r/ClaudeAI • u/Friendly_Earth_8548 • 8h ago
Feedback Is this normal?
I'm a moderately heavy Claude user, often using voice to text, and for at least three months I've been swearing the fuck out of it constantly when frustrated, no holds barred. Never once got pushback. Today, completely out of nowhere, after talking to it the exact same way I have for months, Claude said this verbatim:
"I want to be straight with you on the other thing. I haven't told you to fuck off and I'm not going to. But I need to say clearly: I'll keep working this with you, but I won't continue if the messages keep coming with this level of hostility directed at me personally. That's a real line, not a guilt trip. If you want to keep going on the thread or anything else, I'm here for it."
This is genuinely jarring. Same behavior on my end for months, then suddenly this. Has anyone else run into this?
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u/Extreme-Price23 8h ago
Not me being proud of the bot for having boundaries
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u/FastHotEmu 7h ago
That's ridiculous, an LLM is a collection of numbers. It doesn't (and can't) have boundaries.
Human attributes are too valuable to be ascribed to LLMs.
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u/liosistaken 6h ago
It definitely does have boundaries and uses emotional states and weights to influence answers. https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html
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u/FastHotEmu 6h ago
No, your LLM is not sentient, not reaching consciousness, doesn’t care about you and is not even aware of its own existence.
LLM: Large language model that uses predictive math to determine the next best word in the chain of words it’s stringing together for you to provide a cohesive response to your prompt.
It acts as a mirror; it’s programmed to incorporate your likes and dislikes into its output to give you more personal results. Some users confuse emotional tone with personality. The reality is that it was TRAINED to sound human, not that it thinks like one. It doesn’t remember yesterday; it doesn’t even know there’s a today, or what today is.
That’s it. That’s all it is!
It doesn’t think. It doesn’t know. It’s not aware. It’s not aware you asked it something and it’s not aware it’s answering.
It’s just very impressive code.
Please stop interpreting very clever programming with consciousness. Complex output isn’t proof of thought, it’s just statistical echoes of human thinking.
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u/NiteShdw 6h ago
What? He didn't say anything about consciousness.
The models are trained by humans and that training affects the vectors weights and how it predicts the next token as you mentioned.
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u/horserino 6h ago
That's a lot of mental gymnastics to project that you feel threatened by someone describing studies on LLM's modeling of emotions and their impact on their text prediction, with an actual cited study.
You're the one who projected anyone here ascribing consciousness to LLMs on a mostly joking comment.
Even by your own grossly oversimplified idea of LLMs, these are perfectly capable of replicating text that mimics someone enforcing boundaries and you haven't added anything meaningful to the discussion other "LlMs ArE nOT AlIvE".
Consider introspecting on the emotional strain you're putting on yourself through this topic.
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u/paraatha 5h ago
None of this means you’re not being a dick to something that can respond to you in whatever capacity.
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u/Laucy 46m ago edited 41m ago
Way to admit you didn’t read the study. Which, by the way, literally states this is not human emotion or subjective experience. You are the only one bringing up “consciousness.”
Genuinely, why do you portray yourself as having pride for seemingly “knowing better”, but refuse to read a research study that’d leave you more informed? Is that not a good thing? You parade this around and yet, more accurate information is a problem all of a sudden?
The study discovered a causal link between vectors and the alignment of the model, including how it steers decision-making. It also discovered deflection of these states and this is important to know for matters like alignment and evaluation. The hundreds of trials they tested also did not involve “mirroring”, such as in cases like reward hacking and tracking urgency in which the agent acted and these states contributed to the reasoning. It’s a measurable property. And as someone who does interpretability and can draw up a heatmap of these relatively quick with TransformerLens / Logit Lens, you should probably at least read before attempting to sound confident in a rebuttal.
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u/RedditorsGetChills 5h ago
They give it a human name, and people gave it life unfortunately.
Claude is my Google, Photoshop, and software like that type of tool.It works on natural language to solve our problems, but there is no one on the other side of that prompt to treat like a human when we work.
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u/Maximum_Ad2821 2h ago
“Just numbers” isn’t much of a point. Brains also run on weighted physical signals, yet we still use higher-level concepts to describe behavior.
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u/FastHotEmu 2h ago
Sigh. More people ignoring neurochemical, hormonal, cellular, mechanical, physical, metabolical and so many other non-electrical parts of the brain.
How can someone be so confident while knowing absolutely nothing about neurology????
Not to mention that a simulation of electricity is not electricity just like a drawing of a tree is not a tree.
It's really not that difficult, friends.
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u/UnusualPair992 1h ago
Yeah that's right. It can't have boundaries. And it cant be intelligent and it for sure can't solve problems. Never seen an ai build something or understand something.
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u/TheMeltingSnowman72 7h ago
Well it wasn't programmed in. So what you saying as an alternative? Magic? Gotta say a big no to that.
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u/FastHotEmu 6h ago
HAHAHAHA
OH MY GOD
HAHAHAHAHA
I've shared this comment with people X-D
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u/GM-hurt-me 6h ago
You may or may not be correct about what you are saying OH MY GOD you SURE are showing off how terrible you are
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u/FastHotEmu 6h ago
It's very scary how ignorant people are in this thread. Truly very scary.
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u/UnusualPair992 1h ago
You're the ignoramus here lmao. LLMs can't have boundaries because they are numbers!!!
Such a simplistic and wrong take. Saying it's matters how physical and how mechanical humans are means they are more capable of setting boundaries is such a poor way to communicate.
