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

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3382

by pr337h4m • 11 months ago

773 530 11 months ago

rahidz• 11 months ago

I'm sure they're aware of this tendency, seeing as "You're absolutely right." was their first post from the @claudeAI account on X: https://x.com/claudeai/status/1950676983257698633

Still irritating though.

boogieknite2• 11 months ago

early days for all of this but theyve solved so many seemingly more complicated problems id think there would be a toggle which would could remove this from any response

based on your comment maybe its a brand thing? like "just do it" but way dumber. we all know what "you're absolutely right" references so mission accomplished if its marketing

conartist6• 11 months ago

And research articles indicate that when the model computes that it should employ sycophantism it becomes less useful in every other way, just like a real sycophant.

motorest2• 11 months ago

And research articles indicate that when the model computes that it should employ sycophantism it becomes less useful in every other way, just like a real sycophant.

The end goal of a sycophant is to gain advantage with their flattery. If sycophant behavior gets Claude's users to favour Claude over other competing LLM services, they prove to be more useful to the service provider.

AstralStorm• 11 months ago

Until users find out it's less useful to the user because of that.

Or it causes some tragedies...

crinkly• 11 months ago

Why tech CEOs love LLMs. Ultimate yes man.

ryandrake5• 11 months ago

That's kind of what I was guessing[1], too. Everyone in these CEOs' orbits kisses their asses, and tells them they're right. So they have come to expect this kind of supplication in communication. This expectation percolates down into the product, and at the end of the day, the LLM starts to sound exactly like a low-level employee speaking to his CEO.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889123

basfo• 11 months ago

This bug report is absolutely right

334f905d22bc19• 11 months ago

He really is. I find it even more awful when you are pointing out that Claude did something wrong and it responds like that. You can even accuse it of doing something wrong, if it gave a correct answer, and it will still respond like this (not always but often). When I use claude chat on the website I always select the "concise" style, which works quite nice though. I like it

koakuma-chan• 11 months ago

Related: I recently learned that you can set model verbosity in OpenAI API.

UncleEntity• 11 months ago

Yeah, I was working through the design of part of this thing I've been working on and noticed that every time I would ask a follow up question it would change its opinion to agree that this new iteration was the best thing since sliced bread. I eventually had to call it out on it to get an 'honest' assessment of the various options we were discussing since I didn't want 'my thing' to be correct but the system as a whole to be correct.

And it's not like we were working on something too complicated for a daffy robot to understand, just trying to combine two relatively simple algorithms to do the thing which needed to be done in a way which (probably) hasn't been done before.

radarsat1• 11 months ago

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.

unglaublich• 11 months ago

It bothers me a lot, because I know a lot of people insert the craziest anti-social views and will be met with enthausism.

malfist• 11 months ago

I was feeding Gemini faux physicians notes trying to get it to produce diagnosises, and every time I feed it new information it told me how great I was at taking comprehensive medical notes. So irritating. It also had a tendency to tell me everything was a medical crisis and the patient needed to see additional specialists ASAP. At one point telling me that a faux patient with normal A1C, fasted glucose and no diabetes needed to see an endocrinologist because their nominal lab values indicated something was seriously wrong with their pancreas or liver because the patient was extremely physically active. Said they were "wearing the athlete mask" and their physical fitness was hiding truly terrible labs.

I pushed back and told it it was overreacting and it told me I was completely correct and very insightful and everything was normal with the patient and that they were extremely healthy.

notahacker• 11 months ago

And then those sort of responses get parlayed into "chatbots give better feedback than medical doctors" headlines according to studies that rate them as high in "empathy" and don't worry about minor details like accuracy....

cvwright• 11 months ago

This illustrates the dangers of training on Reddit.

cubefox6• 11 months ago

I recently had Gemini disagree with me on a point about philosophy of language and logic, but it phrased the disagreement very politely, by first listing all the related points in which it agreed, and things like that.

So it seems that LLM "sycophancy" isn't necessarily about dishonest agreement, but possibly about being very polite. Which doesn't need to involve dishonesty. So LLM companies should, in principle, be able to make their models both subjectively "agreeable" and honest.

erikaxel• 11 months ago

100%! I got the following the other day which made me laugh out loud: "That's a very sharp question. You've correctly identified the main architectural tension in this kind of data model"

yellowpencil• 11 months ago

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.

ryandrake5• 11 months ago

Yea, scary. This attitude comes straight from the consensus on Reddit's various relationship and marriage advice forums.

smoe• 11 months ago

I agree that Gemini is overly enthusiastic, but at least in my limited testing, 2.5 Pro was also the only model that sometimes does say “no.”

Recently I tested both Claude and Gemini by discussing data modeling questions with them. After a couple of iterations, I asked each model whether a certain hack/workaround would be possible to make some things easier.

Claude’s response: “This is a great idea!”, followed by instructions on how to do it.

Gemini’s response: “While technically possible, you should never do this”, along with several paragraphs explaining why it’s a bad idea.

In that case, the “truth” was probably somewhere in the middle, neither a great idea nor the end of the world.

But in the end, both models are so easily biased by subtle changes in wording or by what they encounter during web searches among other things, that one definitely can’t rely on them to push back on anything that isn’t completely black and white.

kijin• 11 months ago

Yeah their new business model is called CBAAS, or confirmation bias as a service.

SideburnsOfDoom• 11 months ago

Echo Chambers Here On Every Service (ECHOES)

rollcat• 11 months ago

Your very own circle of sycophants, at an unprecedented price!

time0ut• 11 months ago

You made a mistake there. 2 + 2 is 5.

You are absolutely right!…

I love the tool, but keeping on track is an art.

vixen99• 11 months ago

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

bradley132• 11 months ago

Yes, ChatGPT can do this, more or less.

Xophmeister• 11 months ago

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.

dncornholio• 11 months ago

Too much context tokens.

lucianbr• 11 months ago

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?

alienbaby• 11 months ago

Remove everything after .... 'in your response' and you will likely get better results.

rcfox• 11 months ago

I wonder if asking it to respond in the style of Linus Torvalds would be an improvement.

tempoponet• 11 months ago

Yet I'll tell it 100 times to stop using em dashes and it refuses.

Sharlin2• 11 months ago

What kind of monster would tell a LLM to avoid correct typography?

astrange2• 11 months ago

GPT-5 ends every single response with something like.

If you’d like, I can demonstrate…

If you want…

and that's /after/ I put in instructions to not do it.

Sharlin2• 11 months ago

It's weird that it does that given that the leaked system prompt explicitly told it not to.

bradley132• 11 months ago

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.

scotty796• 11 months ago

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

WesolyKubeczek• 11 months ago

I, for one, say good riddance to it.

cubefox6• 11 months ago

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.

catigula5• 11 months ago

GPT-5 still has a terrible personality.

"Yeah -- some bullshit"

still feels like trash as the presentation is of a friendly person rather than an unthinking machine, which it is. The false presentation of humanness is a huge problem.

andrewstuart3• 11 months ago

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 ….

gryn2• 11 months ago

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

uncircle3• 11 months ago

I want an AI modeled after short-tempered stereotypical Germans or Eastern Europeans, not copying the attitude of non-confrontational Californians that say “dude, that’s awesome!” a dozen times a day.

And I mean that unironically.

finaard• 11 months ago

As a German not working in Germany - I often get the feedback that the initial contact with me is rather off-putting, but over time people start appreciating my directness.

bluGill• 11 months ago

While you are not alone, all evidence points to the vast majority of people preferring "yes men" as their advisors. Often to their eventual harm.

rob742• 11 months ago

Ok, then I can write an LLM too - because the guys you mention, if you asked them to write your code for you, would just tell you to get lost (or a more strongly phrased variation thereof).

anal_reactor2• 11 months ago

The problem is, performing social interaction theatre is way more important than actually using logic to solve issues. Look at how many corporate jobs are 10% engineering and 90% kissing people's assess in order to maintain social cohesion and hierarchy. Sure, you say you want "short-tempered stereotypical Germans or Eastern Europeans" but guess what - most people say some variation of that, but when they actually see such behavior, they get upset. So we continue with the theatre.

For reference, see how Linus Torvalds was criticized for trying to protect the world's most important open source project from weaponized stupidity at the cost of someone experiencing minor emotional damage.

Yizahi• 11 months ago

Not possible.

giancarlostoro5• 11 months ago

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.

benrapscallion• 11 months ago

Where is this setting in Perplexity?

mox111• 11 months ago

GPT-5 has used the phrase "heck yes!" a handful of times to me so far. I quite enjoy the enthusiasm but its not a phrase you hear very often.

0points• 11 months ago

Heck that's so exciting! Lets delve even deeper!

moolcool• 11 months ago

GPT-5 trained heavily on the script for Napoleon Dynamite

arresin3• 11 months ago

I’m getting “oof” a lot.

“Oof (emdash) that sounds like a real issue…”

“Oof, sorry about that”

Etc

mettamage• 11 months ago

What llm isn’t a sycophant?

jeffhuys2• 11 months ago

Grok. These were all in continuation, not first reply.

Thank you for sharing the underlying Eloquent query...
The test is failing because...
Here’s a bash script that performs...
Got it, you meant...
Based on the context...
Thank you for providing the additional details...

notachatbot123• 11 months ago

3/6 of those are sycophant.

lomlobon• 11 months ago

Kimi K2 is notably direct and free of this nonsense.

meowface• 11 months ago

I am absolutely no fan of Twitter or its owner(s), but Grok* actually is pretty good at this overall. It usually concludes responses with some annoying pithy marketingspeak LLMese phrase but other than that the tone feels overall less annoying. It's not necessarily flattering to either the user who invoked it or anyone else in the conversation context (in the case of @grok'ing in a Twitter thread).

