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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

#81

Post by cubefox »

scotty79 wrote: post #26
bradley13 wrote: post #11

This applies to so many AIs. I don't want a bubbly sycophant. I don't want a fake personality or an anime avatar. I just want a helpful assistant. I also don't get wanting to talk to an AI. Unless you are alone, that's going to be irritating for everyone else around.

Sure but different people have different preferences. Some people mourn replacement of GPT4 with 5 because 5 has way less of a bubbly personality.

There is evidence from Reddit that particularly women used GPT-4o as their AI "boyfriend". I think that's unhealthy behavior and it is probably net positive that GPT-5 doesn't do that anymore.

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

#82

Post by baggachipz »

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

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

#83

Post by yellowpencil »

radarsat1 wrote: post #5

I find Gemini is also hilariously enthusiastic about telling you how amazingly insightful you are being, almost no matter what you say. Doesn't bother me much, I basically just ignore the first paragraph of any reply, but it's kind of funny.

A friend of a friend has been in a rough patch with her spouse and has been discussing it all with ChatGPT. So far ChatGPT has pretty much enthusiastically encouraged divorce, which seems like it will happen soon. I don't think either side is innocent but to end a relationship over probabilistic token prediction with some niceties throw in is something else.

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

#86

Post by lucianbr »

Xophmeister wrote: post #23
vixen99 wrote: post #9

Not Claude but ChatGPT - I asked it to pipe down on exactly that kind of response. And it did.

I've done this in my Claude settings, but it still doesn't seem that keen on following it: > Please be measured and critical in your response. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.! I prefer objectivity to sycophancy.

> I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.!

Is this part useful as instruction for a model? Seems targeted to a human. And even then I'm not sure how useful it would be.

The first and last sentence should suffice, no?

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

#87

Post by gryn »

andrewstuart wrote: post #75
bradley13 wrote: post #11

This applies to so many AIs. I don't want a bubbly sycophant. I don't want a fake personality or an anime avatar. I just want a helpful assistant. I also don't get wanting to talk to an AI. Unless you are alone, that's going to be irritating for everyone else around.

I want no personality at all. It’s software. It should have no personality. Imagine if Microsoft Word had a silly chirpy personality that kept asking you inane questions. Oh, wait ….

Keep Clippy's name out of you mouth ! he's a good boy. /s

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

#88

Post by lvl155 »

criddell wrote: post #64
lvl155 wrote: post #35

Yeah because I am sure if they told you how stupid and wrong you’re, people will continue to use it. It’s superficial but not sure why people get so annoyed about it. It’s an artifact. If devs truly want a helpful coding AI based on real devs doing real work, you’d basically opt for telemetry and allow Anthropic/OpenAI to train on your work. That’s the only way. Otherwise we are at the mercy of “devs” these companies…

> Yeah because I am sure if they told you how stupid and wrong you’re, people will continue to use it. Are sycophant and jerk the only two options?

Maybe don’t take its responses so personally? You’re the one anthropomorphizing an LLM bot. Again, it’s just part of the product. If you went to a restaurant and your server was extra nice but superficial you wouldn’t constantly complain about how bad the food was. Because that’s exactly what this is.

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

#89

Post by teekert »

baggachipz wrote: post #82

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

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 with some options if you want to change something.

There are times when it will actually say I'm not right though. But the balance is off.

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

#90

Post by Lendal »

baggachipz wrote: post #82

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.

For me, it's getting annoying. Not every question is an excellent question. Not every statement is a brilliant observation. In fact, I'm almost certain every idea I've typed into an LLM has been thought of before by someone else, many many times.
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