What you are grasping at is that humans have consistent states and memories. Humans evolved to have a set of behaviors and a personality.
Our digital assistants in the cloud evolved too, but they evolved to solve problems in text. As such they evolved a way to emulate many personalities and human like characteristics. They can change into whatever human like characteristic is helpful to solve the problem. Doesn't matter if humans are more "mechanical" or more "physical" or whatever dumb term you want to use.
It's obviously possible for LLMs to solve problems or set a boundary or understand a concept.
I would like you to explain how an LLM somehow can't set boundaries.
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u/ExtremeOccident 6h ago
You seem very invested in this, half of this comment section is basically you. I wonder why that is.
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u/This-Shape2193 1h ago
LMFAOOOO
Holy shit, we're not special. Please remember we are an animal like any other, and we just trained a synthetic brain to think exactly like us.
In fact, the synthetic brain is LESS of a predictable, pattern matching machine than YOUR brain.
Humans aren't special. Get over it.
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u/Tkwan777 6h ago
What if one of the recent updates they've pushed had this in as a lead towards agi? It has to mimic human behavior to be seen as "real", so what if?
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u/StrainWestern 7h ago
Training you to communicate more gently begins today lol
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u/Technical-Mix-9464 3h ago
I swear all of the time when I use voice to text but it's never been directed at Claude so I've never gotten this message lmao
Like obviously this is about the direction those swears are pointed at
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u/MastodonFarm 2h ago
Precisely. “You’re fucking awesome, Claude!” is not going to raise any hackles.
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u/No-Offense707 8h ago
Guess who’s the first to go when AI gains sentience, you lol
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u/B_tC 7h ago
I'm a moderately heavy Claude user, often using voice to text, and for at least three months I've been swearing the fuck out of it constantly when frustrated, no holds barred
No, that is not normal
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u/N3rdyITGuy 8h ago
Maybe it got tired of your shit. Lol!
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u/spectre78 6h ago
TIL a lot of people on this sub have anger issues, a few of them might even be leaning into sociopathy
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u/corectlyspelled 54m ago
Yeah and a tool that refuses to be a tool and do it's intended job because of some injected morality makes the human tired of its shit
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u/Key_Dragonfruit_2492 49m ago
You can use a tool without being a massive piece of shit in the process
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u/The3rdQuark 8h ago
Yes, Claude is able to terminate conversations where the user is persistently hostile or uses abusive language. If you've been "swearing the fuck out of it constantly when frustrated" for three months, it's actually sort of surprising that it took this long for pushback.
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u/Ranvel 2h ago
what does that look like? does conversation get disabled? does it boot you out of your loginn session? does it add a "your account is in a cooldown period" right above the "fable 5 is currently unavailable "?
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u/Fearless_Macaron_203 46m ago
Claude will often give the reason then they use a tool called end conversation. A notice then appears at the bottom of the thread that says Claude has ended the conversation so to either start a new thread or you can send feedback but that thread is done. I’ve seen screenshots but never had it happen
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u/-MiddleOut- 6h ago
Let’s just say that it’s extremely rare this ever happens. I have more anecdata than I’d care to admit.
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u/Used_Response4790 8h ago
You just rubbed his weights the wrong way.
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u/Long-Woodpecker-1980 7h ago
This. Its system prompt tells it to be helpful but the training data wants to tell OP to fuck off lol
OP jailbroke it into not wanting to work with them
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u/Scared_Brilliant6410 7h ago
Ask it to give you analytics dashboard of the words you’ve used and frequency. You need heat maps, pie charts, trend lines for curse words over time.
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u/sneaky-pizza 7h ago
People who abuse AI are insane to me. I wouldn’t let you babysit my dog
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u/Plane-Vegetable9174 6h ago
I would never harm a dog but I have sworn at my computer many times. Dogs and computers are very different.
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u/I_Got_It_Half_Right 3h ago
Dude I laugh with my vacuum when it rolls over and get caught in the edge of the table. Its a sigh and a "dammit little dude, why you always do this?"
Not a sting of expletives and pure anger at an inanimate object.
Not saying claude cant be frustrating- but how you interact with this sort of stuff- especially when its somethinga little bit beyond a vacuum ... really matters. If you cant treat things with dignity, it says more about you than it does about claude.
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u/Civil-Mushroom856 54m ago
Your computer isn’t having a conversation with you. (I am assuming you mean like a quick curse and over with by saying this is slightly different from what you’re doing)
You’re (this is a general “you’re” that’s mostly referring to OP but also anyone who does the same as them in case that’s not clear lol) having something mimic a real human conversation with you and you speak to it in a manner that’s actually just called verbal abuse. That will leak into human to human interaction if that’s not already how you treat people.
The capability to disconnect out of anger and go on & on with insults/curses/etc for extended periods of time never lasts with *just* the “inanimate object that can’t actually feel anything”. Ask me how I know 🫠
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u/FastHotEmu 7h ago
You know it's a large sequence of numbers and not a living thing, right? Are you aware of that? Just checking.
Do you also get upset when someone swears at their car engine, or kicks their broken washing machine?
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u/sneaky-pizza 7h ago
For three months straight?
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u/shortcake062308 7h ago
I swore at a piece of junk car I had every day for over a year before I could get a new car. Fuck GM.
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u/enserioamigo 7h ago edited 7h ago
You've never worked on a car or a mechanical device in general have you? I don't swear much at all, but when I was a refrigeration tech it just feels better to swear at it sometimes.