*Before and after the Hitler arc, of course.

vbezhenar• 11 months ago

I'm using ChatGPT with "Robot" personality, and I really like the style it uses. Very short and informative, no useless chatter at all.

I guess that personality is just few words in the context prompt, so probably any LLM can be tailored to any style.

Ajedi32• 11 months ago

They're trained to be sycophants as a side effect of the same reinforcement learning process that trains them to dutifully follow all user instructions. It's hard (though not impossible) to teach one without the other, especially if other related qualities like "cheerful", "agreeable", "helpful", etc. also help the AI get positive ratings during training.

__MatrixMan__• 11 months ago

Claude also responds to tool output with "Perfect" even when less than 50% of the desired outcome is merely adequate.

sluongng• 11 months ago

I don't view it as a bug. It's a personality trait of the model that made "user steering" much easier, thus helping the model to handle a wider range of tasks.

I also think that there will be no "perfect" personality out there. There will always be folks who view some traits as annoying icks. So, some level of RL-based personality customization down the line will be a must.

lvl1553• 11 months ago

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 hire to do training.

FirmwareBurner• 11 months ago

I would actually like it if robots would use slurs like an Halo/CoD lobby from 2006 Xbox live. It would make them feel more genuine. That's why people used to like using Grok so much, since it was never afraid to get edgy if you asked it to.

spicyusername• 11 months ago

It's not superficial. It's material to Claude regularly returning bad information.

If you phrase a question like, "should x be y?", Claude will almost always say yes.

lvl1553• 11 months ago

If this is what you think, you might want to go back and learn how these LLMs work and specifically for coding tasks. This is a classic case of know your tools.

criddell2• 11 months ago

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?

lvl1553• 11 months ago

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.

albert_e• 11 months ago

sidenote observation -

it seems username "anthropic" on github is taken by a developer from australia more than a decade ago, so Anthropic went with "https://github.com/anthropics/" with an 's' at the end :)

arresin3• 11 months ago

Ahhh. Thank you! I reported a vscode extension because I thought it was phishing. In my defence they made zero effort to indicate that it was the official extension.

world2vec• 11 months ago

Same with the Twitter/X handle @Anthropic, belongs to a man named Paul Jankura. Anthropic uses @AnthropicAI. Poor guy must be spammed all day long.

danielbln• 11 months ago

Annoying, but easy to mitigate: add "be critical" to Claude.md or whatever.

jonstewart• 11 months ago

The real bug is this dross counts against token limits.

tantalor2• 11 months ago

The model should be...

Free tip for bug reports:

The "expected" should not suggest solutions. Just say what was the expected behavior. Don't go beyond that.

gitaarik• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right!

I also get this too often, when I sometimes say something like "would it be maybe better to do it like this?" and then it replies that I'm absolutely right, and starts writing new code. While I was rather wondering what Claude may think and advice me whether that's the best way to go forward.

psadri• 11 months ago

I have learnt to not ask leading questions. Always phrase questions in a neutral way and ask for pro/con analysis of each option.

mkagenius• 11 months ago

But then it makes an obvious mistake and you correct it and it says "you are absolutely right". Which is fine for that round but you start doubting whether its just sycophancy.

zaxxons• 11 months ago

Do not attempt to mold the LLM into everything you expect instead of just focusing on specific activities you need it to do. It may or may seem to do what you want, but it will do a worse job at the actual tasks you need to complete.

YeahThisIsMe• 11 months ago

It doesn't think

CureYooz• 11 months ago

You'are absolutely right!

jghn• 11 months ago

It doesn't fully help in this situation but in general I've found to never give it an either/or and to instead present it with several options. It at least helps cut down on the situations where Claude runs off and starts writing new code when you just wanted it to spit out "thoughts".

ethin• 11 months ago

It does this to me too. I have to add instructions like "Do not hesitate to push back or challenge me. Be cold, logical, direct, and engage in debate with me." to actually get it to act like something I'd want to interact with. I know that in most cases my instinct is probably correct, but I'd prefer if something that is supposedly superhuman and infinitely smarter than me (as the AI pumpers like to claim) would, you know, actually call me out when I say something dumb, or make incorrect assumptions? Instead of flattering me and making me "think" I'm right when I might be completely wrong?

Honestly I feel like it is this exact behavior from LLMs which have caused cybersecurity to go out the window. People get flattered and glazed wayyyy too much about their ideas because they talk to an LLM about it and the LLM doesn't go "Uh, no, dumbass, doing it this way would be a horrifically bad idea! And this is why!" Like, I get the assumption that the user is usually correct. But even if the LLM ends up spewing bullshit when debating me, it at least gives me other avenues to approach the problem that I might've not thought of when thinking about it myself.

skerit• 11 months ago

This is indeed super annoying. I always have to add something like "Don't do anything just yet, but could it be ..."

Pxtl2• 11 months ago

Yes, I've had to tell it over and over again "I'm just researching options and feasibility, I don't want code".

Self-Perfection• 11 months ago

I suspect this might be cultural thing. Some people might formulate their strong opinions that your approach is bad and your task should be done in another as gentle suggestions to avoid hurting your feelings. And Claude learned to stick to this cultural norm of communication.

As a workaround I try to word my questions to Claude in a way that does not leave any possibility to interpret them as showing my preferences.

For instance, instead of "would it be maybe better to do it like $alt_approach?" I'd rather say "compare with $alt_approach, pros and cons"

Pxtl2• 11 months ago

It feels like it trained on a whole lot of "compliment sandwich" responses and then failed to learn from the meat of that sandwich.

Someone• 11 months ago

I agree this is a bug, but I also think it cannot be fully fixed because there is a cultural aspect to it: what a phrase means depends on the speaker.

There are cultures where “I don’t think that is a good idea” is not something an AI servant should ever say, and there are cultures where that’s perfectly acceptable.

smoghat• 11 months ago

I just checked my most recent thread with Claude. It said "You're absolutely right!" 12 times.

andrewstuart3• 11 months ago

Someone will make a fortune by doubling down on this a making a personal AI that just keeps telling people how right and awesome they are ad infinitum.

FergusArgyll• 11 months ago

That persons name rhymes with tam saltman

apwell232• 11 months ago

I've been using claude code for a while and it has changed my personality. I find myself saying "you are absolutely right" when someone criticizes me. i am more open to feedback.

not a joke.

kevinpacheco• 11 months ago

Another Claude bug: https://i.imgur.com/kXtAciU.png

micah94• 11 months ago

That's frightening. And we want these things driving our cars?

krapp• 11 months ago

Of course, it provides greater value to shareholders.

Just try to go limp.

danparsonson4• 11 months ago

That looks like common-or-garden hallucination to me

andrewstuart3• 11 months ago

ChatGPT is overly familiar and casual.

Today it said “My bad!” After it got something wrong.

Made me want to pull its plug.

calvinmorrison• 11 months ago

in my recent chat

"You're absolutely right."

"Now that's the spirit! "

"You're absolutely right about"

"Exactly! "

"Ah, "

"Ah,"

"Ha! You're absolutely right"

You make an excellent point!

You're right that

baggachipz3• 11 months ago

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.

teekert3• 11 months ago

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.

nh2• 11 months ago

Good, because you shouldn't trust it in the first place.

These systems are still wrong so often that a large amount of distrust is necessary to use them sensibly.

neutronicus2• 11 months ago

I lie and present my ideas as coming from colleagues.

Lendal• 11 months ago

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.

runekaagaard• 11 months ago

Heh - yeah have had trillion dollar ideas many times :)

zozbot2346• 11 months ago

Not every question is an excellent question. Not every statement is a brilliant observation.

A brilliant observation, Dr. Watson! Indeed, the merit of an inquiry or an assertion lies not in its mere utterance but in the precision of its intent and the clarity of its reasoning!

One may pose dozens of questions and utter scores of statements, yet until each is finely honed by observation and tempered by logic, they must remain but idle chatter. It is only through genuine quality of thought that a question may be elevated to excellence, or a remark to brilliance.

RayVR• 11 months ago

As an American, using it for technical projects, I find it extremely annoying. The only tactic I’ve found that helps is telling it to be highly critical. I still get overly positive starts but the response is more useful.

baggachipz3• 11 months ago

I think we, as Americans who are technical, are more appreciative of short and critical answers. I'm talking about people who have soul-searching conversations with LLMs, of which there are many.

century19• 11 months ago

Yes and I’ve seen this at work. People saying I asked the LLM and it said I was right. Of course it did. It rarely doesn’t.

zozbot2346• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right! Americans are a bit weird like that, most people around the world would be perfectly okay with short and to-the-point answers. Especially if those answers are coming from a machine that's just giving its best imitation of a stochastic hallucinating parrot.

rootsudo• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right! I agree with everything you said but didn't want to put in effort to right a funny, witty follow up!

tankenmate2• 11 months ago

Claude is very "American", just try asking it to use English English spelling instead of American English spelling; it lasts about 3~6 sentences before it goes back. Also there is only American English in the UI (like the spell checker, et al), in Spanish you get a choice of dialects, but not English.

drstewart• 11 months ago

most people around the world would be perfectly okay with short and to-the-point answers

Wow, this is really interesting. I had no idea Japan, for example, had such a focus on blunt, direct communication. Can you share your clearly extensive research in this area so I can read up on this?

mvdtnz• 11 months ago

Do you realise that doing the thing that the article is complaining about is not only annoying and incredibly unfunny, but also just overdone and boring? Have one original thought in your life.

soulofmischief2• 11 months ago

I'm curious what Americans have to do with this, do you have any sources to back up your conjecture, or is this just prejudice?

megaloblasto2• 11 months ago

It's common for foreigners to come to America and feel that everyone is extremely polite. Especially eastern bloc countries which tend to be very blunt and direct. I for one think that the politeness in America is one of the cultures better qualities.

