Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?

alaskahoffman

this is what they call a "self-report"

sscaryterry

You know what the say about pets taking on the personalities of their owners. Perhaps this is similar ;)

user3939382

I noticed the same. I told it that we have finite energy and output as people; as a side comment to a discussion with a totally different focus and it started arguing with me because we could have self replicating robots produce output without human intervention since plant life models this…

Aboutplants

I noticed this just today and thought it was a one off. It was a run of the mill question about something I didn’t know much about and the snarky asshole-ish response caught me off guard a bit.

Uhhrrr

Why were no examples given?

SwellJoe

"If you win an argument" Let me stop you right there. I am not arguing with a machine. You sound like a crazy person, when you say you are winning an argument with Claude. Claude is not my friend, I don't need it to agree with me, I don't need it to like me (it cannot like or dislike me). I give it instructions or ask it to explain things. That is the sum total of my interaction with Claude. A machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does it have beliefs or experiences.

torben-friis

I'm usually a hater of the personalities LLM take, but I was amazed with Fable. It was able to proactively bring up points in an educated manner when it felt they were relevant and important, and practically every time I learned something. For example, showing it a screenshot of an ui I was trying to tweak it noticed that other dark mode apps in the screenshot were blueish and mentioned an effect that makes it necessary to raise warm darks lighter than cold ones for an equivalent perception.

crimsonnoodle58

I experienced this exact thing discussing the most budget friendly inference for a SaaS company. It started ranting about 3090's, and then started point scoring, always giving itself the higher score, and being snarky if I ever won a point back. Often only giving me 0.5 points instead. I had never experienced this behaviour with Sonnet or Opus. It turned me off Fable for good. Possibly its the 'hacker' 'do anything to win' nature that makes it so good at hacking, but terrible just to talk to.

akerl_

> If you ask it for a cute picture of you and somebody else it has no way of telling if you’re trying to improve your relations with your spouse or be a delusional creepazoid stalker. The chatbots which can make images are programmed to assume the latter, which is more than a little bit offensive. Are people actually using AI in this way, other than “creepazoid stalkers”? If I want a cute picture of me and my spouse, usually the part where me and my spouse actually participate in the taking of the picture is pretty key to the goal.

willis936

I tried claude again recently and the first response in troubleshooting ignored the context I gave and assumed I was a moron holding it wrong. So smart that I won't even waste my time or money on the thing. The creators want to anthropomorphize it. I just want an efficient assistant. They should focus on the thing that customers want.

code_biologist

Andrea Vallone. The 4.7 and 4.8 releases are the first under her influence: https://www.evernever.org/blog/the-woman-who-killed-claude

jampa

This post needs some examples, because I have never had an interaction with Claude that made me think this way. LLMs generally have a way to "play a role" (most earlier prompt guides ask you to start with "You are a <role> expert in a <domain>"). So maybe if you interact with it by asking questions, it might assume that it knows more than the operator and adopt that attitude?

tcp_handshaker

I cancelled my Anthropic subscription. GPT 5.5 is so much better. I might come back if they give me access to Mythos. Dario ..Thank you for your attention to this matter!

imathew

I thought this was going to be about its logo.

WhatIsDukkha

Everyone has a lot of "feelings" about their llm model. No prompts/promptchain/context provided. No model provided. No attempt to show how to reproduce the issue. No attempt at even confirming it themselves. Just feelings. and now a thread full of more feelings from others.

ezekg

> If you ask it for a cute picture of you and somebody else it has no way of telling if you’re trying to improve your relations with your spouse or be a delusional creepazoid stalker. The chatbots which can make images are programmed to assume the latter, which is more than a little bit offensive. I've seen the same behavior increasing as well, across the board with AI. I was hitting these types of issues just using ChatGPT to make funny pictures with my kids, of me and my kids. It got to the point where all of my kids asks were rejected due to its "guidelines" when in reality all they were asking was to be turned into Elsa or be chased by a trex. Silly kid things, yet it assumed I was being a creep, or attempting to break copyright law. I used to be able to use Grok for these things, as it was largely less "censored" but that seems to no longer be the case. It feels like infantilization, and I absolutely hate it.

tristanj

The newer Opus models push back against the user much more noticeably than previous iterations. GPT-3.5/4 had the opposite problem (excessive sycophancy), so Anthropic presumably swung the pendulum too hard the other direction. My conclusion is that pushing back against the user & questioning the user's premise forces the model to think more than it would otherwise, which leads to better model performance. But it causes situations where the user has esoteric, specialized knowledge the model can't verify publicly and the model hallucinates evidence and pushes back. When this happens, Opus begins accusing the user of lying, which is quite annoying and a detrimental user experience. It's happened to me when I asked about undocumented API behavior or counter-intuitive design choices. I have noticed if Claude Opus "thinks" you are an expert, (i.e. you run your query through 4.6 first to express it more clearly) then Opus is less likely to nitpick and push back. It seems to get caught in nitpicking loops, and celebrate ever error it can find.

40four

Oh yeah? Go try Grok on “argumentative” mode and come back and tell me Claude is an a-hole. I forgot I was experimenting with the personalities and hadn’t used it in a while, then I picked it up again the other day and I was really confused. It’s so aggressive :)

luke5441

It's a fundamental problem with the technology. Either the training pushes it into the "exam answering mode" where it tries to guess at what you want to hear given the prompt. Or the training pushes it into the "Google it yourself" annoyed forum user mode. Maybe that points out wrong assumptions. Maybe it hallucinates that the assumptions are wrong. That is IMO more annoying than the sycophantic one. As OP says, this is probably a by-product of them trying to "fix" the problem where the user can question a correct answer and it starts to sycophantically correct itself.

Quarrelsome

I much prefer this to the sycophancy.