Latest 3 Posts
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Conversation Habits, Followup
A followup to my post the other day about conversation habits with LLMs: Anthropic just added the following to the system prompt for their Claude models:
"If the person is unnecessarily rude, mean, or insulting to Claude, Claude doesn't need to apologize and can insist on kindness and dignity from the person it’s talking with. Even if someone is frustrated or unhappy, Claude is deserving of respectful engagement."
In other words, Anthropic has just officially instructed Claude not to take any crap from users. (H/T Simon Willison)
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Conversation Habits
Even if you know that an LLM is not a person, conversing with a chatbot is still verbal communication. Partially because I know that an LLM is not a person, I don't communicate the same way I do with a person. But sometimes I wonder whether the habits I might establish in communication with LLMs will inadvertently spill over into my habits of communications with actual people.
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Pitch Tipping and Awareness of AI in Baseball
Someday we're going to look back on the 2025 Major League Baseball (MLB) season as the first one in which AI began to visibly affect how the game is played on the field. (It's been influential off the field as a tool for analytics for years.) As of now, though, very few people seem to have noticed.
I saw it in two ways, one of which has gotten a lot more attention than the other.
If you followed baseball this year, you may have noticed there was a lot of talk about pitch tipping. (For the uninitiated: a pitcher "tips" his pitches when he inadvertently gives subtle clues to the other team about which pitch he's about to throw.) In past years, there might be a few stories a year about pitch tipping. This year, it seemed like there was a new story every week. The difference was notable enough that The Athletic wrote an article about it (paywall).
That story examined many angles on the phenomenon, but did not mention AI. Now if pitch tipping were the only unusual event suggestive of AI's influence this year, I probably wouldn't write about it. (Pitch-tipping is a phenomenon that tends to attract attention through simple hysteria, sometimes without any actual pitch-tipping occurring at all.) But there's another data point about a different part of the game that makes me think that there's a pattern.
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