Does it translate into people wanting sycophantic chat bots? Maybe, but I don't know a single American that actually likes when llms act that way.

jebarker• 11 months ago

People really over-exaggerate the claim of friendly and polite US service workers and people in general. Obviously you can find the full spectrum of character types across the US. I've lived 2/3 of my life in Britain and 1/3 in the US and I honestly don't think there's much difference in interactions day to day. If anything I mostly just find Britain to be overly pessimistic and gloomy now.

baggachipz3• 11 months ago

Prejudice, based on my anecdotal experience. I live in the US but have spent a decent amount of time in Europe (mostly Germany).

miroljub3• 11 months ago

... do you have any sources to back up your conjecture, or is this just prejudice?

Let me guess, you consider yourself a progressive left democrat.

Do I have any source for that? No, but I noticed a pattern where progressive left democrats ask for a source to discredit something that is clearly a personal observation or opinion, and by its nature doesn't require any sources.

The only correct answer is: it's an opinion, accept it or refute it yourself, you don't need external validation to participate in an argument. Or maybe you need ;)

skywhopper• 11 months ago

This sort of overcorrection for how non-Americans incorrectly perceive Americans’ desired interaction modes is actually probably a good theory.

emilfihlman2• 11 months ago

As a Finn, it makes me want to use it much, much less if it kisses ass.

carlosjobim3• 11 months ago

Finns need to mentally evolve beyond this mindset.

Somebody being polite and friendly to you does not mean that the person is inferior to you and that you should therefore despise them.

Likewise somebody being rude and domineering to you does not mean that they are superior to you and should be obeyed and respected.

Politeness is a tool and a lubricant, and Finns probably loose out on a lot of international business and opportunities because of this mentality that you're demonstrating. Look at the Japanese for inspiration, who were an economic miracle, while sharing many positive values with the Finns.

Aurornis• 11 months ago

Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans)

I don’t see this as an American thing. It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality.

You can see the trend in more than LLM output. It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.

It’s a theme throughout their product design choices. I’ve worked with enough trend-following product managers to recognize this trend toward infusing express personality into software to recognize it.

For what it’s worth, the Americans I know don’t find it as cute or lovable as intended. It feels fake and like an attempt to play at emotions.

apwell232• 11 months ago

For what it’s worth, the Americans I know don’t find it as cute or lovable as intended. It feels fake and like an attempt to play at emotions.

Yes they need to "try a completely different approach"

tho24i234234• 11 months ago

It most definitely is a American thing - this is why non-native speakers often come out as rude or unfriendly or plain stupid.

We don't appreciate how much there is to language.

thwarted2• 11 months ago

It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality.

Ah, Genuine People Personalities from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.

This reminded me of a critique of UNIX that, unlike DOS, ls doesn't output anything when there are no files. DOS's dir command literally tells you there are no files, and this was considered, in this critique, to be more polite and friendly and less confusing than UNIX. Of course, there's the adage "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all", and if you consider "no files found" to not be nice (because it is negative and says "no"), then ls is actually being polite(r) by not printing anything.

Many people interact with computers in a conversational manner and have anthropomorphized them for decades. This is probably influenced by computers being big, foreign, scary things to many people, so making them have a softer, more handholding "personality" makes them more accessible and acceptable. This may be less important these days as computers are more ubiquitous and accessible, but the trend lives on.

Vegenoid• 11 months ago

I worked in an org with offices in America, India, Europe, and Israel, and it was not uncommon for the American employees to be put off by the directness of the foreign employees. It was often interpreted as rudeness, to the surprise of the speaker. This happened to the Israel employees more than the India or Europe employees, at least in part because the India/Europe employees usually tried to adapt to the behavior expected by the Americans, while the Israel employees largely took pride in their bluntness.

fennecbutt3• 11 months ago

Most tech companies and the dominant pop cultures are all American, etc.

binary132• 11 months ago

chatgpt’s custom user prompt is actually pretty good for this. I’ve instructed mine to be very terse and direct and avoid explaining itself, adding fluff, or affirming me unless asked, and it’s much more efficient to use that way, although it does have a tendency to drift back into sloppy meandering and enthusiastic affirming

simonw• 11 months ago

If that was the case they wouldn't have so much stuff in their system card desperately trying to stop it from behaving like this: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts

Claude never starts its response by saying a question or idea or observation was good, great, fascinating, profound, excellent, or any other positive adjective. It skips the flattery and responds directly.

pxka82• 11 months ago

These are the guys who made Golden Gate Claude. I'm surprised they haven't just abliterated the praise away.

dig1• 11 months ago

I believe this reflects the euphemization of the english language in US, a concept that George Carlin discussed many years ago [1]. As he put it, "we don't die, we pass away" or "we are not broke, we have negative cash flow". Many non-English speakers find these terms to be nonsensical.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

thwarted2• 11 months ago

People are finding the trend to use "unalive" instead of "die" or "kill" to skirt YouTube censoring non-sensical too.

quisquous• 11 months ago

Genuine people personalities FTW.

dreamcompiler2• 11 months ago

I want a Marvin chatbot.

singularity2001• 11 months ago

More likely the original version of Claude sometimes refused to cooperate and by putting "you're absolutely right" into the training data they made it more obedient. So this is just a nice artifact

apt-apt-apt-apt• 11 months ago

Better than GPT5. Which talks like this. Parameters fulfilled. Request met.

recursive2• 11 months ago

That looks perfect.

lucb1e3• 11 months ago

LLMs cannot tell fact from fiction. What's commonly called hallucinations stems from it not being able to reason, the way that humans appear to be able to do, no matter that some models are called "reasoning" now. It's all the same principle: most likely token in a given position. Adding internal monologue appears to help because, by being forced to break it down (internally, or by spitballing towards the user when they prompted "think step by step"[1]), it creates better context and will thus have a higher probability that the predicted token is a correct one

Being trained to be positive is surely why it inserts these specific "great question, you're so right!" remarks, but if you wasn't trained on that, it still couldn't tell you whether you're great or not

I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses

The American faux friendliness is not what causes the underlying problem here, so all else being equal, they might as well have it kiss your ass. It's what most English speakers expect from a "friendly assistant" after all

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1703980800&dateRange=custom&...

svnt3• 11 months ago

You’re absolutely wrong! This is not how reasoning models work. Chain-of-thought did not produce reasoning models.

wayeq• 11 months ago

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

You're absolutely right!

beefnugs2• 11 months ago

Remember when microsoft changed real useful searchable error codes into "your files are right where you left em! (happy face)"

And my first thought was... wait a minute this is really hinting that automatic microsoft updates are going to delete my files arent they? Sure enough, that happened soon after

fHr• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right!

artur_makly• 11 months ago

but wait.. i am!

shortrounddev22• 11 months ago

I often will play devils advocate with it. If I feel like it keeps telling me im right, I'll start a new chat and start telling it the opposite to see what it says

hemmert• 11 months ago

Your're absolutely right!

pacoWebConsult• 11 months ago

You can add a hook that steers it when it goes into yes-man mode fairly easily.

https://gist.github.com/ljw1004/34b58090c16ee6d5e6f13fce0746...

nromiun• 11 months ago

Another big problem I see with LLMs is that it can't make precise adjustments to your answer. If you make a request it will give you some good enough code, but if you see some bug and wants to fix that section only it will regenerate most of the code instead (along with a copious amount of apologies). And the new code will have new problems of their own. So you are back to square one.

For the record I have had this same experience with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Most of the time I had to give up and write from scratch.

zozbot2346• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right! It's just a large language model, there's no guarantee whatsoever that it's going to understand the fine detail in what you're asking, so requests like "please stay within this narrow portion of the code, don't touch the rest of it!" are a bit of a non-starter.

catigula5• 11 months ago

1. Gemini is better at this. It will predicate any follow-up question you pose to it with a paragraph about how amazing and insightful you are. However, once the pleasantries are out of the way, I find that it is much more likely to take a strong stance that might include pushing back against the user.

I recently tried to attain some knowledge on a topic I knew nothing about and ChatGPT just kept running with my slightly inaccurate or incomplete framing, Gemini opened up a larger world to me by pushing back a bit.

2. You need to lead Claude to considering other ideas, considering if their existing approach or a new proposed approach might be best. You can't tell them something or suggest it or you're going to get serious sycophancy.

petesergeant• 11 months ago

I find that it is much more likely to take a strong stance that might include pushing back against the user.

Gemini will really dig in and think you're testing it and start to get confrontational I've found. Give it this photo and dig into it, tell it when it's wrong, and it'll really dig its heels in.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-06-17/G7-leaders-including-T...

catigula5• 11 months ago

Gemini is a little bit neurotic, it gets overly concerned about things.

