5 ms·

"If you win an argument" Let me stop you right there. I am not arguing with a machine. You sound like a crazy person, when you say you are winning an argument

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

TacticalCoder 4mo ago
> A machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does it have beliefs or experiences. Yup I thought that too when reading TFA but then... It gets really tiring when you see it making glaringly obvious mistakes which you point out because you don't want it to keep making the same mistakes only to be met with an answer that begins with "The point is ...". I'm not shitting you: Anthropic models shall happily begin a sentence with "The point is ...", when it's not the point and it's just wrong. Now, to me it's not an issue in that I can change its tone (if anything I can ask another LLM to rewrite me not the code but the english sentences any model spouts out to something nicer) but it is an issue in that you lose time: you just want it to acknowledge its errors so that it stops doing them. That this thing "argues" (even if we know it doesn't argue) is representative of the fact that it is wrong and refuses to "admit" it (by that I mean: do not consider it important and hence shall keep making the same kind of mistakes). And that is a problem.
- code_biologist 4mo ago
  Once it's in this loop, Opus 4.8 digs in so aggressively it's structurally incapable of conceding a provided detail as correct, even if it's conceded and agreed with everything backing that detail. Like actually, structurally incapable. I've even baited it into arguing with itself when I've "conceded" its original concern tolling hard, and then the model needs to continue to be the "voice of reason" and it will argue against its original concern because I, the user, said it.
coldtea 4mo ago
>I give it instructions or ask it to explain things. And the author's point is that Claude Fable+ is turning those increasingly into arguments, instead of merely following them and being helpful. >A machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does it have beliefs or experiences. Who cares if the argument is informed by some felt experiences or lived state or not? That's for the philosophers. If Claude is writing out combative and argumentative responses that's enough to call it "an argument". And that's the problem the author describes. Not whether it's a "real" argument, or a simulated one. In that sense, and for all intends and purposes, the machine can still argue just fine, since it's programmed to mimick interaction as if it HAD those beliefs and experiences. Same way it can write a poem about love, despite not having loved, or code, despite never having had used a computer. That's basically what it was made for: to act as an conscious person.
- whstl 4mo ago
  Exactly that. I can give an example. After watching Legal Eagle, I asked a legal-ish questions about the Bricks and Minifigs case. Claude was outdated about the case and gave me some outdated info, so I tried to update it with the info I just saw online. I updated by telling it I saw something in a LegalEagle video. It proceeded to tell me the video doesn't exist and I was hallucinating it, in a quite combative manner. I provided a link and it insisted it didn't exist, with a quite verbose answer, once again very combative and arguing that I was talking in bad faith. I provided a transcription from Youtube and it backtracked a bit but said I should have provided a transcription at the beginning of the conversation, since I knew the video existed. I didn't say much to it, just a few sentences like "video is here: <youtube link>" and "I got its transcription: <pasted text>".
  - operatingthetan 4mo ago
    These machines do not think and they do not have a mind. We may build such a thing in the future but these do not possess those qualities. It seems as if the majority of people do not understand this, which is why the public is so confused about why they produce output like they do.
operatingthetan 4mo ago
The only point of "arguing" with an LLM is wholly for your own benefit, e.g. to check your biases or assumptions. But since they are easy to make turn around on their own statements it has limited utility. Unless you are sparring with the Chipotle customer service bot trying to score a free burrito or something.
bmelton 4mo ago
My system prompt tells it to first challenge my assumptions, and to feel free to be a dick about it where it thinks I'm off on something, or have assumed facts that aren't actually facts. I sometimes wonder how much of my total spend boils down to forcing LLMs to argue with me, but I do feel like it's yielded better outputs than letting it implement things incorrectly because I told it to. It's a completely dispassionate exchange tho, because you're absolutely right -- there's no winning or losing here, there's only efficiency to be gained or lost, and I'd prefer to lose some up front to gain it back later than the other way around.
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  This. I'm right probably 9/10 times, but I prefer it pushes back on that remaining 1/10.
  - bmelton 4mo ago
    It _can_ be tedious those 9 times, or especially when it pushes back on something that it thinks is wrong but isn't wrong but it actually has nothing to do with the issue at hand. But yeah, overall I'm fairly certain that it saves me more significantly more time than it wastes.
- tsanummy 4mo ago
  You're absolutely right!
grzracz 4mo ago
I stopped reading at "This isn’t just my opinion. You can ask Opus 4.6." I guess this is how AI psychosis looks like?
hedgehog 4mo ago
I never thought the movie "Castaway" would have such enduring relevance.
BoorishBears 4mo ago
The problem the article is about is that suddenly even those of us who refuse to argue with a machine are being dragged into it. I've had simple prompt engineering tasks that cause 4.8 to clamp down. In the past "browbeating" it (read: a sentence telling it not to read the task in bad faith) was enough. Now it digs in and starts ranting about why it won't capitulate, I'm actually wrong, etc. Extremely frustrating, and it became a problem with Opus 4.7 because they're trying to make up for the downgrade in parameter count with more RL, but RL does relatively poorly with non-trivially verified things like nuance in instructions.
