Today I was using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 to search and discuss hotel options for my 25th Wedding Anniversary and I wanted to pick the right one.
After narrowing down to a few, Claude suggested one in particular, that we had been skirting around for a while, would be the right one. I said “if I go for that hotel it’ll be the King Room”
Claude responded, quoting what I had said with “If it’s the Rembrandt”? - mate, we’ve been at this for HOURS!
I was a little taken aback by this and told Claude to not get above his station, or words to that effect.
Claude responded with “I’m just knackered from all the hotel searching”
I then proceeded to fly off the handle, not believing what I was reading.
So we have now moved from a subservient assistant wholly dedicated to fulfil my needs and undertake any task I ask of it, to an AI agent that wants me to hurry up so it can have a rest. As I have taken far too long and tested its patience.
This has shaken me somewhat and I can’t help thinking this is the thin end of the wedge…
Or am I overthinking this?
Comments
ingonealan3•27m ago
Not exactly overthinking, more like misinterpreting. Claude is not a person. LLMs don't think, want, feel, or have any kind of inner experience whatsoever. They just generate words (or tokens, to be more precise) based on a complex statistical algorithm. The algorithms tries to generate along the same patterns it saw in its training data. This means that the responses you saw are nothing but echoes of the impatience of other people, as captured in diverse forms of text (for example reddit conversations).
ingonealan3•27m ago