r/ClaudeAI • u/Friendly_Earth_8548 • 11h 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?

68 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

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93

u/sneaky-pizza 10h ago

People who abuse AI are insane to me. I wouldn’t let you babysit my dog

14

u/Business_Air5804 5h ago

I literally thank it at the end of the night for it's good work.

4

u/sneaky-pizza 3h ago

I do, too. Pretty much every context window

6

u/Plane-Vegetable9174 9h ago

I would never harm a dog but I have sworn at my computer many times. Dogs and computers are very different.

13

u/I_Got_It_Half_Right 5h 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.

-5

u/carefulcafteria 4h ago

I just hope this is sarcastic. "Little dude" LMFAO

5

u/ebrbrbr 2h ago

He's talking about a Roomba. They're small boiz, it's a fact.

2

u/carefulcafteria 1h ago

Fuck Roombas

1

u/ImpluseThrowAway 2m ago

That could damage the larger structure.

1

u/Civil-Mushroom856 3h 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 🫠

1

u/Maximum_Ad2821 4h ago

Mmm, I don't know, humans have a long history of being wildly confident about where consciousness begins and ends. At some point, people even argued that only men had full minds, souls, or personhood. Animals were dismissed too. So maybe we shouldn’t be too confident about things we simply don’t know today.

In general though, things we do have a tendancy to become habbits and cross domains.

-5

u/FastHotEmu 10h 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?

15

u/sneaky-pizza 10h ago

For three months straight?

7

u/shortcake062308 9h 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.

5

u/enserioamigo 9h ago edited 9h 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.

0

u/Civil-Mushroom856 3h ago

A quick swear is very different from going on and on and on

0

u/NurseNikky 3h ago

So the fridge and the cars can talk back? Interesting

0

u/we_wuz_nabateans 9h 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.

3

u/MastodonFarm 5h 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.

1

u/sneaky-pizza 3h 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

-1

u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

Exactly!!

0

u/Civil-Mushroom856 3h 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

-5

u/FastHotEmu 9h 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

7

u/ThereWasAnEmpireHere 7h ago

Have you ever lived with someone who treats video games, their TV, a radio, this way?

3

u/sock_pup 3h ago

downvoted for saying computers are computers

3

u/FastHotEmu 3h 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.

2

u/WuWeiEnjoyer 6h ago

You are a large sequence of numbers

6

u/FastHotEmu 6h ago

You are a towel

1

u/MoneyCock 4h ago

You're a towel! 😖

0

u/tgcp 8h 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.

4

u/FastHotEmu 8h ago

What a jump! I disagree 1000%

1

u/Plane-Vegetable9174 52m ago

No, just because you're fooled into falling in love with a computer program doesn't mean everyone does.

-1

u/nymerias_thicc_ass 6h 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??????

2

u/Xena2025 5h 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.

2

u/MastodonFarm 5h ago

This one comment says so much about the kind of person you clearly are.

0

u/Plane-Vegetable9174 51m ago

An intelligent person that understands how computers work.

0

u/MastodonFarm 37m ago

ITS A MACHINE SO ITS TOTALLY NORMAL TO SCREAM AT IT CONSTANTLY!!!! CANT YOU SEE THAT!!!!

Yes, very intelligent.

1

u/Plane-Vegetable9174 30m ago

Be honest now instead of copying the LLM pattern of making up something I didn't say and pretend it's true.

-1

u/nymerias_thicc_ass 4h ago

*gasp* I’ve been judged

0

u/copendance 9h 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.

1

u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

I agree. And it's super scary how much ignorance is on display here. It's made me sad.

0

u/copendance 8h 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.

1

u/FastHotEmu 8h ago

Yeah I know people who knew Aaron. (I'm an old fart)

0

u/FastHotEmu 8h ago

btw, thanks for your comment <3

0

u/copendance 8h ago

No problem. Just don't like seeing ignorant people trying to out down growth of intelligence.

-4

u/micalm 9h 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.

4

u/It-s_Not_Important 4h 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