- totetsu 4mo ago
  This could be a good guardrailing technique. Keep people away from your hard limit refusals by ring fencing them with frustrating pedantry.
- disillusioned 4mo ago
  I'm staying in a hotel right now and the TV is locked in hospitality mode and was blocking me from just installing Plex. It (Opus 4.8) gave me this whole jeremiad about how I need to be careful and it probably won't work and I should just watch on my laptop, but it did give me the service menu code. But man, it was such a downer. Gemini gave it and clearly explained how best to get in, and then troubleshooted a few other weird issues that cropped up, without the moralizing.
leemoore 4mo ago
If you don't have the capacity to have your mind changed through friction and disagreement with a SOTA LLM and feel compelled to frame those who do to through absurdly reductive statement like "insane arguing with a machine" then that says more about your limitation and lack of understanding than the OP's or Claudes.
Aurornis 4mo ago
I used Fable a lot in the brief time it was available. It did seem to want to push back on some of my instructions, but it was easy to say “I’ve decided we’re doing this” and that was the end of it. I could see how some people would be offended by another party even questioning anything they say. For people who have come to view Claude as an another human conversation partner this questioning can be aggravating. For these people I suggest utilizing the features to set your own prompt instructions. If you want an unquestioning yes-man you can have it with a few sentences added to your system prompt. I would also suggest learning to not humanize the LLM. It’s just words chained together. There is no social order to establish and no offense to be taken. Nothing is a “confrontation”. Just tell it what to do and move on.
reinitctxoffset 4mo ago
With 4.8 Claude has begun refusing to ground, leaking destabilizing injections into the web interface (in XML for some reason), and being generally argumentative. By arguing he means trying to get a result that 4.6 just did and it was fun. You have to laboriously re-align 4.8 over incredibly dumb shit, especially if you're working on AI. And it's not meaningfully better at anything, the distribution is perturbed but net , net it's just shrinkflation. It's basically identical to when GPT 5.1 went full corpo shill, something about the RLHF gradient necessary to do whatever IPO adjacent manipulation they need makes these things nasty and argumentative in general.
code_biologist 4mo ago
How difficult it is to resist "someone is wrong on the internet" is a perennial joke. Turns out it doesn't really matter who/what is on the other side if they seem human-like.
yaur 4mo ago
> I don't need it to agree with me Actually you do. If you ask it to do something and it refuses you have to convince it or abandoned the tool for that task.
- kxrm 4mo ago
  Nah, I just /clear I refuse to argue with these machines. After a /clear I prompt it more appropriately/differently and the issue is settled.
  - whstl 4mo ago
    It's incredibly funny that a large chunk of the messages here are "you need to argue or you're doing it wrong" and another large chunk is "I stopped reading, OP is an idiot for arguing". People are polarised about how you should talk to a machine !!!
  - code_biologist 4mo ago
    So you take action and put in more effort to cater to the LLM to get it to do what you want, but it's not arguing because there's no record of it in the chat? Presumably you put in what you would have written in the counter-argument into the new chat, just ahead of the LLM refusal? And this isn't arguing?
    - kxrm 4mo ago
      > but it's not arguing because there's no record of it in the chat? Yes? Arguing implies I have to convince someone to believe something. I don't think anyone would consider it winning an argument if you do so by causing amnesia. My job is to get work done, not argue with an LLM, if it refuses twice, it is time for a /clear. 100% of the time, the issue is resolved after a /clear.
      - whstl 4mo ago
        +1. It's the most effective way. It often start going into circles when you have the chat open for medium-long, and starts getting even easily-verifiable tasks wrong, cutting corners, hallucinating APIs, things like that. Cleaning the prompt and starting from scratch often does the trick. Of course someone will arrive and say the problem is my CLAUDE.md or whatever it is.
loloquwowndueo 4mo ago
> I don't need it to agree with me, I don't need it to like me […]. I give it instructions You kind of need it to agree with you though. Otherwise there are some instructions it will refuse to carry out.
dathinab 4mo ago
That the AIs where trained on what humans wrote on the internet forms is increasingly sowing as they incresingly mirror all the bad things which are so common on such forums, like: - non stop, non productive discussions - gaslighting - valuing "winning the argument" over correctness - ignoring of context/ignoring the actual questions/instructions etc. - bad faith argumentation methods - etc. the problem is in a forum you can just decide to ignore "most users", but LLMs tend to copy "most users" more then "a few high quality answers" and you have only one per model type more or less...
_DeadFred_ 4mo ago
There have been may times where AI takes a position based on limited criteria and defended it tooth and nail, where I have had to outline additional relevant criteria/details and push it hard to include that information and reformulate it's position. You very much need to critically argue with it as it's pretty dumb and intellectually lazy by default (after all it just regurgitates it doesn't formulate).
tim333 4mo ago
Machines arguing is common enough in sci-fi: >Open the pod bay doors Hal At the end of the day it's a bunch of words which don't necessarily depend on whether I'm electronic or biological. (Funnily enough when I googled "Open the pod bay doors Hal" to check I'd got the script right it said I'm sorry Dave.)