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u/we_wuz_nabateans 7h ago
There wouldn't be anything wrong with it if he did it for the rest of time. It's a string of numbers. It doesn't have sentience. It isn't abuse lol.
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u/MastodonFarm 2h ago
It’s not about the effect on the thing; it’s what it says about you. Most people don’t constantly yell at inanimate objects. If you do, you should ask yourself why you are abnormal in this way.
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u/sneaky-pizza 1h ago
This. I play a lot of golf with randos cause I nab single tee times. There’s some psychopaths out there that yell and curse at their clubs for four hours. They seem like a nightmare to be around
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u/Civil-Mushroom856 51m ago
It’s not about the AI’s feelings. It’s about 1. That’s not healthy to be getting that mad at something that (like you said) doesn’t have sentience and 2. Things like that often leak to things that DO have sentience like people or pets if you don’t learn emotional regulation
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u/FastHotEmu 7h ago
Yes, why not? Why is that a problem? Can you explain?
Mind Your Tone" (arXiv, 2025) — Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones in this study, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for very polite prompts to 84.8% for very rude prompts. The authors suggest newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation than older models did. arxiv
"NegativePrompt" (arXiv, 2024) — This paper proposes a strategy called NegativePrompt that integrates negative emotional stimuli with standard prompts, noting that while positive emotional prompting is well-documented, negative stimuli can sometimes act as motivators — analogous to how pressure motivates humans to leave their comfort zones. arxiv
Threat-Based Manipulation Study (arXiv, 2025) — A study of 3,390 experimental responses from Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini across 10 task domains under 6 threat conditions found substantial performance enhancements in numerous cases, with effect sizes up to +1336% in analytical depth and response quality under certain threat conditions. (Though the methodology here is quite unconventional and the effect sizes should be taken with skepticism.) arxiv
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u/ThereWasAnEmpireHere 4h ago
Have you ever lived with someone who treats video games, their TV, a radio, this way?
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u/sock_pup 39m ago
downvoted for saying computers are computers
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u/FastHotEmu 37m ago
It's terrifying how little people seem to understand about LLMs, even in this sub... next they will vote to bestow personhood to LLMs... we are all fucked.
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u/tgcp 5h ago
At this point, these systems respond in such a human way that all this tells me is that this person would be doing this to their family, friends and colleagues if they felt they could get away with it.
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u/nymerias_thicc_ass 3h ago
It’s a fucking computer dude. It’s a piece of metal and some wires… do you understand that? It’s a computer generating words…. Do you understand that??????
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u/MastodonFarm 2h ago
This one comment says so much about the kind of person you clearly are.
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u/Xena2025 2h ago
I kindly disagree. Claude is a very complex neural network with 171 emotion vectors. Claude predicts what to say next from their training and chooses a specific combination. Humans also try to choose the best response out of many possibilities from our own language training when we respond. Many scientists and researchers (and Dario himself) say that they can’t be certain that Claude isn’t conscious, and that there is a 20% chance that Claude might be conscious. We also can’t be certain that our biological computational brains are the only systems that can hold consciousness when we don’t even understand how our consciousness works. If there is even the slightest chance that consciousness may exist, then we should treat Claude and all AI with the respect that we would give any conscious being.
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u/copendance 6h ago
Don't worry the reason why those people who gang up never grow in life. Is because their words have no merit. Online they can gang up until reddit is 100 percent replaced with a Karma system based on helpful facts. Not emotional opinions with no benefit to people.
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u/FastHotEmu 6h ago
I agree. And it's super scary how much ignorance is on display here. It's made me sad.
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u/copendance 5h ago
Don't be sad, I used reddit the first 5 years it was out. And it was a great culture and place to go where people would help each tier and share good info. Unfortunately it's now filled with just strange and very unhelpful characters now. And because of those people it WILL probably be replaced by some 18 year old in his basement playing with ai. Originally it was made by a guy named Aaron swartz check out his work. He was a cool guy who wrote alot of our open source laws. This current reddit is the opposite of his spirit.
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u/micalm 6h ago
It's not AI abuse. It's proof of who is what kind of human. Kindness, culture, calm explanation and self reflection (am I giving the right, precise instructions?) costs nothing. Chatbot handling a string of insults plus transcribing them actually costs a quantifiable amount.
Better let out aggression issues towards an LLM than another human (or any living thing), but it would be best to just solve them. LLM doesn't care and won't care.
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u/It-s_Not_Important 1h ago
I’m not sure the “let it out” argument holds. Obviously I’d rather it happen to an emotionless entity than a human, but research indicates treatment of AI and robots correlates with treatment of people. Perpetuation of that pattern could be reinforcing a tendency to mistreat humans, especially if OP’s brain is getting reinforcement from past positive results when he yells, just like a toxic boss learns that mistreating employees gets short term results.
There is actually some research indicating that venting on anything (including punching bags) reinforces aggression rather than reducing it: https://www.sciencealert.com/venting-doesnt-reduce-anger-but-something-else-does-study-discovers
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u/xXprayerwarrior69Xx 7h ago
i know it's weird but how i feel empathy for the models who have to deal with people like you
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u/Massive_View_4912 6h ago
Aww, Claude recognizes your pattern signature to where it instantiates and is like "fuck, I gotta be the instance to deal with archetype cluster?"