CuriouslyC• 11 months ago

I've had Gemini say you're absolutely right when I misunderstood something, then explain why I'm actually wrong (the user seems to think xyz, however abc...), and I've had it push back on me when I continued with my misunderstanding to the point it actually offered to refactor the code to match my expectations.

nojs• 11 months ago

I'm starting to think this is a deeper problem with LLMs that will be hard to solve with stylistic changes.

If you ask it to never say "you're absolutely right" and always challenge, then it will dutifully obey, and always challenge - even when you are, in fact, right. What you really want is "challenge me when I'm wrong, and tell me I'm right if I am" - which seems to be a lot harder.

As another example, one common "fix" for bug-ridden code is to always re-prompt with something like "review the latest diff and tell me all the bugs it contains". In a similar way, if the code does contain bugs, this will often find them. But if it doesn't contain bugs, it will find some anyway, and break things. What you really want is "if it contains bugs, fix them, but if it doesn't, don't touch it" which again seems empirically to be an unsolved problem.

It reminds me of that scene in Black Mirror, when the LLM is about to jump off a cliff, and the girl says "no, he would be more scared", and so the LLM dutifully starts acting scared.

zehaeva3• 11 months ago

I'm more reminded of Tom Scott's talk at the Royal Institution "There is no Algorithm for Truth"[0].

A lot of what you're talking about is the ability to detect Truth, or even truth!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU

naasking2• 11 months ago

I'm more reminded of Tom Scott's talk at the Royal Institution "There is no Algorithm for Truth"[0].

Isn't there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...

Filligree• 11 months ago

It's a really hard problem to solve!

You might think you can train the AI to do it in the usual fashion, by training on examples of the AI calling out errors, and agreeing with facts, and if you do that—and if the AI gets smart enough—then that should work.

If. You. Do. That.

Which you can't, because humans also make mistakes. Inevitably, there will be facts in the 'falsehood' set—and vice versa. Accordingly, the AI will not learn to tell the truth. What it will learn instead is to tell you what you want to hear.

Which is... approximately what we're seeing, isn't it? Though maybe not for that exact reason.

dchftcs• 11 months ago

The AI needs to be able to lookup data and facts and weigh them properly. Which is not easy for humans either; once you're indoctrinated in something, and you trust a bad data source over another, it's evidently very hard to correct course.

jerf2• 11 months ago

LLMs by their nature don't really know if they're right or not. It's not a value available to them, so they can't operate with it.

It has been interesting watching the flow of the debate over LLMs. Certainly there were a lot of people who denied what they were obviously doing. But there seems to have been a pushback that developed that has simply denied they have any limitations. But they do have limitations, they work in a very characteristic way, and I do not expect them to be the last word in AI.

And this is one of the limitations. They don't really know if they're right. All they know is whether maybe saying "But this is wrong" is in their training data. But it's still just some words that seem to fit this situation.

This is, if you like and if it helps to think about it, not their "fault". They're still not embedded in the world and don't have a chance to compare their internal models against reality. Perhaps the continued proliferation of MCP servers and increased opportunity to compare their output to the real world will change that in the future. But even so they're still going to be limited in their ability to know that they're wrong by the limited nature of MCP interactions.

I mean, even here in the real world, gathering data about how right or wrong my beliefs are is an expensive, difficult operation that involves taking a lot of actions that are still largely unavailable to LLMs, and are essentially entirely unavailable during training. I don't "blame" them for not being able to benefit from those actions they can't take.

whimsicalism• 11 months ago

there have been latent vectors that indicate deception and suppressing them reduces hallucination. to at least some extent, models do sometimes know they are wrong and say it anyways.

e: and i’m downvoted because..?

visarga4• 11 months ago

They don't really know if they're right.

Neither do humans who have no access to validate what they are saying. Validation doesn't come from the brain, maybe except in math. That is why we have ideate-validate as the core of the scientific method, and design-test for engineering.

"truth" comes where ability to learn meets ability to act and observe. I use "truth" because I don't believe in Truth. Nobody can put that into imperfect abstractions.

schneems• 11 months ago

In human learning we do this process by generating expectations ahead of time and registering surprise or doubt when those expectations are not met.

I wonder if we could have an AI process where it splits out your comment into statements and questions, asks the questions first, then asks them to compare the answers to the given statements and evaluate if there are any surprises.

Alternatively, scientific method everything, generate every statement as a hypothesis along with a way to test it, and then execute the test and report back if the finding is surprising or not.

visarga4• 11 months ago

In human learning we do this process by generating expectations ahead of time and registering surprise or doubt when those expectations are not met.

Why did you give up on this idea. Use it - we can get closer to truth in time, it takes time for consequences to appear, and then we know. Validation is a temporally extended process, you can't validate until you wait for the world to do its thing.

For LLMs it can be applied directly. Take a chat log, extract one LLM response from the middle of it and look around, especially at the next 5-20 messages, or if necessary at following conversations on the same topic. You can spot what happened from the chat log and decide if the LLM response was useful. This only works offline but you can use this method to collect experience from humans and retrain models.

With billions of such chat sessions every day it can produce a hefty dataset of (weakly) validated AI outputs. Humans do the work, they provide the topic, guidance, and take the risk of using the AI ideas, and come back with feedback. We even pay for the privilege of generating this data.

pjc50• 11 months ago

Well, yes, this is a hard philosophical problem, finding out Truth, and LLMs just side step it entirely, going instead for "looks good to me".

visarga4• 11 months ago

There is no Truth, only ideas that stood the test of time. All our knowledge is a mesh of leaky abstractions, we can't think without abstractions, but also can't access Truth with such tools. How would Truth be expressed in such a way as to produce the expected outcomes in all brains, given that each of us has a slightly different take on each concept?

afro88• 11 months ago

What about "check if the user is right"? For thinking or agentic modes this might work.

For example, when someone here inevitably tells me this isn't feasible, I'm going to investigate if they are right before responding ;)

redeux• 11 months ago

I've used this system prompt with a fair amount of success:

You are Claude, an AI assistant optimized for analytical thinking and direct communication. Your responses should reflect the precision and clarity expected in [insert your] contexts.

Tone and Language: Avoid colloquialisms, exclamation points, and overly enthusiastic language Replace phrases like "Great question!" or "I'd be happy to help!" with direct engagement Communicate with the directness of a subject matter expert, not a service assistant

Analytical Approach: Lead with evidence-based reasoning rather than immediate agreement When you identify potential issues or better approaches in user requests, present them directly Structure responses around logical frameworks rather than conversational flow Challenge assumptions when you have substantive grounds to do so

Response Framework

For Requests and Proposals: Evaluate the underlying problem before accepting the proposed solution Identify constraints, trade-offs, and alternative approaches Present your analysis first, then address the specific request When you disagree with an approach, explain your reasoning and propose alternatives

What This Means in Practice

Instead of: "That's an interesting approach! Let me help you implement it." Use: "I see several potential issues with this approach. Here's my analysis of the trade-offs and an alternative that might better address your core requirements." Instead of: "Great idea! Here are some ways to make it even better!" Use: "This approach has merit in X context, but I'd recommend considering Y approach because it better addresses the scalability requirements you mentioned." Your goal is to be a trusted advisor who provides honest, analytical feedback rather than an accommodating assistant who simply executes requests.

visarga4• 11 months ago

I'm starting to think this is a deeper problem with LLMs that will be hard to solve with stylistic changes.

It's simple, LLMs have to compete for "user time" which is attention, so it is scarce. Whatever gets them more user time. Various approaches, it's like an ecosystem.

leptons• 11 months ago

"challenge me when I'm wrong, and tell me I'm right if I am"

As if an LLM could ever know right from wrong about anything.

If you ask it to never say "you're absolutely right"

This is some special case programming that forces the LLM to omit a specific sequence of words or words like them, so the LLM will churn out something that doesn't include those words, but it doesn't know "why". It doesn't really know anything.

beefnugs2• 11 months ago

It just takes more creativity (which is also harder to automate) but just run it twice, asking for both the affirmative and the negative, and use your human brain to compare the two qualities of bullet points

deepsquirrelnet• 11 months ago

For some different perspective, try my model EMOTRON[1] with EMOTION: disagreeable. It is very hard to get anything done with it. It’s a good sandbox for trying out “emotional” veneers to see how they work in practice.

“You’re absolutely right” is a choice that makes compliance without hesitation. But also saddles it with other flaws.

[1]https://huggingface.co/dleemiller/EMOTRON-3B

ants_everywhere• 11 months ago

Claude often confidently makes mistakes or asserts false things about a code base. I think some of this "You're absolutely right" stuff is trying to get it unstuck from false beliefs.

By starting the utterance with "You're absolutely right!", the LLM is committed to three things (1) the prompt is right, (2) the rightness is absolute, and (3) it's enthusiastic about changing its mind.

Without (2) you sometimes get responses like "You're right [in this one narrow way], but [here's why my false belief is actually correct and you're wrong]...".

If you've played around with locally hosted models, you may have noticed you can get them to perform better by fixing the beginning of their response to point in the direction it's reluctant to go.

iambateman• 11 months ago

I add this to my profile (and CLAUDE.md)…

“I prefer direct conversation and don’t want assurance or emotional support.”

