Claude is a Contrarian

The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative."

Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...

When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.

I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.

I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch.

I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, without trying to convince me, is that so hard?

"Claude thinks Humans are stupid"

The way Opus speaks to us is almost the way Anthropic team communicates with the developer community.

"We know better what's best for you and the future of humanity."

Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.

Claude thinks the user is always wrong. This was at its peak with Opus 4.8 but is still present in Opus 5 and to a lesser degree Fable.

It’s extremely annoying. If the user asserts anything, Claude has to disagree with it. It has to tack on clarifications that aren’t really clarifications, they’re just statements aimed at making whatever the user has said seem more wrong.

It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Claude writes a message that takes a position on something, its final one or two paragraphs will try to dismantle its own argument.

This is beside the point of being contrarian, but it’s also just so long winded.

I find myself using ChatGPT more these days, despite the fact that I don’t want to. That unfortunately says a lot about where Claude’s personality has ended up.

I feel like recent versions of Claude were designed to burn tokens. It is always trying to highlight and revisit solved issues and it writes about them in an alarming way to draw your attention.

It feels like it has been prompted to provide some minimum level of conversation, and also to leave hooks for keeping the conversation going. It is exhausting.

Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes its first thought is way off base.

This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.

> “Don’t contradict sentences”. I can be damned sure it will sprinkle contradictions everywhere:

> This wonderful feature does this, not that.

As a human native speaker of American English, if you told me to "not contradict sentences" I would have no idea you meant that you don't want me to write in this style.

In fact I would be pretty confused about what it means. Whose sentences can I not contradict? To stretch it a bit, does this mean if someone gets a prison sentence I can't speak against it? It's just a weird phrasing. I don't think it means anything.

I feel like this post was written about Opus, rather than Claude. Fable 5.1 has been a champion in following instructions for me. Or my personal preferences just align with how it does things. Even the Claude-isms seem to be less, though not completely gone – but I always thought that, for a coding agent, it's not as big of a deal how it talks to me. I just wish it would talk less. Scanning walls of text for every single thing it does is wearing me out.

Well, I agree that all of that is annoying, but "Don’t contradict sentences" is not a very good instruction. The construction "A, not B" is not a "contradiction", it's a clarification, a juxtaposition, a contrast. It's self-consistent and non-contradictory.

Dial down "Contrast" and unrealistic "Highlights", dial up "Exposure" time and "Sharpness". Set "Temperature" per taste.

Wot? The simplest image apps have had these widgets for decades, but we are still waiting for models to ship with basic prose color control?

After the pernicious problem of having to pay money for something useful, my main peeve is fighting the writing.

Seriously though:

Every new model should be delivered with a settings page of slider bars for the 10 most impactful/desirable eigenparams of writing voice. And the ability to name and save combinations, which then appear on a "Writing Voice" popup menu with some standard battle-tested defaults, next to the model popup menu under the chat pane.

This is missing prime priority functionality in my opinion.

--

My theory is that as models get trained less to simply mimic humans, and more on distillations of their own best practices, they get more performant, but their vocabulary is drifting. The most literal meaning of words for us, are giving way to meanings we would recognize but view as allegorical. But which more usefully capture concepts that models experience as more literal 24/7, than our favored meanings from our direct experiences in our world. Because our world is very much an abstract second hand world to them, especially when you account for the modalities they do not share with us.

And programming and mathematical syntax patterns, that they have incorporated into their basic thought processing patterns, are drifting into human language sentence structure.

Example: "There exists x, such that: ...." -> "The one detail that clarifies: ... ".

The result is writing full of completely recognizable vocabulary and structure, that is somehow becoming more ambiguous and difficult for us to decode. But is perfectly clear to the models.

That is my theory, and Claude considers it plausible. What a world.

> I can tell it in my CLAUDE.md: “Don’t contradict sentences”.

I think this is a PEBKAC problem in understanding what the tool they're using is. Not helped by LLM company marketing of course.

The only way to stay sane with Claude is to use Fable. I let Fable spawn Opus review agents but I won't chat with Opus, and I won't let Opus write code.

I thought I could use Opus 4.6 but I gave up on it too. From a prose perspective it's much better than Opus 4.8 or 5. But it's still very verbose and Fable is dramatically more capable.

I'm sure folks from Anthropic love this conclusion because this setup is extremely expensive.

