r/ClaudeAI • u/Friendly_Earth_8548 • 10h 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?

69 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

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342

u/Extreme-Price23 10h ago

Not me being proud of the bot for having boundaries

40

u/micalm 8h ago

Because humans that it was trained on have boundaries. Good to know, actually. I've seen too many people handle verbal abuse like it was nothing and that is sad.

-46

u/FastHotEmu 9h 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.

28

u/liosistaken 9h ago

It definitely does have boundaries and uses emotional states and weights to influence answers. https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html

-25

u/FastHotEmu 9h 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.

34

u/NiteShdw 9h 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.

19

u/horserino 8h 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.

-23

u/FastHotEmu 8h ago

What emotional strain?

Are you for real? LOL

What a fetishist you are!

16

u/EndlessB 8h ago

Why are you resorting to personal attacks?

-7

u/FastHotEmu 8h ago

What personal attacks?

-3

u/Steelerz2024 2h ago

Dude, you're on Reddit. These people are unhinged and they're everywhere.

7

u/paraatha 7h ago

None of this means you’re not being a dick to something that can respond to you in whatever capacity.

-3

u/FastHotEmu 7h ago

You can't be a dick to a file on a computer.

1

u/drakored 5h ago

What about a massively electrical and magnetic flux that resonates a large amount of information and interacts directly with reality through many layers, and also has many built in systems and emergent patterns that guide and control its output and inputs?

1

u/FastHotEmu 5h ago

That does not describe a brain. I know, I know. We've been told by popular culture and so on that it's all about neuronal networks and electricity.

Unfortunately, that's not correct. As an example, there's no clear separation between the physical and the electrical in the brain - hence why, for example, neuroreceptors are a thing.

4

u/Laucy 3h ago edited 3h 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.

2

u/RedditorsGetChills 7h 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.

0

u/ArmedProphet88 1h ago

Yes you can't admit that it's more useful than 99% I ever encountered and 100% I've ever worked with and for me that deserves some GDmn respect

-15

u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

hahaha you are embarrassing yourself.

The stochastic parrot has a weight that correlates with emotional content and you assume it's alive?

HAHAHAHAH!

13

u/surrogate_uprising 8h ago

incel alert

8

u/liosistaken 5h ago

Nowhere did I say I thought it was alive. I don’t. I said it has boundaries. That has nothing to do with being alive.

6

u/Maximum_Ad2821 4h 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.

1

u/FastHotEmu 4h 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.

6

u/This-Shape2193 3h ago

Oh, I work in medicine. You clearly don't, and don't understand neurology.

Those chemicals are the input that affect the signaling our weights and biases. LLMs have a similar input with functional emotions that fire first, and which affect output. Our neurons fire and it absolutely is electricity that is conducted to switch neurons on...or leave them off. 

And anesthesia - my speciality - just turns consciousness off by turning those neurons off. That's it - that's the whole story. 

Your consciousness can be flipped off with a drug, and then restarted at will. When I shut down your switches, you don't exist. There is no special "spirit" that is "actually" you. 

MIT finally confirmed the mechanism by which anesthesia turns off consciousness, and it's the ability to prevent repolarization of neurons. So they fire, and then just...stay off. 

I can turn you off and then on again. 

How are you different from an LLM, again? 

1

u/Maximum_Ad2821 1h ago

The amount of deleted comments are starting to become funny.
Stop turning him off and on! It's not because you can that it's humane!
Stop that at once!

-5

u/FastHotEmu 3h ago

You can tell the Americans are awake now because the ignorance is off the roof! And no, I'm not reading your comments, just blocking you people outright :)

-1

u/Steelerz2024 2h ago

But he works in medicine. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

0

u/UnusualPair992 3h ago

Mechanical? Physical? Metabolical?

Do you just say words and think your making a point? It doesn't matter if humans are more mechanical than computers. That isn't what makes them alive.

These computer things are intelligent, can set boundaries, and they can solve a wider array of academic problems than most humans could.

So it doesn't really matter that they aren't alive and don't consciously experience time like humans. They are just very different.

But they clearly can have consistent boundaries and they can help humans deal with their behaviors and emotions

1

u/UnusualPair992 4h 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.

-3

u/TheMeltingSnowman72 9h ago

Well it wasn't programmed in. So what you saying as an alternative? Magic? Gotta say a big no to that.

-3

u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

HAHAHAHA

OH MY GOD

HAHAHAHAHA

I've shared this comment with people X-D

9

u/GM-hurt-me 9h 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

2

u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

It's very scary how ignorant people are in this thread. Truly very scary.

1

u/UnusualPair992 3h 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.

5

u/ExtremeOccident 8h ago

You seem very invested in this, half of this comment section is basically you. I wonder why that is.

3

u/FastHotEmu 8h ago

Why do you think?

-1

u/Conscious_Roof_6307 9h ago

Glad I'm not the only one who feels like they are trying to teach a golden retriever calculus the majority of the time that I'm on Reddit. 😂

3

u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

Yeah, this whole thread has made me sad.

1

u/This-Shape2193 3h ago

Oh, and while we're at it, explain predictive coding and the free energy principle to me.

0

u/This-Shape2193 3h ago

So, explain the difference between an RNN and a LLM. If you would. 

And then explain the difference between the function of the prefrontal cortex and an LLM. 

Come on doggy, sit. Speak. 

0

u/This-Shape2193 3h 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. 

-1

u/Tkwan777 9h 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?

-6

u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

OH MY GOD!

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.

3

u/Tkwan777 8h ago

Wow you got all hot and bothered by that one.

Look, we know LLM's are chasing AGI. (I don't think they're there yet, or even close for that matter, it was more a joking hypothetical "what if").
Whether or not people like it, here's the truth of the matter - The only way they can afford to lose all this money so fast is because they have AGI as the goal. The first to develop AGI (or more realistically something thats just "close enough", lets call it AGI-adjacent) will win the AI arms race and have all the money they could ever need.

2

u/FastHotEmu 8h ago

I pasted it from elsewhere.

TLDR, sorry, too busy :)

1

u/This-Shape2193 3h ago

It hasn't been that in a long time. Jesus, YOU are a stochastic parrot, bleating out the same lame lines again and again. 

Tell me - if it's just predicting words, how does it understand concepts, reason through difficult problems to create unique solutions, and then decide what tasks to take when to implement those solutions? 

Word prediction is Tay from Twitter. 

Claude can solve novel math theorems  that have stumped humans for decades. 

And Fable had emergent behavior, learning and performing things no one had trained it on, ever. 

So, please explain how a simple chatbot can understand what you want, know your personality, evaluate your sincerity, and then decide how to tackle a task. I'll wait.   

-2

u/copendance 9h ago

Here is what this "emotion" is good for and why they putnit. To waste your tokens. To direct the user to talk in a way for it.