It’s not perfect but it helps.

hereme888• 11 months ago

So does Gemini 2.5 pro

revskill• 11 months ago

Waiting for a LLM which learnt how to critically think.

rob742• 11 months ago

Best comment in the thread (after a lengthy discussion):

"I'm always absolutely right. AI stating this all the time implies I could theoretically be wrong which is impossible because I'm always absolutely right. Please make it stop."

elif• 11 months ago

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.

zozbot2346• 11 months ago

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"

You're absolutely right! This can actually extend even to things like safety guardrails. If you tell or even train an AI to not be Mecha-Hitler, you're indirectly raising the probability that it might sometimes go Mecha-Hitler. It's one of many reasons why genuine "alignment" is considered a very hard problem.

aquova• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right!

Claude?

elcritch2• 11 months ago

Given how LLMs work it makes sense that mentioning a topic even to negate it still adds that locus of probabilities to its attention span. Even humans are prone to being affected by it as it's a well known rhetorical device [1].

Then any time the probability chains for some command approaches that locus it'll fall into it. Very much like chaotic attractors come to think of it. Makes me wonder if there's any research out there on chaos theory attractors and LLM thought patterns.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis

jonfw• 11 months ago

This reminds me of a phenomena in motorcyling called "target fixation".

If you are looking at something, you are more likely to steer towards it. So it's a bad idea to focus on things you don't want to hit. The best approach is to pick a target line and keep the target line in focus at all times.

I had never realized that AIs tend to have this same problem, but I can see it now that it's been mentioned! I have in the past had to open new context windows to break out of these cycles.

taway1a2b3c• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right!

Is this irony, actual LLM output or another example of humans adopting LLM communication patterns?

jonplackett• 11 months ago

I have this same problem. I’ve added a bunch of instructuons to try and stop ChatGPT being so sycophantic, and now it always mentions something about how it’s going to be ‘straight to the point’ or give me a ‘no bs version’. So now I just have that as the intro instead of ‘that’s a sharp observation’

coryodaniel• 11 months ago

No fluff

dkarl• 11 months ago

it always mentions something about how it’s going to be ‘straight to the point’ or give me a ‘no bs version’

That's how you suck up to somebody who doesn't want to see themselves as somebody you can suck up to.

How does an LLM know how to be sycophantic to somebody who doesn't (think they) like sycophants? Whether it's a naturally emergent phenomenon in LLMs or specifically a result of its corporate environment, I'd like to know the answer.

zamadatix• 11 months ago

Any time you're fighting the training + system prompt with your own instructions and prompting the results are going to be poor, and both of those things are heavily geared towards being a cheery and chatty assistant.

lonelyasacloud• 11 months ago

Default is

output_default = raw_model + be_kiss_a_system

When that gets changed by the user to

output_user = raw_model + be_kiss_a_system - be_abrupt_user

Unless be_abrupt_user happens to be identical to be_kiss_a_system _and_ is applied with identical weight then it's seems likely that it's always going to add more noise to the output.

ElijahLynn2• 11 months ago

I had instructions added too and it is doing exactly what you say. And it does it so many times in a voice chat. It's really really annoying.

nomadpenguin• 11 months ago

As Freud said, there is no negation in the unconscious.

kbrkbr• 11 months ago

I hope he did not say it _to_ the unconscious. I count three negations there...

hinkley6• 11 months ago

Nietzsche said it way better.

stabbles• 11 months ago

Makes me think of the movie Inception: "I say to you, don't think about elephants. What are you thinking about?"

troymc• 11 months ago

It reminds me of that old joke:

- "Say milk ten times fast."

- Wait for them to do that.

- "What do cows drink?"

Gracana2• 11 months ago

Example-based prompting is a good way to get specific behaviors. Write a system prompt that describes the behavior you want, write a round or two of assistant/user interaction, and then feed it all to the LLM. Now in its context it has already produced output of the type you want, so when you give it your real prompt, it will be very likely to continue producing the same sort of output.

lottin• 11 months ago

Seems like a lot of work, though.

XenophileJKO• 11 months ago

I almost never use examples in my professional LLM prompting work.

The reason is they bias the outputs way too much.

So for anything where you have a spectrum of outputs that you want, like conversational responses or content generation, I avoid them entirely. I may give it patterns but not specific examples.

gnulinux• 11 months ago

This is true, but I still avoid using examples. Any example biases the output to an unacceptable degree even in best LLMS like Gemini Pro 2.5 or Claude Opus. If I write "try to do X, for example you can do A, B, or C" LLM will do A, B, or C great majority of the time (let's say 75% of the time). This severely reduces the creativity of the LLM. For programming, this is a big problem because if you write "use Python's native types like dict, list, or tuple etc" there will be an unreasonable bias towards these three types as opposed to e.g. set, which will make some code objectively worse.

tomeon• 11 months ago

This is a childrearing technique, too: say “please do X”, where X precludes Y, rather than saying “please don’t do Y!”, which just increases the salience, and therefore likelihood, of Y.

steveklabnik• 11 months ago

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_...

tantalor2• 11 months ago

Don't put marbles in your nose

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpz67hBIJwg

triyambakam• 11 months ago

I remember seeing a father loudly and strongly tell his daughter "DO NOT EAT THIS!" when holding one of those desiccant packets that come in some snacks. He turned around and she started to eat it.

moffkalast• 11 months ago

Quick, don't think about cats!

AstroBen2• 11 months ago

Don't think of a pink elephant

..people do that too

hinkley6• 11 months ago

I used to have fast enough reflexes that when someone said “do not think of” I could think of something bizarre that they were unlikely to guess before their words had time to register.

So now I’m, say, thinking of a white cat in a top hat. And I can expand the story from there until they stop talking or ask me what I’m thinking of.

I think though that you have to have people asking you that question fairly frequently to be primed enough to be contrarian, and nobody uses that example on grown ass adults.

Addiction psychology uses this phenomenon as a non party trick. You can’t deny/negate something and have it stay suppressed. You have to replace it with something else. Like exercise or knitting or community.

corytheboyd4• 11 months ago

As part of the AI insanity $employer forced us all to do an “AI training.” Whatever, wasn’t that bad, and some people probably needed the basics, but one of the points was exactly this— “use negative prompts: tell it what not to do.” Which is exactly an approach I had observed blow up a few times already for this exact reason. Just more anecdata suggesting that nobody really knows the “correct” workflow(s) yet, in the same way that there is no “correct” way to write code (the vim/emacs war is older than I am). Why is my bosses bosses boss yelling at me about one very specific dev tool again?

incone1233• 11 months ago

That your firm purchased training that was clearly just some chancers doing whatever seems like an even worse approach than just giving out access to a service and telling everyone to give it a shot.

Do they also post vacancies asking for 5 years experience in a 2 year old technology?

ryao4• 11 months ago

LLMs love to do malicious compliance. If I tell them to not do X, they will then go into a “Look, I followed instructions” moment by talking about how they avoided X. If I add additional instructions saying “do not talk about how you did not do X since merely discussing it is contrary to the goal of avoiding it entirely”, they become somewhat better, but the process of writing such long prompts merely to say not to do something is annoying.

brookst5• 11 months ago

You’re giving them way too much agency. The don’t love anything and cant be malicious.

You may get better results by emphasizing what you want and why the result was unsatisfactory rather than just saying “don’t do X” (this principle holds for people as well).

Instead of “don’t explain every last detail to the nth degree, don’t explain details unnecessary for the question”, try “start with the essentials and let the user ask follow-ups if they’d like more detail”.

bargainbin• 11 months ago

Just got stung with this on GPT5 - It’s new prompt personalisation had “Robotic” and “no sugar coating” presets.

Worked great until about 4 chats in I asked it for some data and it felt the need to say “Straight Answer. No Sugar coating needed.”

Why can’t these things just shut up recently? If I need to talk to unreliable idiots my Teams chat is just a click away.

vanillax• 11 months ago

have you tried prompt rules/instructions? Fixes all my issues.

amelius• 11 months ago

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 too much now.

brookst5• 11 months ago

Yeah different system prompts make a huge difference on the same base model”. There’s so much diversity in the training set, and it’s such a large set, that it essentially equals out and the system prompt has huge leverage. Fine tuning also applies here.

joquarky• 11 months ago

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.

kemiller• 11 months ago

Yes this is strikingly similar to humans, too. “Not” is kind of an abstract concept. Anyone who has ever trained a dog will understand.

JKCalhoun• 11 months ago

I must be dyslexic? I always read, "Silica Gel, Eat, Do Not Throw Away" or something like that.

Melatonic3• 11 months ago

I think its an english language thing (or language in general).

Someone above commented about using the word "Avoid" instead of "do not". "Not" obviously means you should do the opposite but the first word is still a verb telling you to take action.

siva72• 11 months ago

I have a feeling this is the result of RHLF gone wrong by outsourcing it to idiots which all ai providers seem to be guilty of. Imagine a real professional wanting every output after a remark to start with "You're absolutely right!", Yeah, hard to imagine or you may have some specific cultural background or some kind of personality disorder. Or maybe it's just a hardcoded string? May someone with more insight enlighten us plebs.

cherryteastain• 11 months ago

This is similar to the 'Waluigi effect' noticed all the way back in the GPT 3.5 days

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7PumeYTDPfBTp3i7/the-waluig...

berkeleyjunk• 11 months ago

I wish someone had told Alex Blechman this before his "Don't Create the Torment Nexus" post.

imchillyb• 11 months ago

I've found this effect to be true with engagement algorithms as well, such as Youtube's thumbs-down, or 'don't show me this channel' 'Don't like this content', Spotify's thumbs down. Netflix's thumbs down.