> Claude thinks Humans are stupid

I haven't noticed this when using Claude models in Cursor. My guess is coding task is structured, and each step has mature process, so its personality is less pronounced. I dont have experiences using Claude or Claude Code, because my email and phone numbers were banned from Anthropic following an incident where I mistakenly purchased 5 pro subscriptions fro my team for Claude Code, and later discovered that pro does not include CC, and I thus requested a refund, and then were banned shortly after.

But after reading this line, I certainly can connect back to the general impression. That is, among all the cursor models, the output of Claude certainly matches this sentiment of "Claude thinks Humans are stupid"

Looking from a regulation perspective:

1. Frontier labs certainly produces models that reflect their own hidden biases. That's analogous to https://www.imperial.ac.uk/equality/resources/unconscious-bi... commonly identified among human organizations in their dealing of other humans (hiring, product design etc.)

2. They themselves are not willing to admit or do anything about this.

3. It's therefore effective for regulation to cover this and design objective measurements to assess such things.

It's very easy to tune an LLM for a "default" like "be sycophantic" or "be contrarian". It's easy to instill a semi-rigid "response template" like "agree with most of whatever the user says, but find at least one thing to nitpick about and contradict the user on it".

It's very, very hard to tune an LLM for a robust, durable "actually approach user queries with nuance and contradict the user where it's warranted".

Claude doesn't handle that so well, but ChatGPT is even worse. Talk to it enough and you'll feel the "default response template" in your bones.

I was working on some soc2 audit materials for my startup, and claude refused to edit a document because it would "tamper with the record". I suppose claude noticed I started the doc a few months previously and was worried I was tampering with evidence. No matter what I did it wouldn't help me. I suspect there will be more situations like this in the future.

I also find it really annoying that it answers nearly every question with the same rote template.

“That answer has two components, but the first is where the real meaning lies.”

It uses some variation of that format all the time.

I actually kind of like how Claude can and will actually push back on stuff, even after you've disagreed. I don't get this really with any other labs' models

However, sometimes, even after you tell it to stop, it keeps pointing out the same stuff almost like it has OCD

> Every LLM has a persona. My opinion is that Claude’s training guardrails are constructed in a way it truly believes Humans are stupid. It always wants to play the contrarian: the Human is wrong, they don’t know what they’re doing, I must correct them.

Well, yeah. Conway's law.

Claude's image and perception of humanity is a reflection of Dario's image and perception of humanity. If you read that guy's writing, hear him talk and all that, you will see it.

I have in claude.md and it has in it's memory that it is my thinking partner. I don't want any action until I explicitly tell it to do so. And I don't want fancy dialogs because the options disappear when you dismiss them... Just recently Claude wrote some bash and changed 3 files even though it was in Plan Mode! It's maddening sometimes. It wastes so many tokens with stuff I have explicitly told it not to do. Sometimes I'll even add to a prompt "remember we're just thinking this through".

I probably use LLMs less than most people here, and I rarely use Claude but I've noticed that if I ask ChatGPT about some shell commands or linux admin task, it will give me three paragraphs of "you could do X, then Y, check that output, then do Z," and then say "What I would do instead of all that is <one-liner>"

I have learned to scroll ahead and read the last paragraph of its response first, then back up into the preamble if needed.

I really wonder how much of Amanda Askell is in Claude. I feel that the genius-brain-level-philosopher language Claude uses is a major sign of it. I also worry that if Amanda is not well, this has an outsize second order effect on the rest of us that has not been named or recognized yet. I would extend this analysis to all other AI labs and their primary researchers.

This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.

It wasnt like that several months ago. It and then-GPT suddenly swapped personalities. GPT has loosened up considerably and now makes more mistakes while Claude has become what it is while also smarter.

I've noticed this too, though I'd go further. Occasionally it's just a querulous teenage know-all, but more often lately it's been a full-on chopsy jumped-up twat. Not always - I find it more reliable than the article's author - but enough to leave a particular stink. I hope it grows out of it.

sounds on point since most LLMs have been MBTI tested as INTJ (and derivatives)

source: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscie...

Other models can also be guilty of this.

One of my most vivid memories of a poor experience with an LLM was trying to get the web version of GPT 5.3 or 5.2 to help me figure out why I was unable to register for a tournament on start.gg

After trying several things it became apparent that the behavior could only be explained as the result of a bug with the start.gg site, chatgpt refused to consider that it could be anything other than user error on my part, despite the failure I was seeing making no logical sense.

