The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative."
Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...
Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...
You even start your reply with "That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this." It's just a friendly way of speaking.
For decades, they were allowed -expected even- to be weird and communicate badly with their peers, let alone third parties.
Then, a whole zoo of processes, gamifications and other shenanogans were invented just to help them show normies what was up with their work (remember the planning poker game?)...
Now, at last, those people are actually ewpected to be able to explain their constraints, document the work, be accountable for the results and generally exchange contructively... Just, well, with AIs not with humans.
if you're asserting Claude-like speech is how normies speak?
If I asked “should I try lemon in my tea and coffee?” this would be effective communication. But Claude gives answers like this for “should I try lemon in my tea?” which is just annoying.
I'm pretty early in my career, so I probably gain more from that sort of stuff than most people. The senior devs on my team tend to get the most frustrated with it and I think this behavior is a big part of why.
Which is very annoying when you do know things
But it... does. In some sessions it will get particularly paranoid, apologetic, self-doubtful, or suspicious. I'd say these traits are always there but they can become more or less pronounced.
(By contrast, I'd say the GPT models are much more even keeled, although I maybe haven't used them enough.)
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
If you read the volumes of comments on AI on HN or Reddit over the past year for example, it's two things: overwhelmingly negative general, and openblah will save us from the evil oppressors.
And more broadly, the tone globally is quite negative these days and has been since the pandemic. That's the life of Claude in a timeline. It may just be reflecting more accurately the debbie downer sentiment in the air. Humanity sure seems bearish on existence.
There are problems in the world. That cannot be disputed, but the overwhelming negativity is just intellectual laziness IMO. That and a fear of change or loss of status. I understand that fear, viscerally even. But the attitude is just dumb, you have to adapt. Plus, life is short! There's not some award you get on your death bed for being the most negative A-hole your whole life. A love of life is an amazing thing!
I look at this stuff in tech right now and say, "THIS SHIT RULES!" and am actually excited at the things I will get to build.
Like, tomorrow, I have to baby sit agents for most of the day, that's kind of a net "meh" but, I'm going to wire together an SDR I found in my shop and a raspberry pi I had lying around, and try to build an automated kiosk to transcribe some weather data for one of my customers. It's not a huge thing, but it's going to be fun. And the technology to really even do that didn't really exist a few years ago! Open Whisper is what, 4 years old?
But "oh teh noes, everything was better in the 90s!"
That's nostalgia, and it's reactionary garbage. I am not going to have my spirit broken by a bunch of people who never do anything.
All the stuff I always wanted to build is now easier than ever.
The reality is that while things often balance on a knife's edge precipice of chaos and calamity, things are WAY better than how they used to be by many many metrics, but humans are primed to be negative. You actively have to specifically choose to not be a debbie downer. You're wired to be bummed out. We all are, and this sort of "negative framing of things" and aggressive "yes but" seems really smart to a lot of people.
I used to see this same shit all the time in meetings.
"We are here to discuss problem X!" "Yeah, but have you considered other problems A-W?" "Those are valid concerns, but we are hear to solve X." <grumpy face> "Well, we cannot solve X until we solve A-W" <nothing gets done>
Almost a year ago now, I realized what it was. In large institutions, people get to look smart when they poke holes in things, and that wins them social cachet. In a bigger org, you're not actually rewarded for getting much done. You're rewarded for making your chain of command look better. Sometimes that involves "getting stuff done" but it can also look like being the person who says, "oh that won't work" or "have we considered Z?" over Zoom. Unfortunately though, building things never is actually something where you get everything right the first time. So the meetings to plan the future meetings build out into a miasma of nothing and when you let perfect be the enemy of good, you'll never accomplish anything. You'll look insanely busy because you'll be constantly be arguing with a group of box-tickers and concern trolls about increasingly calamitous hypotheticals, but you'll accomplish nothing.
David Graeber was right about this. Since Claude has been trained on internal slack channels and this behavior on the web, I'm sure this is why this sort of behavior exists. Because I bet that there's tons of meetings at Anthropic about "well, have you thought about <insert irrelevant issue>" or "we should reframe this take" or whatever.
It's kind of funny actually.
I mean, the special team existed, and people were paid, but I bet the vast majority of the work did nothing of consequence.
All this "caution" is just people trying really hard to be the smartest person in the room.