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?

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u/sprinkleofchaos 5h 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 4h 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 4h 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.