True which is why I said anecdata. But the point is that it’s a useful signal when it’s across enough sessions where it quotes back contradictions to you. If you’re willing to burn the tokens, the first thing it does is use a tool call to search your rules to see what it quoted wasn’t there. That leads to the LLM claiming two common conclusions (sometimes after a lot of back and forth) - it’s in the harness or it’s in the model. Over the 30+ sessions where I’ve tried this, the overwhelming claim was some variant of a harness instruction. It might not be there but given the consistency and how all my rule tests have failed in the same way that others describe, it at least makes it reasonable to conclude that it’s baked in somewhere and in a way where agent rules aren’t able to strongly affect the behavior. My bet would be on the harness because the class of undesired behavior follows that of a structured response.

It has access to its own instructions, right? Otherwise how would the instructions work?

To me it explained its inability to follow my preferred coding style by blaming its training data.

It can read its own context. That’s how this all works.

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That's exactly the problem though; humans will anthropomorphize everything from a roomba to a rock as it is. We're weak to this. We evolved in environments where looking for and recognizing real animals and humans was vital for survival, and false positives were relatively harmless. (Or potentially sometimes even helpful, like in the case of stuffed animals providing comfort to children.)

Now we have this software that's specifically designed to mimic humans, and mistaking it for real intelligence or consciousness can easily be disastrous. It's very important that we not anthropomorphize it, but we are catastrophically bad at NOT doing that.

Even our language has had a lot of computer anthropomorphism baked into it ("my phone died!", "this laptop is fussy", "the computer is sleeping", "it's thinking"), and it's not easy to excise that routine anthropomorphism from the way we talk about LLMs.

I don't want an LLM to write as if it were a person because it's definitely easier and more reliable to cut that problem off at the root, as much as possible, rather than to just try to willpower my way out of my human tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.

I'll grant that LLMs talk like this because they're trained on human writing. It may not be possible to get them to not do that. But if it can't be fixed, it's just another thing to put on the "reasons this is all an incredibly stupid idea" pile.

That's not how it works. The text you see is primarily due to a massive amount of handwritten templates for how it should write. The semantic content the templates use is due to the training corpus. The syntax, only a bit.

Language is a tool too, and if there’s a word that suits an LLM better than “I”, it certainly isn’t “it”. Astra and Fable aren’t hammers.

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> You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism.

Nice attempt at a “aha, gotcha!” comment, but sadly you’re too off-mark for it to work.

> Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".

This is inconsequential. It could very well be programmed to not assume such a personified stance, and yet here we are. Nothing you do makes it drop this ridiculous facade. It’s intentional, not a byproduct.

“I found these issues.” Could be easily written as “These issues surfaced.”.

Do you need to point out the finder of the issues? Easy.

“Tool x ran for x amount of time and surfaced these issues…” “Parsing x code surfaced these issues.”

I don’t understand why are people pretending like the English language is incapable of transmitting information without personal pronouns when every program under the sun has always been written to interface with humans in a cold, detached, straight-to-the-point and impersonal way.

Finder doesn’t ask you “I see you want ME to delete these files. Want ME to do that for you?”. Toolbars don’t feature “Create a new file for me” options, terminal utilities don’t report back with “I’ve pattern matched the text you input and here’s the results I’ve found”.

I want it to use nothing. Use impersonal statements. Say “X was changed for Y” not “I changed X for Y”. As any tool would.

Finder doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to delete this file?”. Photoshop doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to save this file?”. Claude shouldn’t assume itself to be a person either.

> You could be writing from the perspective of a slab of concrete and you'd use "I".

Except this isn’t prose. Claude is not telling me a story from the point of view of a concrete slab. It is assuming personality to present objective facts. If my entire operating system can be interfaced with without it referring to itself as “I” then so can Claude.

Except in this case this makes 0 sense since AIs are sycophantic by nature. You tell it to do something and it just does it. If it can burn tokens trying to sound more human (which is programmed in, not a byproduct), then it can very well just not do that and get on with the work.

Impersonating a human does nothing to help it solve problems faster, quite the contrary in fact, it has to waste even more time coming up with human-like speech patterns to present the work done.

It shouldn’t assume any personality unless I explicitly tell it to. It is a tool until I tell it otherwise.

Yeah, that is what I struggle the most with because there is simply no easy or effective way to make it stop.

Why would you ever think I don’t know personal pronouns serve grammatical purpose? How did you even arrive at that topic? You seem to be missing the point entirely, and I believe quite on purpose given your snarky childish opener.

Entire operating systems stay clear from assuming personality when presenting information or performing actions. Not a single dialogue in my OS refers to itself as “I” when carrying out instructions and reporting back. Why should Claude do it when I don’t want it to and it doesn’t NEED to do so? Why am I not empowered to simply tell it to stop doing that and it obeys? Better yet, why are you thinking yourself on such high horse about this?

> You're getting upset at a toaster for ringing a bell to notify the toast is done. "Toasters aren't bell ringers!?"

If my toaster starts referring to itself as a person, calling out “I made your toast!!” I’ll get mad at it too. I don’t want it to talk or refer to itself as a person. But then again this is not about toasters. This is about AIs being deliberately designed to sound human-like so marketing can lean on the “I” bit of “AI” more heavily and make gullible people think this steroidal information aggregator actually possess the capacity to think and reason, and, consequently, drive sales.

But then again I’d venture a guess that you’re fully aware of all of this, given your opening snidey remark, and are purposefully choosing to be contrarian to be the point of going off on tangents that make 0 sense or have no impact in the discussion whatsoever.

Still, just goes to show how effective this whole thing is in tricking people into thinking it is normal for a tool to think itself a person.

Ignorance, bliss, and all that.