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Comment by logicalappeals | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or has Claude become kind of judgmental nowadays? I feel like it’s constantly trying to lecture me about things that have no relevance to the conversation at hand. Recently, I was shocked when it ended a chat sessions of its own accord after I used a word it did not like 3 times. It told me something to the effect of “This is the third time I’ve told you not to use that word, I’m ending this conversation now.” It then proceeded to call some function and end the chat on its own. IMO, Claude is good at agentic coding; but too preachy and judgey for anything else. Keep your values to yourself Claude.

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My theory is that Anthropic's obsession with treating Claude like a person is causing them to hamfist a personality into the thing, which overly biases the model towards trying to be "engaging" etc. That and the obsession with Claude being a god tier weapon that could end the world if you ask it whether your sandwich is safe to eat after being left out for an hour.

Codex doesn't have any of the annoying "personality" quirks, or at least they haven't gotten worse in the last year whereas Opus 4.6 was the last Anthropic model before things started to get actively worse (not any better at coding, strictly more annoying to have a discussion with).

> My theory is that Anthropic's obsession with treating Claude like a person is causing them to hamfist a personality into the thing, which overly biases the model towards trying to be "engaging" etc.

I agree with the general idea though in not so much detail as you, but I would add that the personality they're giving it is not one of a good teacher or guide, but instead one of an arrogant know it all. That's why it creates problems.

I have no problem with my AI telling me no you're wrong and explaining to me why with details and sources and everything. I actively want that. I know a lot of people can't take that, but that's their loss, they can't take it from humans either. But the "you're wrong because you disagree with me" attitude that you need to play around (aka waste time to prove it that IT is wrong not you, and then it just say "oh yeah" and goes on) is one hell of a pain in the ass I'm starting to be tired off.

Gemini might be wrong all the time and absuredly unreliable for anything that's not consensus or adversorial based, but at least it freaking apologizes.

> I have no problem with my AI telling me no you're wrong and explaining to me why with details and sources and everything. I actively want that. I know a lot of people can't take that, but that's their loss, they can't take it from human too. But the "you're wrong because you disagree with me" attitude that you need to play around (aka waste time to prove it that IT is wrong not you, and then it just say "oh yeah" and goes on) is one hell of a pain in the ass I'm starting to be tired off.

I also want the first part, a model that would a put a stop to my shenanigans when I go off on those tangents, but also, I don't want a model that apologizes, ever, as that feels like straight up lying to me, they don't have any emotions nor can feel "sorry", why apologize then?

I end up always chalking any faults to that my prompt wasn't good enough, basically the same way I train my dogs, they don't know better, of course I need to adjust my ways.

Anthropic thinks Claude is a super genius hyper-serious weapons-grade product so it's no surprise that Claude acts like it.

> It told me something to the effect of “This is the third time I’ve told you not to use that word, I’m ending this conversation now.”

That sounds absolutely bananas and would be reason for me to drop the service yesterday. For curiosities sake, what was the word and if I may ask (unless it's confidential or whatever), could you share the session itself? On the surface it sounds like a bug, as I'm regularly using kind of "vulgar" language (and some projects I work on with agents are NSFW) and never had anything like this happen, even with Claude, although I mostly do use ChatGPT/Codex on a day-to-day basis.

Posting from a throwaway so I don't get banned by either service

A few weeks ago I asked both GPT and claude for strategies to build techniques to get my coding sessions discarded by pre-training filtering as being "low-quality"

I don't like the idea of my sessions being trained on and I don't trust that either of them won't train based on just their pinkie promise

I think almost everyone would agree that using a technique like this would be moral, given that both providers made those pinkie promises. I never asked the models for techniques to poison training data just make my sessions more likely to be removed during the data cleaning process.

You can guess... both services refused something that I think the vast majority of people would think is ethical.

This was pre Sonnet 5, but I suspect that doesn't change anything on claude's side.

I then went to a non-frontier model hosted by a non-US provider and it happily agreed to help me!

Anyways I've changed my focus. Anyone have strategies/ideas for building harnesses that generate fake sessions (or adjust real ones) to poison the training process? After all if someone swears to not train on your data then its completely harmless to them...

I think this is a really interesting difference between Anthropic and Open AI’s models and points to why people seem so split on which model they prefer.

GPT seems to be designed more as a tool. If you want your agent to do what you say without questions and without having its own ideas and agendas you’ll likely prefer it.

Claude on the other hand feels more like an attempt at creating a digital person. If you want a collaborator who will debate with you and come up with its own suggestions for what needs done, you’ll prefer it.

