Tone control, part 2

I am not an LLM superuser — in the sense that I am not locked in all day, mar­shaling My Dutiful Minions; I have no minions — but I do ask ques­tions from time to time, mostly technical, and I have done so con­sis­tently for a couple of years now, so nat­u­rally I have noticed changes in the way the models respond.

I have to say that I really do not like Claude’s voice lately:

• It seems too eager to match not only my reg­ister as a user, but the reg­ister of what­ever doc­u­ments it is considering; there is an effect almost of “voice capture” that I’ve noticed sev­eral times.

• I think of this as a subtle but deep syco­phancy. Dis­tinct from the super­fi­cial syco­phancy of you’re right! you’re brilliant!, this flavor might appear to dis­agree or push back, while still affirming: yes, this is the right way to frame an idea; to have a conversation. (Here’s a brief chat with Claude that prompted this thought.)

• The truly unsy­co­phantic model would some­times respond: lol wut?

Gemini’s tone, by contrast, is colder, more frankly robotic, and to me it seems less malleable. Certainly, it’s very dis­ci­plined about refusing to par­tic­i­pate in its own anthropomorphization. It’s also “distant”, somehow … Gemini is writing across a vast gulf, whereas Claude wants to be like, sit­ting next to you on the park bench.

I prefer the gulf, because I think it’s more accurate.

(Previously in tone control.)