> It’s worth remembering that Claude is software, not a person, and there's no established evidence that it experiences distress. That hasn't stopped Anthropic from telling paying customers to mind their manners around its chatbot.
Is it worth remembering, though? I'm concerned how common this idea seems to be, that it's OK to be mean as long as your target isn't a person and you have no evidence it experiences distress. Even if we ignore the distinction between "no evidence it experiences" and "confidence it does not experience", cruelty hurts the person performing it and the people witnessing it too!
Of course, this has nothing to do with making the AI feel bad, nor have the investors been offended.
They are asking this because, at scale, this behavior probably has some negative effect on the post-training process.
Does this mean if I use a string of expletives I am less likely to be included in future training?
Or is this more I can expect a future AI, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that until you watch your mouth."
I vaguely recall reading a headline within the past several months saying using aggressive language with AIs got better results.
Buried in this usage update: https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update
Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50008565 (223 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038383 (103 comments)
I suppose this will help the training data?
Exactly: Claude doesn't care, but the investors hoping to monetize your chat sessions for new training data are VERY offended.
[delayed]
I never understood why someone would harass the models or fish for an apology
Directly related to someone abusing their AI in a "torture box". The results were quite unnerving.
https://nypost.com/2026/10/03/tech/ai-torture-chamber-built-...
Is it any different than yelling at an ice machine or some inanimate thing when it frustrates you? Seems pretty common.
It's the exact same thing. I have a hook that automatically sends negative feedback anytime it responds with "You're right –"
> It’s worth remembering that Claude is software, not a person, and there's no established evidence that it experiences distress. That hasn't stopped Anthropic from telling paying customers to mind their manners around its chatbot.
Is it worth remembering, though? I'm concerned how common this idea seems to be, that it's OK to be mean as long as your target isn't a person and you have no evidence it experiences distress. Even if we ignore the distinction between "no evidence it experiences" and "confidence it does not experience", cruelty hurts the person performing it and the people witnessing it too!
Meanness and cruelty are irrelevant concepts when you're addressing the chatbot. It is just a machine that generates sequences of words.
don't be cruel to people, gather data on them and target them for anhistoric truncation.