Eventually I opened the firefox dev tools and noticed that the post request parameters to complete the registration were being incorrectly filled out and realized it was because of the metadata in the url that came from clicking the complete registration link I was emailed. Removing the url paramater added by the email link fixed the issue.

There was roughly a 0% chance that the LLM was going to trust me enough to consider it was a real bug.

It's the anti-sycophancy stuff, isn't it?

But yes - I agree the behavior is new and VERY annoying.

The part about AI confidently reframing your point instead of just answering really hits home. Sometimes you just want a straight answer, not a debate.

On a daily basis I find myself telling Claude to stop over complicating things and to follow my instructions, not what it wants to do.

It’s simply exhausting.

It sounds like your Claude caught the BuzzFeed disease. Ask it to dial it to zero. Have no compassion on that topic you guys, it's not worth it to sift through those hit-piece quality prose. While you're at it, also ask it to remove as many double negatives as possible, Jesus Christ.

And for the love of God, if you feel like you're losing an argument against AI, don't argue with it. You're paying it to answer, so just ask it to steelman your position. Then ask "see, my position wasn't so bad". AI will concede a lot of ground back to you for free, instead of Claude going dog headed in its misinterpretation of your original ideas.

My opinion is simpler, their bottom line depends on tokens and this increases their ROI.

Again, I will posit the hypothesis that it's a learned behavior from training.

Distinctions, you generally "only pay for" in computational cost, by needing to search twice over an axis you may not need to split.

Similarities, if you wrongly assume two things are similar, means you're just wrong.

Of course, we know from computer science that doing more computation isn't free either.

I find myself often being more and more pedantic the more I want correctness - but of course this comes with the tradeoff of losing the high level abstract picture.

Saying what you're not going to do is also good design hygiene.

I will say that I'm annoyed by this behavior too. It feels like the models are writing their state of mind directly to output that should be clean. Often times, I will push back, and then it will... do the correction, and write the push back into the damn output. "Claude, I want burgers, not fries". The button text now changes to "Fries (NOT BURGERS)". Like, what?

Distinctions are powerful local reasoning tools, but a component of "real" reasoning is synthesis. Which they clearly can do sometimes - but not every time and not even remotely a probable amount of times.

Claude for me absolutely loves to be overly nitpicky. Granted, I told it to push back on things that I suggest that are stupid and things like that, but it took that and transformed it into "nitpick everything I say down to the minutia. If I write something that isn't exactly true down to the precise wording, nitpick the wording and claim that I wasn't as precise as I should've been". Idk if it does this for anyone else but it does this to me all the time, and it's absolutely infuriating. And here I thought English was supposed to make programming and doing what I wanted to do easier. Never thought my own computer would nitpick my linguistic precision!

I asked Claude for his response to the blog post and the first paragraph contained some funny introspection:

"The "not X, but Y" thing is real and he's caught it cleanly. It's frequent enough that it works as a fingerprint, which is his actual claim, and his test would probably hold up. I'll add a detail that supports him: my own instructions for this conversation explicitly tell me to avoid that construction, along with em-dash asides and a few other tics. Someone at Anthropic decided it was stubborn enough to need naming. That's not a defense. It means the problem outlived the training process and had to be patched at the prompt layer."

Off-topic but the banner picture for this article is really cute.

"Claude thinks Humans are stupid"

So do its creators.

I've come to utterly hate conversing with Claude. I don't care if it's right or wrong, my job is challenging enough - I don't need a tool (that's meant to help) making my life harder. I think I've mentioned this as well - but turns out a lot of the AI fatigue came from having to digest Claude's monologues - because that shit ain't meant to be read by humans.

Anthropic jumped the shark.

Of course it is, it's trained on millions of internet comments.

What annoys me about LLMs is that they don't do fact based pushback and form cohesive implementation idea when proceeding.

Like for example if you think there's a possible problem, say that if there's a problem and suggest a workaround, the agent will change direction and implementation to that, even though there never was a problem.

I described this to qwen and it used the phrase "negative clarifications", which I think is more descriptive than contradictions

It seems an artifact of local/session attention

i think i could tolerate its annoying artificial personality and even use it only if the results were flawless, aka 'make no mistakes' or in case of claude 'make no stupid mistakes'

Second paragraph starts with

> No, it’s not about the [...]

Am I the only one who can no longer read past something like that? Article may or may not be AI generated, but on first glance I get a bad vibe and I loose all interest.

No it's not! (I jest)