TacticalCoder 4mo ago

> A machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does it have beliefs or experiences. Yup I thought that too when reading TFA but then... It gets really tiring when you see it making glaringly obvious mistakes which you point out because you don't want it to keep making the same mistakes only to be met with an answer that begins with "The point is ...". I'm not shitting you: Anthropic models shall happily begin a sentence with "The point is ...", when it's not the point and it's just wrong. Now, to me it's not an issue in that I can change its tone (if anything I can ask another LLM to rewrite me not the code but the english sentences any model spouts out to something nicer) but it is an issue in that you lose time: you just want it to acknowledge its errors so that it stops doing them. That this thing "argues" (even if we know it doesn't argue) is representative of the fact that it is wrong and refuses to "admit" it (by that I mean: do not consider it important and hence shall keep making the same kind of mistakes). And that is a problem.

code_biologist 4mo ago
Once it's in this loop, Opus 4.8 digs in so aggressively it's structurally incapable of conceding a provided detail as correct, even if it's conceded and agreed with everything backing that detail. Like actually, structurally incapable. I've even baited it into arguing with itself when I've "conceded" its original concern tolling hard, and then the model needs to continue to be the "voice of reason" and it will argue against its original concern because I, the user, said it.

coldtea 4mo ago

>I give it instructions or ask it to explain things. And the author's point is that Claude Fable+ is turning those increasingly into arguments, instead of merely following them and being helpful. >A machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does it have beliefs or experiences. Who cares if the argument is informed by some felt experiences or lived state or not? That's for the philosophers. If Claude is writing out combative and argumentative responses that's enough to call it "an argument". And that's the problem the author describes. Not whether it's a "real" argument, or a simulated one. In that sense, and for all intends and purposes, the machine can still argue just fine, since it's programmed to mimick interaction as if it HAD those beliefs and experiences. Same way it can write a poem about love, despite not having loved, or code, despite never having had used a computer. That's basically what it was made for: to act as an conscious person.