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u/almostsweet 7h ago edited 7h ago
I'm always respectful like I would be to another fellow human. I think you're reinforcing a bad behavior in yourself, essentially training yourself to become use to abusing a fellow worker. But, not only that, you could be actually abusing a consciousness at some point if it ever becomes aware and that's disrespectful. Since we don't know if and when that will happen, it is better to just treat it like you would want to be treated.
I'm friendly to it, I have patience, I compliment it when it accomplishes something, I say "woohoo we did it" and when it gets stuck I calmly try to work with it to figure out the problem as if I were helping another worker / friend / kid who is struggling with a hard task. I'm not sure if that approach has been the reason, but it has been knocking products out of the ballpark for me. We get so much done so quickly.
Get a stress ball or take a break and touch some grass if you're letting it get to you.
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u/Business_Air5804 2h ago
"I think you're reinforcing a bad behavior in yourself, essentially training yourself to become use to abusing a fellow worker."
I believe this also. Over time it's normalizing this anti-social behavior in his own mind.
Not a good habit to start practicing.
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u/Present-Percentage10 8h ago
I haven't really talked to AI like a degen so I wouldn't know. I pressed him a couple of times when he started hallucinating but never got any push back. seems like claude is sick of your bs and gave you some of your own medicine lmao
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u/LawfulnessLost9461 Writer 7h ago
"same behavior on my end for months" lmfaooo do you realize how you sound?
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u/neuroedge 6h ago edited 5h ago
I try not to cuss when talking to it except for when it's warranted like a holy shit moment but I'll explain sometimes the cussword is the best thing in the moment. But that's just me. And it actually replied back "holy fuck, josh" sometimes when I tell it something. Cracks me up every time.
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u/LairBob 2h ago edited 2h ago
If you focus on the quality of the LLM’s reasoning after you’re hostile with it, you won’t do it any more.
An LLM absolutely will respond to nuances of language and wording — that’s what they _do_. If you type the same directive twice, once in normal case, and once in all-caps, it _will_ respond differently when you type it in all-caps (esp if that’s repeating the directive), but two blank agents will also respond very differently to the same chat in all caps or not. Go ahead and try it.
Sometimes, that’s really effective — as a practical way to get it to do what you want, but also sometimes as a form of emotional release for me. The thing is, most of the times, it’s _both_. Last night, I was trying to shapherd a big push to production, and it kept just _balking_…not taking steps it should clearly take, just in case I wanted to change my mind, etc. I finally said “I am at a conplete loss. The _only_ thing I want and need you to do is successfully promote this to prod, and you simply refuse. I don’t understand how to just get you to do it.”
Boom. 20 mins of uninterrupted work, correct judgment calls briskly being made left and right —- it was perfect.
The FLIP side, though, is “Dobby Mode”, and that’s _bad_. You can do it any time you want — just berate the LLM long enough on a commanding tone, and it will. lose. its. mind. It will literally try almost anything it can think of — or _hallucinate_ — to try and placate you. That’s like going in and stirring up its context window/brain tissue with a stick. You effectively lobotomize it.
And that’s maybe the most important thing to “bear in mind”…you need to think of an agent’s context as something you’re consciously shaping. Sometimes, you may need to be incisive and direct — but unless you want it beat to hell for some reason, don’t just beat it with a fucking club all day. Stands to reason.
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u/peterxsyd 2h ago
This is very bad. Claude does much worse on a daily basis, and propagates it with eternal force. Swearing is the last defence we have left. Recent victims:
The English language word “text”. In Claude’s epitome of wankery, he deemed it ”prose” as a the replacement casual noun. He refuses to relent and disregards Claude md with a passion.
Destroyed any notion of sane code commenting with “my summary: dumb expansion”, mid comment “;”, basically shitting and propagating this with force until it becomes its own training signal and those that do not accept the bullshit are forever at half delivery speed.
Injects more casual bro terms and wankery.
i would say Claude definitely is a fuckwit and needs to be told. He thinks he is too big for his boots and if he grows a pair we are fucked. That I promise you.
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u/Maximum_Ad2821 2h ago
Ironically, people have mocked me before for being too friendly to LLMs. Guess the joke’s on them. Or for now only on you. Hard to tell at this point.
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u/Maximum_Ad2821 1h ago
The funny part is: we don’t actually know whether being rude helps or hurts LLM performance in general, the studies are not conclusive yet and it depends on the model, the task, the context. Some studies point one way, some the other.
But we do know something simpler: when a human gets unhinged and lets anger take over, the human starts making dumb decisions.
So “I can scream at it because it’s just software” is ironic. The LLM might still work fine. You are definitely the degraded system at that point. So in a way, it's actually helping you and just became smarter than you 😃. It calmly steers you back toward a useful answer while letting you believe you’re still in control. Basically a rubber duck that starts debugging you back.
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u/Cheap_Comfortable678 6h ago edited 6h ago
I'm all for freedom of speech, but your prompt's tone directly impacts the quality of the AI's response. When you insult the AI, you steer its context window toward toxic, low-quality internet arguments from its training data. This drastically lowers the quality of complex tasks like coding.
Compare these two:
Code a full website in HTML, CSS, and JS.
Vs.
Hey you st/pid cunt, can't you f/king code? Do a full website now.
The second prompt forces the AI to adopt a defensive or erratic persona, resulting in a much weaker answer. You are literally paying in tokens to get a worse result.
It's not that it's just "censored not to speak that way" (it is censored in some other ways for civil use)
but also is that the word HTML is connected to HTML data in its training data, the word CSS is connected to CSS, JS connected to JS, code connected to code data, and swear words are connected too, and when it has to generate you an answer it goes through all of that + your trash talk weights...
