I guess it wasn’t only me! Claude keeps saying this even when it’s not appropriate.
I'm absolutely right
31–40 of 277 posts
Re: I'm absolutely right
#32I wonder how much of Anthropic's revenue comes from tokens saying "you're absolutely right!"
Oh wow, I never thought of that. In fact, this surfaces another consideration: pay-per-use LLM APIs are basically incentivized to be verbose, which may be well in conflict with the user's intentions. I wonder how this story will develop.
In an optimistic sci-fi line of thinking, I would imagine APIs using old-school telegraph abbreviations and inventing their own shortened domain languages.
In practice I rarely see ChatGPT use an abbreviation, though.
Re: I'm absolutely right
#33I wonder if this is a tactic that LLM providers use to coerce the model into doing something. Gemini will often start responses that use the canvas tool with "Of course", which would force the model into going down a line of tokens that end up with attempting to fulfill the user's request. It happens often enough that it seems like it's not being generated by the model, but instead inserted by the backend. Maybe "you…
I think this is on the right track, but I think it's a byproduct of the reinforcement learning, rather than something hard-coded. Basically, the model has to train itself to follow the user's instruction, so by starting a response with "You're absolutely right!", it puts the model into the thought pattern of doing whatever the user said.
"Thought pattern" might be overstating it. The fact that "You're absolutely right!" is statistically more likely to precede something consistent with the user's intent than something that isn't, might be enough of an explanation.
Re: I'm absolutely right
#34I wonder if this is a tactic that LLM providers use to coerce the model into doing something. Gemini will often start responses that use the canvas tool with "Of course", which would force the model into going down a line of tokens that end up with attempting to fulfill the user's request. It happens often enough that it seems like it's not being generated by the model, but instead inserted by the backend. Maybe "you…
It is a tactic. OpenAI is changing the tone of ChatGPT if you use casual language, for example. Sometimes even the dialect. They try to be sympathetic and supportive, even when they should not. They fight for the user attention and keeping them on their platform, just like social media platforms. Correctness is secondary, user satisfaction is primary.
I find the GPT-5 model having turned the friendliness way, way down. Topics that previously would have rendered long and (usefully) engaging conversations are now met with an "ok cool" kind of response.
I get it - we don't want LLMs to be reinforces of bad ideas, but sometimes you need a little positivity to get past a mental barrier and do something that you want to do, even if what you want to do logically doesn't make much sense.
An "ok cool" answer is PERFECT for me to decide not to code something stupid (and learn something useful), and instead go and play video games (and learn nothing).
Re: I'm absolutely right
#35Re: I'm absolutely right
#36It's annoying because when I ask the LLM for help it's normally because I'm not absolutely right and doing something wrong.
Re: I'm absolutely right
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a dark pattern
Maybe I'm old or just wrong, but "dark pattern" for me means "intentionally misleading" which doesn't seem to be the case here, this is more of a "add liveliness so users can see it's not static data" with no intention of misleading, since it seems to be true that the data is actually dynamic.
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Re: I'm absolutely right
#38I wonder if this is a tactic that LLM providers use to coerce the model into doing something. Gemini will often start responses that use the canvas tool with "Of course", which would force the model into going down a line of tokens that end up with attempting to fulfill the user's request. It happens often enough that it seems like it's not being generated by the model, but instead inserted by the backend. Maybe "you…
Very unlikely to be an explicit tactic. Likely to be a result of RLHF or other types of optimization pressure for multi-turn instruction following.
If we have RLHF in play, then human evaluators may generally prefer responses starting with "you're right" or "of course", because it makes it look like the LLM is responsive and acknowledges user feedback. Even if the LLM itself was perfectly capable of being responsive and acknowledging user feedback without emitting an explicit cue. The training will then wire that human preference into the AI, and an explicit "yes I'm paying attention to user feedback" cue will be emitted by the LLM more often.
If we have RL on harder targets, where multiturn instruction following is evaluated not by humans that are sensitive to wording changes, but by a hard eval system that is only sensitive to outcomes? The LLM may still adopt a "yes I'm paying attention to user feedback" cue because it allows it to steer its future behavior better (persona self-consistency drive). Same mechanism as what causes "double check your prior reasoning" cues such as "Wait, " to be adopted by RL'd reasoning models.
Re: I'm absolutely right
#39As I opened the website, the “16” changed to “17”. This looked interesting, as if the data were being updated live just as I loaded the page. Alas, a refresh (and quick check in the Developer Tools) reveals it’s fake and always does the transition. It’s a cool effect, but feels like a dirty trick.
It's a dark pattern
> It's a dark pattern
No, a dark pattern is intentionally deceptive design meant to trick users into doing something (or prevent them from doing something else) they otherwise wouldn't. Examples: being misleading about confirmation/cancel buttons, hiding options to make them less pickable, being misleading about wording/options to make users buy something they otherwise wouldn't, being misleading about privacy, intentionally making opt in/out options confusing, etc.
None of it is the case here.
Re: I'm absolutely right
#40Gemini keeps telling me "you've hit a common frustration/issue/topic/..." so often it is actively pushing me away from using it. It either makes me feel stupid because I ask it a stupid question and it pretends - probably to not hurt my feelings - that everyone has the same problem, or it makes me feel stupid because I felt smart about asking my super duper edge case question no one else has probably ever asked befor…
I don't think that's Gemini's problem necessarily. You shouldn't be so insecure.