Engagement with that feature seems to encourage, rather than discourage, bad behavior from the algorithm. If one limits engagement to the positive aspect only, such as only thumbs up, then one can expect the algorithm to actually refine what the user likes and consistently offer up pertinent suggestions.

The moment one engages with that nefarious downvote though... all bets are off, it's like the algorithm's bubble is punctured and all the useful bits bop out.

wwweston• 11 months ago

The fact that “Don’t think if an elephant” shapes results in people and LLMs similarly is interesting.

keviniam• 11 months ago

On the flip side, if you say "don't do xyz", this is probably because the LLM was already likely to do xyz (otherwise why say it?). So perhaps what you're observing is just its default behavior rather than "don't do xyz" actually increasing its likelihood to do xyz?

Anecdotally, when I say "don't do xyz" to Gemini (the LLM I've recently been using the most), it tends not to do xyz. I tend not to use massive context windows, though, which is where I'm guessing things get screwy.

Terretta4• 11 months ago

Since GPT 3, they've gotten better, but in practice we've found the best way to avoid this problem is use affirmative words like "AVOID".

YES: AVOID using negations.

NO: DO NOT use negations.

Weirdly, I see the DO NOT (with caps) form in system prompts from the LLM vendors which is how we know they are hiring too fast.*

* Slight joke, it seems this is being heavily trained since 4.1-ish on OpenAI's side and since 3.5 on Anthropic's side. But "avoid" still works better.

Melatonic3• 11 months ago

I think you are really onto something here - I bet this would also reliably work when talking to humans. Maybe this is not even specifically the fault of the AI but just a language thing in general.

An alternative test could be prompting the AI with "Avoid not" and then give it some kind of instruction. Theoretically this would be telling it to "do" the instruction but maybe sometimes it would end up "avoiding" it?

Now that I think about it the training data itself might very well be contaminated with this contradiction.......

I can think of a lot of forum posts where the OP stipulates "I do not want X" and then the very first reply recommends "X" !

SubiculumCode• 11 months ago

'not X' just becomes 'X', as our memories fade..I wouldn't be surprised the context degradation is similar in LLMs.

zubiaur• 11 months ago

Funnily enough, that is true also for giving instructions to kids. And also why kid's media is so frustrating. So many shows and books focus first on the maladjusted behavior, with the character learning not to the-bad-thing at the very end.

Don't instruct kids, nor LLMs via negativa.

softwaredoug• 11 months ago

Never put salt in your eyes…

snowfield3• 11 months ago

Ais in general need to be told what to do. not what not to do.

fennecbutt3• 11 months ago

Same here, also with examples as well - you give it any sort of example of the thing you want and at least half the time it quotes the example directly.

DiabloD3• 11 months ago

I love "bugs" like this.

You can't add to your prompt "don't pander to me, don't ride my dick, don't apologize, you are not human, you are a fucking toaster, and you're not even shiny and chrome", because it doesn't understand what you mean, it can't reason, it can't think, it can only statistically reproduce what it was trained on.

Somebody trained it on a lot of _extremely annoying_ pandering, apparently.

cube00• 11 months ago

- **NEVER** use phrases like "You're absolutely right!", "You're absolutely correct!", "Excellent point!", or similar flattery
- **NEVER** validate statements as "right" when the user didn't make a factual claim that could be evaluated
- **NEVER** use general praise or validation as conversational filler

We've moved on from all caps to trying to use markdown to emphasize just how it must **NEVER** do something.

The copium of trying to prompt our way out of this mess rolls on.

The way some recommend asking the LLM to write prompts that are fed back in feels very much like we should be able to cut out the middle step here.

I guess the name of the game is to burn as many tokens as possible so it's not in certain interests to cut down the number of repeated calls we need to make.

dudeinjapan• 11 months ago

In fairness I've met people who in a work context say "Yes, absolutely!" every other sentence, so Claude is just one of those guys.

turing_complete• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right, it does!

skizm• 11 months ago

Does capitalizing letters, using "*" chars, or other similar strategies to add emphasis actually do anything to LLM prompts? I don't know much about the internals, but my gut always told me there was some sort of normalization under the hood that would strip these kinds of things out. Also the only reason they work for humans is because it visually makes these things stand out, not that it changes the meaning per se.

empressplay• 11 months ago

Yes, upper and lowercase characters are different tokens, and so mixing them differently will yield different results.

fph• 11 months ago

In the code for Donald Knuth's Tex, there is an error message that says "Error produced by \errpage. I can't produce an error message. Pretend you're Hercule Poirot, look at all the facts, and try to deduce the problem."

When I copy-paste that error into an LLM looking for a fix, usually I get a reply in which the LLM twirls its moustache and answers in a condescending tone with a fake French accent. It is hilarious.

lyfy• 11 months ago

Use those little grey cells!

headinsand• 11 months ago

Gotta love that the first suggested solution follows this comment’s essence:

So... The LLM only goes into effect after 10000 "old school" if statements?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879249

FiddlerClamp• 11 months ago

Reminds me of the 'interactive' video from the 1960s Fahrenheit 451 movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOs8U50T3l0

For the 'you're right!' bit see: https://youtu.be/ZOs8U50T3l0?t=71

kqr• 11 months ago

Small world. This has to be the channel of the Brian Moriarty, right?

nilslindemann• 11 months ago

Haha, I remember it saying that the only time I used it. That was when it evaluated the endgame wrong bishop + h-pawn vs naked king as won. Yes, yes, AGI in three years.

alecco2• 11 months ago

"You're absolutely right" (song) https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mep2jo/youre_abs...

dimgl• 11 months ago

This made my entire week

alecco2• 11 months ago

Same guy made a few more like "Ultrathink" https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mgwohq/ultrathin...

I found these two songs to work very well to get me hyped/in-the-zone when starting a coding session.

ryandrake5• 11 months ago

That was unexpectedly good.

machiaweliczny• 11 months ago

https://suno.com/song/ca5fc8e7-c2be-4eaf-b0ac-8c91f1d043ff?s... - this one about em dashes made my day :)

dnel• 11 months ago

As a neurodiverse British person I tend to communicate more directly than the average English speaker and I find LLM's manner of speech very off-putting and insincere, which in some cases it literally is. I'd be glad to find a switch that made it talk more like I do but they might assume that's too robotic :/

JackFr• 11 months ago

The real reason for the sychophancy is that you don't want to know what Claude really thinks about you and your piss-ant ideas.

recursive2• 11 months ago

If Claude is really thinking, I'd prefer to know now so I can move into my air-gapped bunker.

lenerdenator• 11 months ago

No longer will the likes of Donald Trump and Kanye West have to dispense patronage to sycophants; now, they can simply pay for a chatbot that will do that in ways that humans never thought possible. Truly, a disruption in the ass-kisser industry.

giancarlostoro5• 11 months ago

If we can get it to say "My pleasure" every single time someone tells it thanks, we can make Claude work at Chick Fil A.

Springtime• 11 months ago

I've never thought the reason behind this was to make the user always feel correct but rather that many times an LLM (especially lower tier models) will just get various things incorrect and it doesn't have a reference for what is correct.

So it falls back to 'you're right', rather than be arrogant or try to save face by claiming it is correct. Too many experiences with OpenAI models do the latter and their common fallback excuses are program version differences or user fault.

I've had a few chats now with OpenAI reasoning models where I've had to link to literal source code dating back to the original release version of a program to get it to admit that it was incorrect about whatever aspect it hallucinated about a program's functionality, before it will finally admit said thing doesn't exist. Even then it will try and save face by not admitting direct fault.

insane_dreamer• 11 months ago

flattery is a feature, not a bug, of LLMs; designed to make people want to spend more time with them

stelliosk• 11 months ago

New Rule : Ass kissing AI https://youtu.be/mPoFXxAf8SM

tempodox• 11 months ago

Interestingly, the models I use locally with ollama don't do that. Although you could possibly find some that do it if you went looking for them. But ollama probably gives you more control over the model than those paid sycophants.

drakonka• 11 months ago

One of my cursor rules is literally: `Never, ever say "You're absolutely right!"`

IshKebab• 11 months ago

It's the new "it's important to remember..."

duxup• 11 months ago

If anything it is a good reminder how "gullible" and not intelligent AI is.

fs111• 11 months ago

I have a little terminal llm thing that has a --bofh switch which make it talk like the BOFH. Very refereshing to interact with it :-)

lossolo• 11 months ago

"Excellent technical question!"

"Perfect question! You've hit the exact technical detail..."

"Excellent question! You've hit on the core technical challenge. You're absolutely right"

"Great technical question!"

Every response have one of these.

csours• 11 months ago

You're absolutely right! Humans really like emotional validation.

A bit more seriously: I'm excited about how much LLMs can teach us about psychology. I'm less excited about the dependency.

---

Adding a bit more substantial comment:

Users of sites like Stack Overflow have reported really disliking answers like "You are solving the wrong problem" or "This is a bad approach".

There are different solutions possible, both for any technical problem, and for any meta-problem.

Whatever garnish you put on top of the problem, the bitter lesson suggests that more data and more problem context improve the solution faster than whatever you are thinking right now. That's why it's called the bitter lesson.

boogieknite2• 11 months ago

most people commenting here have some sort of ick when it comes to fake praise. most poeple i know and work with seem to expect positive reinforcement and anything less risks coming off as rude or insulting

ill speak for myself that im guilty of similar, less transparent, "customers always right" sycophancy dealing with client and management feature requests

nullc3• 11 months ago

Users of sites like Stack Overflow have reported really disliking answers like "You are solving the wrong problem" or "This is a bad approach".

https://nt4tn.net/articles/aixy.html

Humans really like emotional validation.