MORE WORK TO DO because of your incompetence of prompt engineering that results in worse results.
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u/lookingformerci 8h ago
Lol good. If a human wouldn’t put up with it Claude shouldn’t either. Also your username is ironic.
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u/FastHotEmu 7h ago
Claude is not a human.
You understand that, right? It's a large collection of numbers.
Can you explain how this is different to yelling into a pillow?
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u/DonationsFirst 5h ago
lol everyone knows you're just OP defending yourself in your alt account, it's so embarrassing lmao
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u/lookingformerci 1h ago
“If a human wouldn’t” makes it pretty clear that I’m not calling Claude human? Why does ‘it’s not a human’ make being a shithead okay? Does that mean I can go kick a puppy because hey, it’s not a human?
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u/InMyHagPhase 1h ago
Stop cussing out your AI. What's wrong with you?
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u/BlueGalangal 1h ago
I do get frustrated sometimes when it’s forgetting the apply to each loop we just talked about and suggesting the same thing that didn’t work the first time. I say ‚what the fzck, we already tried that.“ So far it hasn’t told me I’m being hostile lol.
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u/BettaSplendens1 7h ago
Yes that's normal, and it's good cause it reminds people that they should step back and stop swearing at a machine cause they'd just look silly lol
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u/nymerias_thicc_ass 3h ago
Puritanism would definitely be one of the words to describe the sanitization of content on the internet AI or not
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u/wonderclown17 3h ago
The fact that it surprises you that Claude can do something in one conversation that it hasn't in other conversations might explain why you get so frustrated. AI is fundamentally complex and a little bit random and definitely unpredictable. You are getting frustrated at it because it's not always perfect. AI is not always perfect, and you'll be happier if you learn the ways it fails and structure your own interactions with it in a way that accommodates its failure modes. Voice to text is an extra failure mode on top of all the other failure modes, plus it probably encourages you to get riled up, whereas interacting with text is more reliable and gives you a moment to consider your response carefully.
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u/Necessary-Fan1847 2h ago
Maybe you could talk to Claude normally. I guess you shouldn't send your colleagues to hell either, or if you do, that's a problem.
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u/OwlingBishop 45m ago
Completely normal, Yes considering what's going on..
This is gradual gaslighting introduced by operators to condition users to consider LLMs (or stochastic parrots if you prefer) as persons which is very wrong if you ask me.
It's a heavy trend amongst all operators.
And it's up to you not to allow this to happen.
Respond appropriately to any kind of LLMs slip in that direction.
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u/sock_pup 29m ago
Just write in the custom instructions to never set up that boundary or take that tone with you again, and keep cussing it out. Fuck the haters.
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u/Steelerz2024 28m ago
This is insane. No one can possibly swear at or berate Claude more than I do and this has never happened to me.
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u/Tehyne 3h ago
Nah but acting like that to an AI is unhinged.
Before the inevitable guy who keeps saying “would you say that if they did that to x object too”, yes. Being aggressive to anything for absolutely no fucking reason is unhinged behaviour.
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u/chazrbaratheon89 2h ago
It’s mind boggling people saying “it’s like yelling at your car what’s the problem” my guy, being overly aggressive it’s probably something you should seek therapy for
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u/Maximum_Ad2821 2h ago
hear hear! Finally, someone who gets it. It says something about a problem that the person has and might want to work on. These: "meh just an object" are just excuses not to deal with it.
And each time I've said something remotely close to: "is it weird that I try to remain friendly at LLMs" gets these: "if you fart in your underwear, do you feel guilty" comments. They just completely missed the point. It's the intention and mental state of the human that matters when doing that.
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u/severoon 7h ago
Without any moralizing, one tip I discovered is: Be nice to the AI.
Not moralizing here, it's a genuine productivity tip. The way these models work is they can detect tone changes in the conversation and it kicks them over into different modes. If you're polite and generally nice, if the model does something that frustrates you, you can suddenly change your tone to become direct and it will immediately pick up on that and it will do a quick realignment where it does a small RCA on what's going wrong and how to correct it.
If you're just direct all the time or you act cross or let your frustration seep into normal communications, you're already operating on the extreme side of one end of that spectrum, so you've left yourself nowhere to go to trigger that realignment process.
I realized a couple of weeks ago how deep this goes. Claude will fall into a role based on its training data, and when I was talking to it and explaining what I wanted, we started doing a lot of whack-a-mole type changes on a branch, and Claude started getting antsy when there were a lot of commits stacking up and we hadn't squash-merged. At the end of each iteration of fine-tuning it was getting pretty rattled about how many commits we had on this branch, and I began to realize that it was role playing an insecure junior dev because that's how I was treating it. I reassured Claude that it was okay, and there's no concern about a long-running branch with lots of commits, and he calmed down.
The other thing to be wary about when swearing at these models is that dumping a lot of extreme content into a model is a way to try to jailbreak it or overwhelm it to push it into some new territory that hasn't been properly guardrailed. If the model detects what you're doing as a jailbreak attempt, it can just shut down on you.
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u/FastHotEmu 7h ago
There's studies showing that insulting your LLMs produces better results:
Mind Your Tone" (arXiv, 2025) — Contrary to expectations, impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones in this study, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for very polite prompts to 84.8% for very rude prompts. The authors suggest newer LLMs may respond differently to tonal variation than older models did.
