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- Hacker News
- It's very easy to tune an LLM for a "default" like "be sycophantic" or "be contrarian". It's easy to instill a semi-rigid "response template" like "agree with most of whatever the user says, but find at least one thing to nitpick about and contradict the user on it".
It's very, very hard to tune an LLM for a robust, durable "actually approach user queries with nuance and contradict the user where it's warranted".
Claude doesn't handle that so well, but ChatGPT is even worse. Talk to it enough and you'll feel the "default response template" in your bones.
by ACCount39 - > “Don’t contradict sentences”. I can be damned sure it will sprinkle contradictions everywhere:
> This wonderful feature does this, not that.
As a human native speaker of American English, if you told me to "not contradict sentences" I would have no idea you meant that you don't want me to write in this style.
In fact I would be pretty confused about what it means. Whose sentences can I not contradict? To stretch it a bit, does this mean if someone gets a prison sentence I can't speak against it? It's just a weird phrasing. I don't think it means anything.
by asveikau - I feel like recent versions of Claude were designed to burn tokens. It is always trying to highlight and revisit solved issues and it writes about them in an alarming way to draw your attention.
It feels like it has been prompted to provide some minimum level of conversation, and also to leave hooks for keeping the conversation going. It is exhausting.
- Claude thinks the user is always wrong. This was at its peak with Opus 4.8 but is still present in Opus 5 and to a lesser degree Fable.
It’s extremely annoying. If the user asserts anything, Claude has to disagree with it. It has to tack on clarifications that aren’t really clarifications, they’re just statements aimed at making whatever the user has said seem more wrong.
It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Claude writes a message that takes a position on something, its final one or two paragraphs will try to dismantle its own argument.
This is beside the point of being contrarian, but it’s also just so long winded.
I find myself using ChatGPT more these days, despite the fact that I don’t want to. That unfortunately says a lot about where Claude’s personality has ended up.
- Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.by knollimar
- I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch.
I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, without trying to convince me, is that so hard?
by manmal - When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.
I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.
by futhey - The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative."
Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...
by bhouston