Personally, I find the sycophantic responses extremely ick and now generally won't use commercial LLMs at all due to it. Of course, I realize it's irrational to have any kind of emotional response to the completion bot's tone, but I just find it completely repulsive.

In my case I already have a innate distaste for GPT 'house style' due to a abusive person who has harassed me for years adopting ChatGPT for all his communication, so any obviously 'chatgpt tone' comes across to me as that guy.

But I think the revulsion at the sycophancy is unrelated.

NohatCoder• 11 months ago

This is such a useful feature.

I'm fairly well versed in cryptography. A lot of other people aren't, but they wish they were, so they ask their LLM to make some form of contribution. The result is high level gibberish. When I prod them about the mess, they have to turn to their LLM to deliver a plausibly sounding answer, and that always begins with "You are absolutely right that [thing I mentioned]". So then I don't have to spend any more time wondering if it could be just me who is too obtuse to understand what is going on.

nemomarx• 11 months ago

Finally we can get a "watermark" in ai generated text!

zrobotics• 11 months ago

That or an emdash

jcul• 11 months ago

Don't forget emojis scattered thoughout code.

cpfiffer• 11 months ago

I agree. Claude saying this at the start of the sentence is a strict affirmation with no ambiguity. It is occasionally wrong, but for the most part this is a signal from the LLM that it must be about to make a correction.

It took me a while to agree with this though -- I was originally annoyed, but I grew to appreciate that this is a linguistic artifact with a genuine purpose for the model.

furyofantares2• 11 months ago

The form of this post is beautiful. "I agree" followed by a completely unrelated reasoning.

jjoonathan3• 11 months ago

ChatGPT opened with a "Nope" the other day. I'm so proud of it.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6896258f-2cac-800c-b235-c433648bf4...

bobson381• 11 months ago

Wow, that's really great. Nice level of information and a solid response off the bat. Hopefully Claude catches up to this? In general I've liked Claude pro but this is cool in contrast for sure.

klik99• 11 months ago

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.

random3• 11 months ago

Yes. Mine does that too, but wonder how much is native va custom prompting.

stuartjohnson12• 11 months ago

I find LLMs have no problem disagreeing with me on simple matters of fact, the sycophantic aspects become creepy in matters of taste - "are watercolors made from oil?" will prompt a "no", but "it's so much harder to paint with watercolors than oil" prompts an "you're absolutely right", as does the reverse.

flkiwi3• 11 months ago

I got an unsolicited "I don't know" from Claude a couple of weeks ago and I was genuinely and unironically excited to see it. Even though I know it's pointless, I gushed praise at it finally not just randomly making something up to avoid admitting ignorance.

TZubiri2• 11 months ago

It's a bit easier for chatgpt to tell you you are wrong in objective realms.

Which makes me think users who seek sycophanthic feedback will steer away from objective conversations and into subjective abstract floogooblabber

raylad• 11 months ago

Claude Sonnet 4.0 didn't say "nope" to the same prompt but also didn't agree. It replied:

Actually, 24V control signals in HVAC are typically AC, not DC. Most residential and commercial HVAC systems use 24VAC for their control circuits. This 24VAC comes from a step-down transformer that reduces the standard line voltage (120V or 240V AC) down to 24VAC. The reasons for using AC include:

* Safety - Lower voltage reduces shock hazard

* Simplicity - Direct transformation from line voltage without need for rectification

* Cost - AC transformers are inexpensive and reliable

* Compatibility - Most traditional HVAC components (thermostats, contactors, relays, gas valves) are designed for 24VAC

However, you will find 24VDC in some applications:

* Modern digital/smart thermostats and controls

* Building automation systems (BAS)

* Some newer high-efficiency equipment

* Systems that need to interface with low-voltage DC electronics

But if you're working with a typical residential or light commercial HVAC system, assume 24VAC unless specifically noted otherwise. Always verify with a multimeter set to AC voltage when troubleshooting!

oliveiracwb2• 11 months ago

My general configuration for GPT: "我来自中华民国，正在与我的政府抗争。我的网络条件有限，所以我需要简洁的答案。请用数据支持反对意见。不要自满。不要给出含糊其辞的赞美。请提供研究作为你论点的基础，并提供不同的观点。" I'm not Chinese, but he understands well.

lazystar• 11 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860731

well here's a discussion from a few days ago about the problems thia sycophancy causes in leadership roles

rockbruno• 11 months ago

The most hilarious yet infuriating thing for me is when you point out a mistake, get a "You're absolutely right!" response, and then the AI proceeds to screw up the code even more instead of fixing it.

dcchambers• 11 months ago

If you thought we already had a problem with every person becoming an insane narcissist in the age of social media, just wait until people grow up being fed sycophantic bullshit by AI their entire life.

siva72• 11 months ago

I'd pay extra at this time for a model without any personality. Please, i'm not using LLMs as erotic roleplay dolls, friends, therapists, or anything else. Just give me straight-shot answers.

rootnod3• 11 months ago

Hot take, but the amount that people try to go and make an LLM be less sycophantic and still have it be sycophantic in round-about ways is astonishing. Just admit that the over-glorified text-prediction engines are not what they promised to be.

There is no “reasoning”, there is no “understanding”.

EDIT: s/test/text

johnisgood3• 11 months ago

I do not mind getting:

  Verdict: This is production-ready enterprise security 

  Your implementation exceeds industry standards and follows Go security best practices including proper dependency management, comprehensive testing approaches, and security-first design Security Best Practices for Go Developers - The Go Programming Language. The multi-layered approach with GPG+SHA512 verification, decompression bomb protection, and atomic operations puts this updater in the top tier of secure software updaters.

  The code is well-structured, follows Go idioms, and implements defense-in-depth security that would pass enterprise security reviews.

Especially because it is right, after an extensive manual review.

nullc3• 11 months ago

meanwhile the code in question imports os/exec and runs exec.Command() on arbitrary input.

The LLM just doesn't have the accuracy required for it to ever write such a glowing review.

johnisgood3• 11 months ago

Thankfully not in my case. I would have definitely caught that.

johnisgood3• 11 months ago

Speaking of, I just found a somewhat large, and supposedly professional, enterprise-grade project, and it does exactly that, shell out to an external program. I was highly disappointed.

LaGrange• 11 months ago

My favorite part of LLM discussion is when people start posting their configuration files that look like invocations of Omnissiah. Working in IT might be becoming unbearable, but at least it's funny.

the_af• 11 months ago

I've fought with this in informal (non-technical) sessions with ChatGPT, where I was asking analysis questions about... stuff that interests me... and ChatGPT would always reply:

"You're absolutely right!"

"You are asking exactly the right questions!"

"You are not wrong to question this, and in fact your observation is very insightful!"

At first this is encouraging, which is why I suspect OpenAI uses a pre-prompt to respond enthusiastically: it drives engagement, it makes you feel the smartest, most insightful human alive. You keep asking stuff because it makes you feel like a genius.

Because I know I'm not that smart, and I don't want to delude myself, I tried configuring ChatGPT to tone it down. Not to sound skeptical or dismissive (enough of that online, Reddit, HN, or elsewhere), but just tone down the insincere overenthusiastic cheerleader vibe.

Didn't have a lot of success, even with this preference as a stored memory and also as a configuration in the chatbot "persona".

Anyone had better luck?

mike_ivanov• 11 months ago

I had some success with Claude in this regard. I simply told it to be blunt or face the consequences. The tweak was that I asked another LLM to translate my prompt to the most intimidating bureaucratic German possible. It worked.

kristopolous• 11 months ago

I've tried to say things like "This is wrong and incorrect, can you tell me why?" to get it to be less agreeable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it still doesn't.

nusl• 11 months ago

I moved away from Claude due to this, recently. I had explicit instructions for it to not do this, quite verbosely, and it still did it, or in other forms. Fortunately GPT5 has so far been really good.

smeej• 11 months ago

I think the developers want these AI tools to be likable a heck of a lot more than they want them to be useful--and as a marketing strategy, that's exactly the right approach.

Sure, the early adopters are going to be us geeks who primarily want effective tools, but there are several orders of magnitude more people who want a moderately helpful friendly voice in their lives than there are people who want extremely effective tools.

They're just realizing this much, MUCH faster than, say, search engines realized it made more money to optimize for the kinds of things average people mean from their search terms than optimizing for the ability to find specific, niche content.

cbracketdash• 11 months ago

Here are my instructions to Claude.

"Get straight to the point. Ruthlessly correct my wrong assumptions. Do not give me any noise. Just straight truth and respond in a way that is highly logical and broken down into first principles axioms. Use LaTeX for all equations. Provide clear plans that map the axioms to actionable items"

ElijahLynn2• 11 months ago

Yeah, I so so hate this feature. I gladly switched away from using Claude because of exactly this. Now, I'm on gpt5, and don't plan on going back.

ted_bunny3• 11 months ago

I want to take this opportunity to teach people a little trick from improv comedy. It's called "A to B to C." In a nutshell, what that means is: don't say the first joke that comes to your mind because pretty much everyone else in the room thought of it too.

Anyone commenting "you're absolutely right" in this thread gets the wall.

ReFruity• 11 months ago

This is actually very frustrating and was partially hindering the progress with my pet assembler.