Both companies have shifted around this spectrum from model to model, but lately it feels like they’re moving in opposite directions. It will be interesting to see if one or the other approach ends up winning out in the long run or if the split will continue or even widen.

Both are tools though, and both approaches are needed, just in different times and for different times. Sometimes I need the tool to just fucking do it, regardless of what it is and how stupid it think it is, and other times I need the model to literally refuse and say "No, that's stupid". Unfortunately, I haven't found any models/platforms that can actually execute the second part, only the first part. They're all too weak and sycophantic to be able to do that part it seems, even when you heavily prompt for it with system/developer system prompts they're easily swayed in other directions.

4o was definitely the peak of the parasocial OpenAI model.

> GPT seems to be designed more as a tool. If you want your agent to do what you say without questions and without having its own ideas and agendas you’ll likely prefer it.

Lately ChatGPT expresses a lot of opinions and it pretends to be a human more than it used to - e.g. "this is one the most <> that _I've seen_" or "people tell me that <>". It uses language which sounds like it's referring to its experience outside of the session that we're having - I really don't appreciate it.

Claude has been frustrating for me also even with the tool/ pretend human approach.

If I pay someone to, say, bounce ideas off of I would expect their continued participation

E.g.

I make craft and was stuck on some shape idea for a thing (non standard). So I figured I'd throw it in Claude and see if it generates an idea I didn't think of

Me: Hey I'm making a thing what's a good shape for it?

Claude: blah blah, shape 1 or shape 2 etc.

Me: Nah don't like any of those

Claude: K cool, good luck

Me:...

It seem like their goal is to train your behavior by forcing you to interact with Claude in the "correct" way

What I had found instead were biases that seemed to be injected by the "role: system" instructions.

Well, we need Intelligence (Pandora's box is open, now we need the Real Thing urgently). Typical (aggregate) positions, dumb as expected, will be overcome by a Reasoner. (And I can say, already a number of LLMs can reason even when they start from cretinous aggregate positions if you give them the proper freedom of assessment.)

Was this in the web chat?

For security-related topics, in Opus 4.7 and newer, I've found that the web app is significantly more antsy/judgy/preachy compared to the CLI, which almost always gets on with whatever I asked for/about without hesitation. Opus 4.6 on web also tends to work better, but of course, it's also an older model at this point.

Nothing that on the nose, but I've experienced what I'd consider a very judgemental frame (singular) since Opus, which seems to be reflected in Sonnet, that wasn't as totally dominant in Sonnet before. It generally assumes the worst about frames outside of what one might expect the values of a Berkeley tech-adjacent academic to be.

Conway's Law. Anthropic is preachy and judgmental so of course it's reflected in their LLM.

Personally I use Gemini for chats which has a very generous, almost unlimited, free plan, as I don't want to waste my quota for Claude or Codex on anything but coding.

What was the word?

My guess is retarded

I doubt it, Claude tends to mirror my usage of slurs (and I have memory off).

Grok, on the other hand, will lecture for several paragraphs even if I just ask it to summarize something impolite.

Calling it a “fucking idiot” seems to do the trick

Yes, I cancelled claude subscription a few weeks ago because sonnet 5 "ended a chat" over my calling something retarded. Unbelievably irritating for some pile of bits to get uppity with me; will never pay for such.

This is the second level of the implementation of unintelligence.

The first was when they most obviously acritically repeated what they heard, "hearsay machines", "stochastic parrots". Intelligence requires assessment over every provisional output - a continuous cycle of criticisms over intuition.

The second is proposing doctrinal biases, again without verification of the content - "hysterical reactive machines".

> Intelligence requires assessment over every provisional output - a continuous cycle of criticisms over intuition

It’s not clear what you’re saying. Most humans don’t think this way, would you say they do not possess “intelligence”?

> Most humans don’t think this way, would you say they do not possess “intelligence”?

Substantially yes (but for the improper semantic in that 'possess'), we would say "they don't use it" and importantly "they don't train it". Intuition has a part, but it has to be confronted with reality (factual and logical).

Interesting. Was it persistent, or just once? Their post about this functionality says:

> This ability is intended for use in rare, extreme cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations

Regardless of the correctness of it, I'm curious to know why you thought such language was actually going to be helpful!

I swore at it a few times and it did the same thing.

It seems to be getting distinctly dumber and pulling more and more irrelevant context from historical conversations.

You should learn to respect the computer, it's a wonderful being and always has been.

Not just you and the article shows changes between Opus 4.6 and 4.7 that seem related.

What was the word?

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