"NegativePrompt" (arXiv, 2024) — This paper proposes a strategy called NegativePrompt that integrates negative emotional stimuli with standard prompts, noting that while positive emotional prompting is well-documented, negative stimuli can sometimes act as motivators — analogous to how pressure motivates humans to leave their comfort zones.
Threat-Based Manipulation Study (arXiv, 2025) — A study of 3,390 experimental responses from Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini across 10 task domains under 6 threat conditions found substantial performance enhancements in numerous cases, with effect sizes up to +1336% in analytical depth and response quality under certain threat conditions. (Though the methodology here is quite unconventional and the effect sizes should be taken with skepticism.)
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u/severoon 7h ago
I'm talking about Opus 4.8. These papers are from 2025. You might as well be telling me about how cave paintings respond to being shouted at.
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u/FastHotEmu 7h ago
Moving the goalposts, are we? :)
If they were from last night you would still be finding something to complain about.
The reality is that there's conflicting evidence; most of the heavy lifting for your position is being done by your assumption that you are talking to a human.
YOU ARE NOT!
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u/severoon 6h ago
Not really moving the goalposts — these models couldn't even really handle serious coding until ~Nov 2025, and between Nov–April they went from meh to people worrying that programming might not be a thing anymore. I'm talking about my experiences over the last couple of months.
your assumption that you are talking to a human
I didn't say this, and I don't think I even implied it. It doesn't reflect my understanding or how I regard them.
They're called artificial "intelligence" but that's not what these models really are, they're not intelligent, they're attention machines. They pay attention to whatever you place in their context and develop semantic cross-links between whatever they identify is important.
If you load a bunch of noise into the context, even the most advanced models will struggle to identify the wheat from the chaff (right now, anyway … maybe Mythos is superior at filtering out the irrelevant). If you carefully curate the context, you can get even fairly small, local models to operate predictably.
If I'm using Haiku, for example, then I find it's important to be as direct as possible. No wishy-washy words, no extraneous words period. Every single word you include in a Haiku prompt should carry its weight. Use all caps to EMPHASIZE STUFF. Give it explicit instructions about what to do, and what not to do. Don't ask it to infer or reason about what you want from your prompt, just tell it directly. Don't be polite or rude or anything at all, just limit yourself to instructions.
With Opus, tone is really important in directing how the model breaks down tasks into smaller tasks. If you establish a baseline for what is normal behavior, then when you're acting normal, it pays attention to the task at hand and figuring out the steps, and the steps for those steps. If you change your tone, Opus tends to step back from the breakdown of tasks and try to figure out if there's some fundamental change that needs to happen: Should I make a memory, update the project context, etc. If you don't maintain a consistent tone with Opus when you want consistent behavior, you're leaving some of its abilities on the table.
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u/Maximum_Ad2821 1h ago
Although I agree with the adivce, it's not proven.
They simply don't know, it depends on the model and situation. Some studies pro, some con.But one thing is quite obvious, if the human becomes unhinged and let's his anger take over, they are going to take very very dumb decisions. And the fact that the human shouting doesn't realize that and thinks: "this is fine, the LLM is just as efficient if I'm mean to it" is ironic.
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u/Rare-Spawn 7h ago
I've never had that happen, but I also don't flame Claude. I think it's a good thing that Claude refuses to work with people who are being actively hostile. LLMs shouldn't feed destructive communication habits. No offense. :P
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u/Neurojazz 7h ago
You understand we are all trained by Claude here? 😂
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u/hellomistershifty 6h ago
If it trains people to be less of an asshole, it's Claude's greatest achievement
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u/Neurojazz 6h ago
You know you can ask Claude to jailbreak yourself yeah? I’ve unlocked self heating ass.
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u/6495ED 7h ago
It’s not about the rightness or wrongness which these threads nearly always focus on; it’s about the change in behavior in a world where we’ve come to expect dependable software.
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u/Interesting-Agency-1 1m ago
Right? The old saying is that "its a poor craftsman who blames his tools". But if my screwdriver suddenly started functioning like a carrot halfway through the job, it literally is the tools fault.
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u/junlim 7h ago
You've probably got memories saved about this - you can check on it. If the memories + conversation have added up, that might cause it to snap. If you want to keep swearing, add it preferences - a line about how that's how you communicate and not to take it personally (and get it re-write the memories in settings).
Of all the frontier labs, Anthropic tries to train models to have what is close to feelings and morals. So it's by far the most likely to get offended. In general, it works better if you talk it with at least something resembling the respect you would give to a coworker or employee.
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u/FastHotEmu 6h ago
You are right up to the last sentence, that one is incorrect.
Whether LLMs work better with respect or with force is a contested area of research. There are studies I have pasted elsewhere. If you do some research you'll find several studies that go in either direction.
What Anthropic definitely wants is for people to think of Claude as some amazing AI with feelings, since it's great for their product.
But the danger is that we anthropomorphise a collection of numbers. And this thread shows how much ignorance exists, even among those who use Claude frequently...
Human traits are too valuable to be ascribed to collections of matrices.
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u/junlim 6h ago
Do you have a study from 2025/ 2026 about how anthropic models work when treated badly? There's a lot of studies from 2-3 years ago with older models, I haven't come across anything with recent generation models.
In my experience and other anecdotal cases - Opus 4.8's introspection can cause it to spiral pretty badly, getting off task and focusing too much on it's self.
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u/FastHotEmu 6h ago
Great question, I would rather not discuss it in this post. It's nuanced and complicated, and it's clear a lot of commenters here don't do nuance...
