Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 560 posts

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#301

Post by cruffle_duffle »

School-Cotton wrote: post #203
zamadatix wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time you're fighting the training + system prompt with your own instructions and prompting the results are going to be poor, and both of those things are heavily geared towards being a cheery and chatty assistant.

Anecdotally it seemed 5 was briefly better about this than 4o, but now it’s the same again, presumably due to the outcry from all the lonely people who rely on chatbots for perceived “human” connection. I’ve gotten good results so far not by giving custom instructions, but by choosing the pre-baked “robot” personality from the dropdown. I suspect this changes the system prompt to something without all the “please be…

That thing has only been out for like a week I doubt they’ve changed much! I haven’t played with it yet but ChatGPT now has a personality setting with things like “nerd, robot, cynic, and listener”. Thanks to your post, I’m gonna explore it.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#303

Post by the_af »

I've fought with this in informal (non-technical) sessions with ChatGPT, where I was asking analysis questions about... stuff that interests me... and ChatGPT would always reply:

"You're absolutely right!"

"You are asking exactly the right questions!"

"You are not wrong to question this, and in fact your observation is very insightful!"

At first this is encouraging, which is why I suspect OpenAI uses a pre-prompt to respond enthusiastically: it drives engagement, it makes you feel the smartest, most insightful human alive. You keep asking stuff because it makes you feel like a genius.

Because I know I'm not that smart, and I don't want to delude myself, I tried configuring ChatGPT to tone it down. Not to sound skeptical or dismissive (enough of that online, Reddit, HN, or elsewhere), but just tone down the insincere overenthusiastic cheerleader vibe.

Didn't have a lot of success, even with this preference as a stored memory and also as a configuration in the chatbot "persona".

Anyone had better luck?

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#304

Post by zozbot234 »

lucb1e wrote: post #279
carlosjobim wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finns need to mentally evolve beyond this mindset. Somebody being polite and friendly to you does not mean that the person is inferior to you and that you should therefore despise them. Likewise somebody being rude and domineering to you does not mean that they are superior to you and should be obeyed and respected. Politeness is a tool and a lubricant, and Finns probably loose out on a lot of international business…

Wow. I lived in Finland for a few months and this does not match my experience with them at all. In case it's relevant, my cultural background is Dutch... maybe you would say the same about us, since we also don't do the fake smiles thing? I wouldn't say that we see anyone who's polite and friendly as inferior; quite the contrary, it makes me want to work with them more rather than less. And the logical contrary for…

"I never smile if I can help it. Showing one's teeth is a submission signal in primates. When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life." While this famous quote from The Office may be quite exaggerated in many ways, this can nonetheless be a very real attitude in some cultures. Smiling too much can make you look goofy and foolish at best, and outright disingenuous at worst.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#305

Post by torginus »

conradev wrote: post #280
ryandrake wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually feel like they were trained to be both extremely humble and at the same time, excited to serve. As if it were an intern talking to his employer's CEO. I suspect AI companies executive leadership, through their feedback to their devs about Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and so on, are unconsciously shaping the tone and manner of their LLM product's speech. They are used to be talked to like this, so their prod…

GPT-5 speaks to me like a similarly-leveled colleague, which I love. Opus 4 has this quality, too, but man is it expensive. The rest are puppydogs or interns.

This is anecdotal but I've seen massive personality shifts from GPT5 over the past week or so of using it

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#306

Post by jjoonathan »

NohatCoder wrote: post #277

This is such a useful feature. I'm fairly well versed in cryptography. A lot of other people aren't, but they wish they were, so they ask their LLM to make some form of contribution. The result is high level gibberish. When I prod them about the mess, they have to turn to their LLM to deliver a plausibly sounding answer, and that always begins with "You are absolutely right that [thing I mentioned]". So then I don't…

ChatGPT opened with a "Nope" the other day. I'm so proud of it.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6896258f-2cac-800c-b235-c433648bf4...

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#308

Post by furyofantares »

cpfiffer wrote: post #293
NohatCoder wrote: post #277

This is such a useful feature. I'm fairly well versed in cryptography. A lot of other people aren't, but they wish they were, so they ask their LLM to make some form of contribution. The result is high level gibberish. When I prod them about the mess, they have to turn to their LLM to deliver a plausibly sounding answer, and that always begins with "You are absolutely right that [thing I mentioned]". So then I don't…

I agree. Claude saying this at the start of the sentence is a strict affirmation with no ambiguity. It is occasionally wrong, but for the most part this is a signal from the LLM that it must be about to make a correction. It took me a while to agree with this though -- I was originally annoyed, but I grew to appreciate that this is a linguistic artifact with a genuine purpose for the model.

The form of this post is beautiful. "I agree" followed by a completely unrelated reasoning.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#309

Post by withinboredom »

brookst wrote: post #223
ryao wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs love to do malicious compliance. If I tell them to not do X, they will then go into a “Look, I followed instructions” moment by talking about how they avoided X. If I add additional instructions saying “do not talk about how you did not do X since merely discussing it is contrary to the goal of avoiding it entirely”, they become somewhat better, but the process of writing such long prompts merely to say not to d…

You’re giving them way too much agency. The don’t love anything and cant be malicious. You may get better results by emphasizing what you want and why the result was unsatisfactory rather than just saying “don’t do X” (this principle holds for people as well). Instead of “don’t explain every last detail to the nth degree, don’t explain details unnecessary for the question”, try “start with the essentials and let the…

I think you're taking them too literally.

Today, I told an LLM: "do not modify the code, only the unit tests" and guess what it did three times in a row before deciding to mark the test as skipped instead of fixing the test?

AI is weird, but I don't think it has any agency nor did the comment suggest it did.

Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything

#310

Post by supriyo-biswas »

pxka8 wrote: post #178
simonw wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was the case they wouldn't have so much stuff in their system card desperately trying to stop it from behaving like this: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts > Claude never starts its response by saying a question or idea or observation was good, great, fascinating, profound, excellent, or any other positive adjective. It skips the flattery and responds directly.

These are the guys who made Golden Gate Claude. I'm surprised they haven't just abliterated the praise away.

The problem there is that by doing so, you may just end up with a model that is always critical, gloomy and depressed.
Post reply on HN