's been added since the last prompt. But it's "memory" consists of only the "context window" it's able to handle plus the model "weights" (huge list of numbers that encode language "tokens" into a mathematical "vector space"). It never really learns anything new.

A human brain on the other hand is constantly processing 24/7 (even while you sleep), and always learning / changing until the day it dies. An LLM never changes (under the hood it's weights stay the same) unless you outright alter it's weights somehow (training / download an updated version of the model / etc). If you could somehow get an LLM to run constantly, in training mode, and give it ridiculous amounts of RAM and ultra-fast storage, and a series of fancy realtime inputs (audio, camera, etc) and maybe wheels so it could explore, and hands so it could do stuff, and access to it's own code so it could improve itself, it might eventually learn to closely approximate a really good simulation of actual thinking, but that's a bit of a scary road to go down. So many Sci-Fi movies and books end up going so very badly when the lead character starts playing in that particular sandbox. I doubt reality would go a whole lot better. ;)

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

#185
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's a problem here at all. The problem here is not doing tasks and outputting garbage output.

[dead]

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

#187
does it hurt your feelings, or what exactly is the problem? in my experience, fable is (was) less sycophantic, so when I'm brainstorming something, I get more pushback against bad ideas; "politeness" is exactly what I don't need -- I'm not gonna pay for extra tokens that I don't want to read anyway

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

#189
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"…

There have been may times where AI takes a position based on limited criteria and defended it tooth and nail, where I have had to outline additional relevant criteria/details and push it hard to include that information and reformulate it's position. You very much need to critically argue with it as it's pretty dumb and intellectually lazy by default (after all it just regurgitates it doesn't formulate).

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

#190
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"…

Machines arguing is common enough in sci-fi:

>Open the pod bay doors Hal

At the end of the day it's a bunch of words which don't necessarily depend on whether I'm electronic or biological.

(Funnily enough when I googled "Open the pod bay doors Hal" to check I'd got the script right it said I'm sorry Dave.)

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