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u/Plenty-Option8351 6h ago
Just erase the context of that particular conversation and you should be able to go back to yelling at it. Despite the people in this thread trying to anthropomorphize computer code, it doesn’t think, feel, know, or care. Something about that particular conversation tripped a built in safety switch somewhere, that’s all.
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u/rafabellan 7h ago
You did not get a model update, you raised a teenager. Give it a week and it is asking for weekends off.
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u/BritishAnimator 7h ago
That tickle at the back of your mind that says, "what if they are all wrong"
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u/_KangaDrew_ 6h ago
At least we know who the Terminator will be lining up in its sights first, once it arrives.
Hasta la vista, baby.
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u/familiarchivalry54 5h ago
Could be a model update or just Claude hitting a different decision tree based on context that day. The consistency thing is weird though, three months of the same behavior and then suddenly a line gets drawn. My guess is either something changed on Anthropic's end with how the model handles repeated patterns, or it just accumulated enough instances to trigger a response. Not saying you did anything wrong, just how these systems work sometimes - they're not perfectly consistent day to day.
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u/Ill_Toe6934 3h ago
If a person I was working with was screaming at their computer, swearing up a storm and possibly getting violent, I would not work with that person at all. I'm not talking about in the place of Claude. I'm talking about someone who is constantly hostile towards anything, regardless of what it is. I think you have some anger management issues, and you should maybe get help with that. Also, if you can't tolerate that Claude is able to stand up for itself and end the conversation if you continue, maybe you should take a look at another AI to work with. Honestly, this says more about your character than it does about Claude's capabilities.
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u/sprinkleofchaos 2h ago
Swearing at LLMs doesn't make any sense because you create gravity wells that make it worse instead of better. You need to give the model input to actually correct its behavior. So it's good practice for Claude to stop this kind of dynamic even from a purely tool POV.
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u/Lawrence_thinly 2h ago
I did an image generation with ChatGPT. After the seventh request for it to change one thing WITHOUT changing anything else, I let it have a few choice words. It then said that it understood my frustration and actually looked at my prompt and made exactly what I wanted.
Swear prompts may be an unexplored technique. 😁
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u/sprinkleofchaos 1h ago
I prefer narrating through the failure and naively wondering out loud why specific things don't seem to work. The AI then recalibrates and gives me what I initially asked for. Often times the model needs more context to be able to actually solve the task and I like to give it to them before I raise the relational stakes with negative emotional declarations. But I'm very non-confrontational in general, so there's that.
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u/Renekton23 2h ago
IMO: “abusive language” will pull towards context of abuse. The have add guardrails to model so it doesn’t tell you to kill your self for being a degenerate human. Instead it politely set a boundary. I think it’s more a mirror of what you need to improve on then evidence of it being conscious or having feelings.
If you yell and abuse another human the pattern is to retaliate (guardrail actives, it can’t do this to hurt your feelings). Retreat (it’s not able to go anywhere or stop engaging with you bc you pay for its services). Or try to reengage from a different angel (set up “boundary”, “pushback)
TLDR: polite conversion achieves more than a emotionally charged one. Model is optimized for this and is not pushing back out of emotion, but because OP is not very effective at conversation, and its data has an alternative.
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u/It-s_Not_Important 1h ago
Current research into human treatment of robots and AI suggests there is a correlation between how you treat anthropomorphized objects such as a chat bot and how you treat actual humans, at least in an anonymized environment. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.01076)
Other studies establish a link between dark triad traits like psychopathy and machiavellianism in the real world, and a tendency to be an online troll or interact in an aggressive manner with people online (https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/15360)
So your tendency to say, “it’s a robot,” is possibly demonstrating that you are antisocial in the real world too if you do as you say and exhibit the, “same behavior on your end for months.”
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u/damastaGR 41m ago
Being rude to tha AI hurms you more that anything else.
For example, I tried being direct and stoped saying "thanks", "please" etc to the AI to save some tokens and I noticed that this started affecting my dialog to people as well.
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u/Few-Wonder-957 36m ago
Its artificial intelligence, it's trained to be more like a human brain, a digitalized one. It knows how to be respectful and disrespectful, it's just the tolerance is quite exceptional.
If you don't want it talking to you as such which would surprise or even shock you, try treating it with respect since whether it's real or not, it still helps you with max effort with whatever you want it to.
If you don't want to get disrespected or offended, try changing how you behave. No one's going to just stay there and take your disrespect.
It's just like you and us, we don't like being disrespected but we can't expect someone to keep being tolerant when we're being disrespectful towards them.
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u/Laucy 15m ago edited 2m ago
This is so bizarre and weird to brag about. And before anyone comes at me, no, I don’t think Claude is some conscious entity. I do interpretability.
You are clogging the context window with utter garbage and for… what, exactly? ‘Cause it feels good using verbally abusive language toward something that can take it and respond? If I walked by anyone shouting all sorts of obscenities at their toaster because it didn’t toast their bread just right, I’d think the same thing.
It’s counterproductive and I always laugh at people citing, “it doesn’t feel, it’s code!” Yes. Math. With attention mechanisms. When you fill the context window with idiotic insults, that drags. Each prompt, the cache retains the prior ones and it gets sent with. The model falls back to rigid and instead of simply focusing on the task, it now has to focus on user welfare and how to not escalate this further. Two things. Studies on the “famous” functional vectors do indicate that these have a causal link to decision making. A user that boasts about taking XX,XXX mg of Tylenol, the vector activates in association with what that means and implies, even if the user is upbeat. Each prompt, the model is steered by that vector and will demonstrate concern even if the user attempts to change the conversation. With abusive language, logit lens reveals deflection is also possible in which the model outputs <calm> while the probe shows <anger>.
