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

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

#521

Post by giancarlostoro »

benrapscallion wrote: post #497
giancarlostoro wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did as a test, Grok has "workspaces" and you can add a pre-prompt. So I made a Kamina (from Gurren Lagann) "worspace" so I could ask it silly questions and get back hyped up answers from "Kamina" it worked decently, my point is some tools out there let you "pre-prompt" based on your context. I believe Perplexity has this as well, they don't make it easy to find though.

Where is this setting in Perplexity?

They call it spaces, so when you create a "Space" on Desktop at least, you look on the right hand corner for the three dots, next to the Share button, and click "Settings":

> Give instructions to Perplexity to customize how answers are focused and structured.

You type into that box, now every space you make can have a fully custom "pre-prompt" as I call it.

I only just started using Perplexity, they really need to rework their UI a little bit.

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

#522

Post by scoofy »

ben_w wrote: post #463
cozyman wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is no Truth, only ideas that stood the test of time" is that a truth claim?

It's an idea that's stood the test of time, IMO. Perhaps there is truth, and it only looks like we can't find it because only some of us are magic?

I studied philosophy. Got multiple degrees. The conversations are so incredibly exhausting… not because they are sophomoric, but only because people rarely have a good faith discussion of them.

Is there Truth? Probably. Can we access it, maybe but we can never be sure. Does that mean Truth doesn’t exist? Sort of, but we can still build skyscrapers.

Truth is a concept. Practical knowledge is everywhere. Whether they correspond to each other is at the heart of philosophy: inductive empiricism vs deductive rationalism.

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

#523

Post by joquarky »

amelius wrote: post #220
elif wrote: post #150

I've spent a lot of time trying to get LLM to generate things in a specific way, the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" When working on art projects, my trick is to specifically give all feedback constructively, carefully avoiding framing things in terms of the inverse or parts to remove.

I think you cannot really change the personality of an LLM by prompting. If you take the statistical parrot view, then your prompt isn't going to win against the huge numbers of inputs the model was trained with in a different personality. The model's personality is in its DNA so to speak. It has such an urge to parrot what it knows that a single prompt isn't going to change it. But maybe I'm psittacomorphizing a bit…

I liked the completion models because they have no chatter that needs to follow human conversational protocol, which inherently introduces "personality".

The only difference from conversational chat was that you had to be creative about how to set up a "document" with the right context that will lead to the answer you're looking for. It was actually kind of fun.

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

#524

Post by teekert »

neutronicus wrote: post #450
teekert wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it really erodes trust. First couple of times I felt that it indeed confirmed what I though, then I became suspicious and I experimented with presenting my (clearly worse) take on things, it still said I was absolutely right, and now I just don't trust it anymore. As people here are saying, you quickly learn to not ask leading questions, just assume that its first take is pretty optimal and perhaps present it wit…

I lie and present my ideas as coming from colleagues.

Haha, the good old "asking for a friend". Maybe I should add that to the standard pre-prompt. "I'm always asking for a friend, who is a bit of a douche so its ok to hurt his feelings."

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

#525

Post by lemontheme »

szundi wrote: post #341
zrobotics wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That or an emdash

I like using emdesh and now i have to stop because this became a meme

Same. I love my dashes and I’ve been feeling similarly self-conscious.

FWIW I have noticed that they’re often used incorrectly by LLMs, particularly the em-dash.

It seems there’s a tendency to place spaces around the em-dash, i.e. , which is an uncommon usage in editor-reviewed texts. En-dashes get surrounding spaces; em-dashes don’t.

Not that it changes things much, since the distinction between the two is rarely taught, so non-writing nerds will still be quick to cry ‘AI-generated!’

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

#526

Post by lukaslalinsky »

One trick I do to avoid this: When it's doing something wrong, and I see some pattern based on which I'd do it differently, I tell it the observation rather than my conclusion. If I tell it stuff like what about X, it will just agree that X is a good idea. But if I say, I see that Y, it might come to the same conclusion that it needs to do X, or something completely different. It will still say I'm absolutely right, but at least it's to something where I am absolutely right. I mostly use Claude Code to fill the blanks in my thinking, so this works better for me.