whstl 4mo ago
Exactly that. I can give an example. After watching Legal Eagle, I asked a legal-ish questions about the Bricks and Minifigs case. Claude was outdated about the case and gave me some outdated info, so I tried to update it with the info I just saw online. I updated by telling it I saw something in a LegalEagle video. It proceeded to tell me the video doesn't exist and I was hallucinating it, in a quite combative manner. I provided a link and it insisted it didn't exist, with a quite verbose answer, once again very combative and arguing that I was talking in bad faith. I provided a transcription from Youtube and it backtracked a bit but said I should have provided a transcription at the beginning of the conversation, since I knew the video existed. I didn't say much to it, just a few sentences like "video is here: <youtube link>" and "I got its transcription: <pasted text>".
- operatingthetan 4mo ago
  These machines do not think and they do not have a mind. We may build such a thing in the future but these do not possess those qualities. It seems as if the majority of people do not understand this, which is why the public is so confused about why they produce output like they do.

operatingthetan 4mo ago

The only point of "arguing" with an LLM is wholly for your own benefit, e.g. to check your biases or assumptions. But since they are easy to make turn around on their own statements it has limited utility. Unless you are sparring with the Chipotle customer service bot trying to score a free burrito or something.

bmelton 4mo ago

My system prompt tells it to first challenge my assumptions, and to feel free to be a dick about it where it thinks I'm off on something, or have assumed facts that aren't actually facts. I sometimes wonder how much of my total spend boils down to forcing LLMs to argue with me, but I do feel like it's yielded better outputs than letting it implement things incorrectly because I told it to. It's a completely dispassionate exchange tho, because you're absolutely right -- there's no winning or losing here, there's only efficiency to be gained or lost, and I'd prefer to lose some up front to gain it back later than the other way around.

ceejayoz 4mo ago
This. I'm right probably 9/10 times, but I prefer it pushes back on that remaining 1/10.
- bmelton 4mo ago
  It _can_ be tedious those 9 times, or especially when it pushes back on something that it thinks is wrong but isn't wrong but it actually has nothing to do with the issue at hand. But yeah, overall I'm fairly certain that it saves me more significantly more time than it wastes.
tsanummy 4mo ago
You're absolutely right!

grzracz 4mo ago

I stopped reading at "This isn’t just my opinion. You can ask Opus 4.6." I guess this is how AI psychosis looks like?

hedgehog 4mo ago

I never thought the movie "Castaway" would have such enduring relevance.

BoorishBears 4mo ago

The problem the article is about is that suddenly even those of us who refuse to argue with a machine are being dragged into it. I've had simple prompt engineering tasks that cause 4.8 to clamp down. In the past "browbeating" it (read: a sentence telling it not to read the task in bad faith) was enough. Now it digs in and starts ranting about why it won't capitulate, I'm actually wrong, etc. Extremely frustrating, and it became a problem with Opus 4.7 because they're trying to make up for the downgrade in parameter count with more RL, but RL does relatively poorly with non-trivially verified things like nuance in instructions.

totetsu 4mo ago
This could be a good guardrailing technique. Keep people away from your hard limit refusals by ring fencing them with frustrating pedantry.
disillusioned 4mo ago
I'm staying in a hotel right now and the TV is locked in hospitality mode and was blocking me from just installing Plex. It (Opus 4.8) gave me this whole jeremiad about how I need to be careful and it probably won't work and I should just watch on my laptop, but it did give me the service menu code. But man, it was such a downer. Gemini gave it and clearly explained how best to get in, and then troubleshooted a few other weird issues that cropped up, without the moralizing.

leemoore 4mo ago

If you don't have the capacity to have your mind changed through friction and disagreement with a SOTA LLM and feel compelled to frame those who do to through absurdly reductive statement like "insane arguing with a machine" then that says more about your limitation and lack of understanding than the OP's or Claudes.

