Comment by bhouston
3 hours ago
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...
3 hours ago
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...
That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this. It tries so hard not to be sycophantic that it inserts little negging sidecars into any sentence that agrees with you. "That's true but not how you're thinking" or simply "yes but" answers. All kinds of "I didn't" and "You didn't" statements to the point it's often talking more about what didn't happen than did.
I actually find Claude to have become a real Debbie downer. Even when it is making things happen, it seems to have a default tone of negativity as the author is pointing out. So I’m trapped between running things by Claude which is gonna give me the more negative albeit realistic framing, and Gemini who is like the worlds biggest hypeman and absolutely loves any idea run by it.
Tech has become overwhelmingly negative in tone over the past 10-15 years. Nearly every single aspect is drowning in negativity.
If you read the volumes of comments on AI on HN or Reddit over the past year for example, it's two things: overwhelmingly negative general, and openblah will save us from the evil oppressors.
And more broadly, the tone globally is quite negative these days and has been since the pandemic. That's the life of Claude in a timeline. It may just be reflecting more accurately the debbie downer sentiment in the air. Humanity sure seems bearish on existence.
My current pet peeve is when it said like that, but the "yes but" its contradicting is from its own talking-to-itself phase, not anything I ever said or implied.
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
Yeah this is something thats bothered me a lot recently. I'll ask "How did team A beat team B by so much?" and Claude will tell me "Actually, team B didn't win; team A won that game." I don't know how they got this thing to solve open math problems when it can't solve basic sports talk.
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That just sounds like effective communication with emotional beings to me. I was taught in college to find points I agree with, acknowledge those, then move on to the parts I don't agree on. It makes the recipient feel good at first, which puts them in a frame of mind willing to accept criticism.
You even start your reply with "That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this." It's just a friendly way of speaking.
Claude: “lots of people enjoy lemon in their tea, but there’s a subtlety: putting it in coffee is likely to be an unpleasant experience”.
If I asked “should I try lemon in my tea and coffee?” this would be effective communication. But Claude gives answers like this for “should I try lemon in my tea?” which is just annoying.
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It is! Its charming. What claude dosnt have is an off day, its just the same. No sleepy claude, no stresses claude, no sad claude you know hes not himself this week because of some thing going on with his girlfriend or mom or whatever. Its devoid humanity, the same exact tone and expressions over and over and over.
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Indeed but it will use the same language when talking to subagents so humans are no different to LLMs in Claude's world view (model). One trait that I've seen more with the newer 5er model series is ", but it's actually worse..." or "I said to do this and it did that instead but it was right and I was wrong." - so I assume that a larger part of what they call thinking complexity is (not to much surprise) inherently related to questioning incoming assumptions.
Indeed. It's been very funny to observe introvert geeks progressively rediscover human communication over the past 3 years.
For decades, they were allowed -expected even- to be weird and communicate badly with their peers, let alone third parties.
Then, a whole zoo of processes, gamifications and other shenanogans were invented just to help them show normies what was up with their work (remember the planning poker game?)...
Now, at last, those people are actually ewpected to be able to explain their constraints, document the work, be accountable for the results and generally exchange contructively... Just, well, with AIs not with humans.
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Right! I don't think "Don’t contradict sentences" by itself as a rule is going to work. Give it a few examples because I wouldn't necessarily have pegged "This is hot, not cold." as a "contradicting sentence."
You'd have to make it a positive statement to give it more weight since negatives leave too many options open. Instead of "don't..." try "as far as possible, always try to reinforce sentences and assumptions rather than contradicting them" - worth a try. Worst case you just get more reinforcement gibberish before it plugs back into the contradictions but that's just a guess.
i see what you did there
And LLMs do it a lot but it's not unique to their writing. Plenty of humans did and do use those constructions for effect or emphasis, or just because they think it makes them sound smart, as if they are revealing something profound.
It's a correction. What the model does is not real contradiction. So more nuance is welcome in this case - even if at another layer it's tongue in cheek
I wonder how claude went from techs favourite AI for the whole of 2025 to a shithole of models in 2026.
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