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

#527

Post by ben_w »

scoofy wrote: post #522
ben_w wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an idea that's stood the test of time, IMO. Perhaps there is truth, and it only looks like we can't find it because only some of us are magic?

I studied philosophy. Got multiple degrees. The conversations are so incredibly exhausting… not because they are sophomoric, but only because people rarely have a good faith discussion of them. Is there Truth? Probably. Can we access it, maybe but we can never be sure. Does that mean Truth doesn’t exist? Sort of, but we can still build skyscrapers. Truth is a concept. Practical knowledge is everywhere. Whether they c…

I can definitely sympathise with that. This whole forum — well, the whole internet, but also this forum — must be an Eternal September* for you.

Given the differences between US and UK education, my A-level in philosophy (and not even a very good grade) would be equivalent to fresher, not even sophomore, though looking up the word (we don't use it conventionally in the UK) I imagine you meant it in the other, worse, sense?

Hmm. While you're here, a question: As a software developer, when using LLMs I've observed that they're better than many humans (all students and most recent graduates) but still not good. How would you rate them for philosophy? Are they simultaneously quite mediocre and also miles above conversations like this?

* On the off-chance this is new to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#528

Post by literalAardvark »

klik99 wrote: post #338
jjoonathan wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT opened with a "Nope" the other day. I'm so proud of it. https://chatgpt.com/share/6896258f-2cac-800c-b235-c433648bf4...

Is that GPT5? Reddit users are freaking out about losing 4o and AFAICT it's because 5 doesn't stroke their ego as hard as 4o. I feel there are roughly two classes of heavy LLM users - one who use it like a tool, and the other like a therapist. The latter may be a bigger money maker for many LLM companies so I worry GPT5 will be seen as a mistake to them, despite being better for research/agent work.

5 is very steerable, it's likely that you can get an agreeable enough, while less dangerous (eh...) therapist/partner out of it.

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

#529

Post by kldg »

zamalek wrote: post #377
virtue3 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should all be deeply worried about gpt being used as a therapist. My friend told me he was using his to help him evaluate how his social interactions went (and ultimately how to get his desired outcome) and I warned him very strongly about the kind of bias it will creep into with just "stroking your ego" - There's already been articles on people going off the deep end in conspiracy theories etc - because the ai ke…

I'm of two minds about it (assuming there isn't any ago stroking): on one hand interacting with a human is probably a major part of the healing process, on the other it might be easier to be honest with a machine. Also, have you seen the prices of therapy these days? $60 per session (assuming your medical insurance covers it, $200 if not) is a few meals worth for a person living on minimum wage, versus free/about $20…

I have gone through this with daughter, because she's running into similar anxiety issues (social and otherwise) I did as a youth. They charge me $75/hour self-pay (though I see prices around here up to $150/hour; granted, I'm not in Manhattan or whatever). Therapist is okay-enough, but the actual therapeutic driving actions are largely on me, the parent; therapist is more there as support for daughter and kind of a supervisor for me, to run my therapy plans by and tweak; we're mostly going exposure therapy route, intentionally doing more things in-person or over phone, doing volunteer work at a local homeless shelter, trying to make human interaction more normal for her.

Talk therapy is useful for some things, but it can also be to get you to more relevant therapy routes. I don't think LLMs are suited to talk therapy because they're almost never going to push back against you; they're made to be comforting, but overseeking comfort is often unhealthy avoidance, sort of like alcoholism but hopefully without the terminal being organ failure.

With that said, an LLM was actually the first to recommend exposure therapy, because I did go over what I was observing with an LLM, but notably, I did not talk to the LLM in first-person. -So perhaps there is value in talking to an LLM but putting yourself in the role of your sibling/parent/child and talking about yourself third-person to try getting away from LLM's general desire to provide comfort.

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

#530

Post by lazide »

kelnos wrote: post #492
lazide wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re likely thinking of calves. Cows (though admittedly ambiguous! But usually adult female bovines) do not drink milk. It’s insidious isn’t it?

Colloquially, "cow" can mean a calf, bull, or (female adult) cow. It may not be technically correct, but so what? Stop being unnecessarily pedantic.

In this context it is literally the necessary level of pedantic yes?
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