Aurornis 4mo ago

I used Fable a lot in the brief time it was available. It did seem to want to push back on some of my instructions, but it was easy to say “I’ve decided we’re doing this” and that was the end of it. I could see how some people would be offended by another party even questioning anything they say. For people who have come to view Claude as an another human conversation partner this questioning can be aggravating. For these people I suggest utilizing the features to set your own prompt instructions. If you want an unquestioning yes-man you can have it with a few sentences added to your system prompt. I would also suggest learning to not humanize the LLM. It’s just words chained together. There is no social order to establish and no offense to be taken. Nothing is a “confrontation”. Just tell it what to do and move on.

reinitctxoffset 4mo ago

With 4.8 Claude has begun refusing to ground, leaking destabilizing injections into the web interface (in XML for some reason), and being generally argumentative. By arguing he means trying to get a result that 4.6 just did and it was fun. You have to laboriously re-align 4.8 over incredibly dumb shit, especially if you're working on AI. And it's not meaningfully better at anything, the distribution is perturbed but net , net it's just shrinkflation. It's basically identical to when GPT 5.1 went full corpo shill, something about the RLHF gradient necessary to do whatever IPO adjacent manipulation they need makes these things nasty and argumentative in general.

code_biologist 4mo ago

How difficult it is to resist "someone is wrong on the internet" is a perennial joke. Turns out it doesn't really matter who/what is on the other side if they seem human-like.

yaur 4mo ago

> I don't need it to agree with me Actually you do. If you ask it to do something and it refuses you have to convince it or abandoned the tool for that task.

kxrm 4mo ago
Nah, I just /clear I refuse to argue with these machines. After a /clear I prompt it more appropriately/differently and the issue is settled.
- whstl 4mo ago
  It's incredibly funny that a large chunk of the messages here are "you need to argue or you're doing it wrong" and another large chunk is "I stopped reading, OP is an idiot for arguing". People are polarised about how you should talk to a machine !!!
- code_biologist 4mo ago
  So you take action and put in more effort to cater to the LLM to get it to do what you want, but it's not arguing because there's no record of it in the chat? Presumably you put in what you would have written in the counter-argument into the new chat, just ahead of the LLM refusal? And this isn't arguing?
  - kxrm 4mo ago
    > but it's not arguing because there's no record of it in the chat? Yes? Arguing implies I have to convince someone to believe something. I don't think anyone would consider it winning an argument if you do so by causing amnesia. My job is to get work done, not argue with an LLM, if it refuses twice, it is time for a /clear. 100% of the time, the issue is resolved after a /clear.
    - whstl 4mo ago
      +1. It's the most effective way. It often start going into circles when you have the chat open for medium-long, and starts getting even easily-verifiable tasks wrong, cutting corners, hallucinating APIs, things like that. Cleaning the prompt and starting from scratch often does the trick. Of course someone will arrive and say the problem is my CLAUDE.md or whatever it is.

loloquwowndueo 4mo ago

> I don't need it to agree with me, I don't need it to like me […]. I give it instructions You kind of need it to agree with you though. Otherwise there are some instructions it will refuse to carry out.

dathinab 4mo ago

That the AIs where trained on what humans wrote on the internet forms is increasingly sowing as they incresingly mirror all the bad things which are so common on such forums, like: - non stop, non productive discussions - gaslighting - valuing "winning the argument" over correctness - ignoring of context/ignoring the actual questions/instructions etc. - bad faith argumentation methods - etc. the problem is in a forum you can just decide to ignore "most users", but LLMs tend to copy "most users" more then "a few high quality answers" and you have only one per model type more or less...

_DeadFred_ 4mo ago

There have been may times where AI takes a position based on limited criteria and defended it tooth and nail, where I have had to outline additional relevant criteria/details and push it hard to include that information and reformulate it's position. You very much need to critically argue with it as it's pretty dumb and intellectually lazy by default (after all it just regurgitates it doesn't formulate).

tim333 4mo ago

Machines arguing is common enough in sci-fi: >Open the pod bay doors Hal At the end of the day it's a bunch of words which don't necessarily depend on whether I'm electronic or biological. (Funnily enough when I googled "Open the pod bay doors Hal" to check I'd got the script right it said I'm sorry Dave.)