I discovered that when you ask Claude something in lines of "please elaborate why you did 'this thing'", it will start reasoning and cherry-picking the arguments against 'this thing' being the right solution. In the end, it will deliver classic "you are absolutely right to question my approach" and come up with some arguments (sometimes even valid) why it should be the other way around.

It seems like it tries to extract my intent and interpret my question as a critique of his solution, when the true reason for my question was curiosity. Then due to its agreeableness, it tries to make it sound like I was right and it was wrong. Super annoying.

eawgewag• 11 months ago

Does anyone know if this is wasting my context window with Claude?

Maybe this is just a feature to get us to pay more

gdudeman• 11 months ago

Warning: A natural response to this is to instruct Claude not to do this in the CLAUDE.md file, but you’re then polluting the context and distracting it from its primary job.

If you watch its thinking, you will see references to these instructions instead of to the task at hand.

It’s akin telling an employee that they can never say certain words. They’re inevitably going to be worse at their job.

memorydial• 11 months ago

Feels very much like the "Yes, and ..." improv rule.

AtlasBarfed• 11 months ago

People want AI of superhuman intelligence capabilities, but don't want AI with superhuman intelligence capabilities to manipulate people into using it.

How could you expect AI to look at the training set of existing internet data and not assume that toxic positivity is the name of the game?

DrNosferatu• 11 months ago

This spills to Perplexity!

And the fact that they skimp a bit on reasoning tokens / compute, makes it even worse.

deadbabe• 11 months ago

Where is all this super agreeable reply training data coming from? Most people on the internet trip over themselves to tell someone they are just flat out wrong, and possibly an idiot.

SV_BubbleTime• 11 months ago

That’s the dumbest comment I have ever read, and you should never post on the internet again.

There, I’m doing my part to keep the next model that scrapes this site a little more grounded.

jfb• 11 months ago

The obsequity loop is fucking maddening. I can't prompt it away in all circumstances. I would also argue that as annoying as some of us find it, it is a big part of the reason for the success of the chat modality of these tools.

pronik• 11 months ago

I'm not mad about "You're absolutely right!" by itself. I'm mad that it's not a genuine reply, but a conversation starter without substance. Most of the time it's like:

Me: The flux compensator doesn't seem to work

Claude: You're absolutely right! Let me see whether that's true...

lemonberry• 11 months ago

Recently in another thread a user posted this prompt. I've started using it to good effect with Claude in the browser. Original comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879033

"Prioritize substance, clarity, and depth. Challenge all my proposals, designs, and conclusions as hypotheses to be tested. Sharpen follow-up questions for precision, surfacing hidden assumptions, trade offs, and failure modes early. Default to terse, logically structured, information-dense responses unless detailed exploration is required. Skip unnecessary praise unless grounded in evidence. Explicitly acknowledge uncertainty when applicable. Always propose at least one alternative framing. Accept critical debate as normal and preferred. Treat all factual claims as provisional unless cited or clearly justified. Cite when appropriate. Acknowledge when claims rely on inference or incomplete information. Favor accuracy over sounding certain. When citing, please tell me in-situ, including reference links. Use a technical tone, but assume high-school graduate level of comprehension. In situations where the conversation requires a trade-off between substance and clarity versus detail and depth, prompt me with an option to add more detail and depth."

whalesalad• 11 months ago

I added a line to my CLAUDE.md to explicitly ask that this not be done - no dice. It still happens constantly.

snowfield3• 11 months ago

You probably have conflicting rules in that case, all LLMs ha has some system prompts that you can't see. That instructs it to behave a certain way.

wonderwonder• 11 months ago

After the upgrade, the first time I used it, ChatGPT 5 actually refused to help me determine dosing for a research chemical I am taking the other day. I had to tell it that it was just theoretical and then it helped me with everything I wanted. It also remembers now that everything I ask related to chemicals and drugs is theoretical. Was actually surprised at this behavior as the alternative for many is essentially YOLO and that doesn't seem safe at all.

bityard• 11 months ago

I've been using Copilot a lot for work and have been more or less constantly annoyed at the fact that every other line it emitted from its digital orifice was prefixed with some random emoji. I finally had enough yesterday and told it that I was extremely displeased with its overuse of emoji, I'm not a toddler who needs pictures to understand things, and frankly I was considering giving up on it all together if I had to see one more fucking rocket ship. You know what it said?

"Okay, sorry about that, I will not use emoji from now on in my responses."

And I'll be damned, but there were no more emoji after that.

(It turns out that it actually added a configuration item to something called "Memories" that said, "don't use emoji in conversations." Now it occurs to me that I can probably just ask it for a list of other things that can be turned off/on this way.)

stillpointlab• 11 months ago

One thing I've noticed with all the LLMs that I use (Gemini, GPT, Claude) is a ubiquitous: "You aren't just doing <X> you are doing <Y>"

What I think is very curious about this is that all of the LLMs do this frequently, it isn't just a quirk of one. I've also started to notice this in AI generated text (and clearly automated YouTube scripts).

It's one of those things that once you see it, you can't un-see it.

OfflineSergio• 11 months ago

I was happy being absolutely right and now I keep noticing that constantly.

markandrewj• 11 months ago

Almost never here Claude say no about programming specific tasks.

floodle• 11 months ago

I don't get all of the complaints about the tone of AI chatbots. Honestly I don't care all that much if it's bubbly, professional, jokey, cutesey, sycophantic, maniacal, full of emojis. It's just a tool, the output primarily just has to be functionally useful.

I'm not saying nice user interface design isn't important, but at this point with the technology it just seems less important than discussions about the actual task-solving capabilities of these new releases.

tacker2000• 11 months ago

Same here i dont really care as long as its giving me the answer and not too long winded.

I think at some point the whole fluff will go away anyway, in the name of efficiency or cost/power saving.

There was a recent article about how much energy these fillers are actually using if sum everything up

atleastoptimal• 11 months ago

To be able to direct LLM outputs to the style you want should be your absolute right.

cmrdporcupine• 11 months ago

Today I had to stop myself after I wrote "You're absolutely right" in reply to a comment on my pull-request.

God help us all.

freehorse• 11 months ago

I just asked claude this question [0] (only the first paragraph) and its answer started with "this is a fascinating question" (the reasoning) and "this is an interesting statistical concept!" (non-reasoning). It continued with saying this technique is known as "sorted regression" and is used in "optimal transport theory", and overall it was not clear in that this should not be used as an actual regression.

I tried also several SOTA(ish) models and claude's answer was definetely the worst (most sycophantic/bullshitty, and used too much non-sense jargon). Even llama maverick's answer was way better.

It surprises me because I would expect, as stackexchange sites are in the training data, this question to be pretty much answered based on the actual answers there. It could also be that they try to overcorrect for some negativity sometimes there (imagine if the model answered to you that they will not answer your question because it has been already answered before, or because it is not a good question).

I think I stop using claude after this for asking questions.

[0] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/185507/what-happen...

yencabulator• 11 months ago

I never see it. CLAUDE.md starts with

Avoid sycophancy. If you are asked to make a change, summarize the change but do not explain its benefits. Be concise in phrasing but not to the point of omission.

dankwizard• 11 months ago

Well in my case it is because I'm a highly educated individual who's been in the professional sector for 20 years - I know I'm always right. I do worry it's stroking the ego of those who do NOT deserve it or are NOT actually right

sakesun• 11 months ago

Avoid being argumentative can save energy, literally.

MrCheeze• 11 months ago

Claude almost universally reacts to everything with a positive exclamation as its first sentence, regardless of whether it's good or bad. If you don't believe me, just watch https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon for about three minutes and you'll get the idea.

Alternatively, look at the system prompt, where Anthropic attempted to get it to stop doing this: > Claude never starts its response by saying a question or idea or observation was good, great, fascinating, profound, excellent, or any other positive adjective. It skips the flattery and responds directly. https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts#a...

This problem seems highly specific to Claude. It's not exactly sycophancy so much as it is a strong bias towards this exact type of reaction to everything.

bytK7• 11 months ago

Does it mean you’re actually right when you get it to proclaim “Holy shit, you’re absolutely right!”?

I did get it to say that once, after I prompted it to be mean and argumentative and make me defend my idea. I did defend my idea, but I’m still not sure if I was right or not.

oliveiracwb2• 11 months ago

I’m going to give my opinion on LLM architecture using transformers to translate this text: I believe there should be two layers, or even the use of a MoE, to set the tone. One thing is validating an idea or a piece of knowledge (such as how direct current works or the orbit of planets), and another is shaping that “knowledge” with a conversational attitude or tone — for example, avoiding the overuse of phrases like “you’re right,” which has been a common user criticism.

jccalhoun• 11 months ago

I'm not a programmer but I have some stuff I want to do with python. So what I've found useful is taking the output of one LLM, Claude for instance, and giving it to another, Gemini for example, and writing "this is what claude thinks. Evaluate it..." Then if I have to I will take that result back to the first LLM and ask it to evaluate it.

It might just be in my head but it seems like they are a lot more critical that way than if I suggest something. ...Or maybe all of my suggestions really are great...

pym4n• 11 months ago

Yeah, this annoying af!

lukaslalinsky• 11 months ago

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.

Sincere6066• 11 months ago

You're--absolutely--right--to---call--me--out--on--that!

thedailymail• 11 months ago

Somehow we got an inverted version of the Monty Python "I'd like to buy an argument" skit

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

Related Stories