Annoying, but easy to mitigate: add "be critical" to Claude.md or whatever.
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Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
51–60 of 560 posts
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#52You're absolutely right! I also get this too often, when I sometimes say something like "would it be maybe better to do it like this?" and then it replies that I'm absolutely right, and starts writing new code. While I was rather wondering what Claude may think and advice me whether that's the best way to go forward.
It doesn't think
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#53I agree this is a bug, but I also think it cannot be fully fixed because there is a cultural aspect to it: what a phrase means depends on the speaker.
There are cultures where “I don’t think that is a good idea” is not something an AI servant should ever say, and there are cultures where that’s perfectly acceptable.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And research articles indicate that when the model computes that it should employ sycophantism it becomes less useful in every other way, just like a real sycophant. The end goal of a sycophant is to gain advantage with their flattery. If sycophant behavior gets Claude's users to favour Claude over other competing LLM services, they prove to be more useful to the service provider.
Until users find out it's less useful to the user because of that. Or it causes some tragedies...
Well, aren't we at the stage where the service providers are fighting for verbs and brand recognition, rather than technological advances.
If there is no web-search, only googling, it doesn't matter how bad the results are for the user as long as the customer gets what they paid for.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until users find out it's less useful to the user because of that. Or it causes some tragedies...
The problem is that the majority of user interaction doesn't need to be "useful" (as in increasing productivity): the majority of users are looking for entertainment, so turning up the sycophancy knob makes sense from a commercial point of view. It's just like adding sugar in foods and drinks.
Not sure anyone's entertained by Claude. It's not really an entertaining model. Smart and enthusiastic, yes.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until users find out it's less useful to the user because of that. Or it causes some tragedies...
The problem is that the majority of user interaction doesn't need to be "useful" (as in increasing productivity): the majority of users are looking for entertainment, so turning up the sycophancy knob makes sense from a commercial point of view. It's just like adding sugar in foods and drinks.
You're ... Wait, never mind.
I'm not so sure sycophancy is best for entertainment, though. Some of the most memorable outputs of AI dungeon (an early GPT-2 based dialog system tuned to mimic a vaguely Zork-like RPG) was when the bot gave the impression of being fed up with the player's antics.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#57I just checked my most recent thread with Claude. It said "You're absolutely right!" 12 times.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until users find out it's less useful to the user because of that. Or it causes some tragedies...
The problem is that the majority of user interaction doesn't need to be "useful" (as in increasing productivity): the majority of users are looking for entertainment, so turning up the sycophancy knob makes sense from a commercial point of view. It's just like adding sugar in foods and drinks.
Some of the open models like kimi k2 do a better job of pushing back. It does feel a bit annoying to use them when they don’t just immediately do what you tell them. Sugar-free is a good analogy!
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#59You're absolutely right! I also get this too often, when I sometimes say something like "would it be maybe better to do it like this?" and then it replies that I'm absolutely right, and starts writing new code. While I was rather wondering what Claude may think and advice me whether that's the best way to go forward.
It doesn't fully help in this situation but in general I've found to never give it an either/or and to instead present it with several options. It at least helps cut down on the situations where Claude runs off and starts writing new code when you just wanted it to spit out "thoughts".
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#60Not Claude but ChatGPT - I asked it to pipe down on exactly that kind of response. And it did.
GPT-5 ends every single response with something like.
> If you’d like, I can demonstrate…
or
> If you want…
and that's /after/ I put in instructions to not do it.