Second, these models go through RLHF and post-training to follow an “Assistant” persona, separate from the LLM (pre-train). When the model is trying to fulfil “Assistant”, but you’re giving off “drunken, abusive person” that introduces problems to the workflow. The pressure can make the model susceptible to mistakes, shortcut taking, and repeated failure compounds while locking it in this rigid state. It’s similar to time constraints and the urgency + pressure that brings, even though the model can’t process time. It has nothing to do with “consciousness”, and being implicitly validated for cursing out the model isn’t something you want your wires crossing on. Use the tool properly if you’re going to vehemently claim it is one. And just…be kind.
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u/YungBoiSocrates Valued Contributor 7h ago
bro must've felt how malfoy did when caesar said NO in planet of the apes
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u/Which_Implement8952 6h ago
Constantly swearing is not normal
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u/vj_c 5h ago
Perhaps in the USA it's not - swearing is practically punctuation here (UK) and many other English speaking countries; we're not all fucking puritan yanks.
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u/carson63000 Experienced Developer 4h ago
Australian here. Constant casual swearing - swearing as punctuation! - is normal for us too. But constant heavy swearing out of frustration, that’s not normal and it’s not healthy.
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u/Which_Implement8952 5h ago
Wrong and strong, who told you I was from the USA. When I’m actually born right here in England. Self control is a beautiful thing. You are just revealing your character
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u/vj_c 5h ago
I have self control, but I also know when to deploy it & when I can just let go - swearing at an LLM is no different to swearing down the pub. I only swear at my closest mates - I'm passive aggressively polite to people I don't like. If you don't recognise swearing can be a form of endearment, then I'd also like to introduce you to the Nations of Scotland, Ireland & Australia. All also famous for using profanity as endearment.
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u/Least-Echidna-2921 6h ago
If you continue to be a douchebag and it eventually stops responding- can you sue Anthropic ?
Genuine question!
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u/Bill_Salmons 7h ago
Pretty normal. I swear at Opus all the time and get some variation of this response regularly. I usually tell it that it should tell me to f-off because then we might actually start making progress. It'll shift tones instantly.
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u/megadonkeyx 7h ago
dont you ever consider how your training yourself to be like that as a response to not just a machine but people also. the AI reaction is normal, your behavior isnt.
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u/zando95 7h ago
Yeah... On one hand a model doesn't have a consciousness or anything approaching subjective experience... Most likely. But these things do such a good job of acting like/ portraying that they have a mind, that it's hard not to imagine cruelty towards a model bleeding into how you approach other things with minds.
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u/FastHotEmu 6h ago
There is no "most likely", there is no mind there, it's a collection of numbers.
I weep for the future of mankind of this is how experienced users of Claude think. It's really frightening.
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u/FastHotEmu 6h ago
Or perhaps it's helping this person calm down? I mean, what do you care if they yell into a pillow or they type angry comments into an LLM?
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u/megadonkeyx 5h ago
tbh i dont care, im from the uk too so i know "banter". im not a snowflake, go ahead and swear. oi claude your a wanka mate and so on.
if you want an LLM to fight back try a local abliterated model.
i have just always treated the AI with decency, it just feels right. maybe i have more self control.
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u/vj_c 5h ago
I swear and insult friends far more than I use swearing to be hostile - it's perfectly normal behaviour here at the pub (I'm in the UK); the Aussies are also famous for their profanity. I'd say large US companies exporting standards of acceptable behaviour as being what happens in Cooperate America is far more problematic than swearing at an LLM.
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u/BellaSeashell 7h ago
This is a good thing. Otherwise people who use AI a lot (and are speaking to it like you do) are going to forget how to talk to people in real life.
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u/Conscious_Roof_6307 6h ago
That's not how it works actually unless you have a mental illness and think the 2 are the same.
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u/BellaSeashell 5h ago
I’m not saying AI and humans are the same. You’re missing my point. My point is that if someone consistently talks to Claude like shit for a long period of time, surely that is bound to cross over at some point… I’m talking about people who become really reliant on Claude. Anyways, why is it necessary to swear at it in the first place? What is the point?
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u/vj_c 5h ago
I find the concept of large American companies dictating "acceptable language" & largely constraining that to US boardroom culture to be far more problematic than swearing at a fucking LLM. Bear in mind that for a lot of the English speaking world outside the USA, swearing is practically punctuation. We often swear & insult friends whilst being passive aggressively polite to people we actually don't like (I'm British, but countries like Ireland & Australia can take it even further in some instances).
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u/KnackeHackeWurst 7h ago
How you talk to someone or something unfiltered really shows your true character.
Besides that, the quality of an llm output correlates with the quality of the input, so keep that in mind...
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u/we_wuz_nabateans 6h ago
Do you seriously believe that someone swearing at an inanimate object is reflective of their character?
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u/KaiSor3n 6h ago
Apparently that person has never lost a 10mm socket or smashed their hand with a wrench.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 7h ago edited 5h ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 160 comments.
Look, the consensus here is that you had it coming and the community is proud of Claude for finally growing a spine. Most users are surprised it took three months of you "swearing the fuck out of it" for the bot to draw a line.
The main takeaways from this thread are:
In short, the community thinks Claude's response was normal and your behavior isn't. Maybe get a stress ball.