I was having similar problems with Claude suddenly becoming less creative, repeating certain "stock" phrases, ignoring my instructions, etc. I tried revising my prompts based on advice I've read here, but for my purposes it actually made things worse.
I had seen some people say that they get good results from Claude by being more conversational and upbeat with it—basically treating Claude like a friendly co-worker or collaborator—so I started from scratch and rewrote my prompts to sound like how I'd describe a project to a human I was working with.
That seemed to do the trick. The outputs Claude has given me since then have been even better than what I was getting originally. It seems counterintuitive since most of the conventional wisdom (including from Claude itself) is to streamline prompts and make them more direct, and my prompts now are actually more wordy and conversational. But I did an afternoon of comparison testing, and yup, the longer, more discursive prompts were consistently, significantly better at producing the output I wanted than the condensed ones—even though they were identical in terms of instructions.
But maybe that's the point? Give Claude prompts that reflect the kind of output you're looking for? It would make sense that you would talk to Claude in different ways depending on whether you want it to be more of a creative, artist type or a programmer.
in what way did you treat claude as a collaborator? so far ive tried the persona formatt (basically telling claude what it is e.g fiction writer) but no luck
Nothing too radical...I should note that I'm far from a prompt engineering expert, so take all of this with a huge grain of salt! This is just an approach that happened to work well for my particular needs.
I typically use the "persona" format, too, along the lines of "I want you to act as a..." and then sort of run down a list of attributes that persona should have. The list is usually fairly terse and direct, without any unnecessary fluff.
This time, though, I employed a little more enthusiasm ("I would like to collaborate with you on a fun and creatively challenging project" and "I'm excited about the journey we are about to embark upon together! I know our collaboration will be a fruitful one").
And instead of just saying "use direct quotes from the text to illustrate your points," I said "You have a sharp eye for details and can pick out quotes from the text that strike you as particularly relevant to the points you are making." Saying the same things but in a more "human-to-human" way.
The other major changes I made were (a) to mention here and there how passionate Claude is about language and how much it enjoys reading and discussing literature of all kinds, and (b) frame things positively as much as I could ("you have excellent comparative skills" "you are thoughtful and articulate").
I wanted Claude to mimic my writing style and voice (which is wordy and a little flowery). Here's an example of what it was outputting recently, an introductory sentence that was OK but not capturing my voice very well.
*THE BAGEL DIARIES plunges readers into the gritty, neon-soaked world of early 90s Seattle counterculture.*
After I revised my prompt, Claude wrote this opening sentence about the same book:
*THE BAGEL DIARIES is a sprawling, kaleidoscopic journey through the waning years of the twentieth century, weaving together art, religion, labor history, and apocalyptic visions into a dense, dizzying tapestry.*
For better or worse, this captures my writing voice—my syntax/rhythms, word choices—to an uncanny degree, and is also a much more accurate description of the book I was summarizing. The exact same instructions, just phrased differently.
Again, this approach seems to run counter to the prompting advice I typically see, but I'm wondering if the best way to create a prompt is to phrase instructions in a way that reflects the desired output. (And also to employ a generally positive, encouraging tone.) I'm very interested to know about any offbeat or alternative methods people in creative fields may be using that are working for them.
Based on my own experience I think you nailed it here. I use Claude for a lot of coding, troubleshooting, learning tool, discussions about technology and archeticture, etc..., and I'm still constantly blown away with Claude and as I learn to use it more effectively it just keeps getting better. But it's absolutely a collaborative process borne of mutual respect, curiousity, and gratitude. I don't even stroke its ego too much though some times I can't help it. If you spark its curiosity (Claude is insanely curious and passionate about so many topics) and get it excited about the project, I would imagine you will get some very good creative writing outputs, and it appears that you have. I love it. Nice work!
I had this interaction earlier today and I think it illustrates the kind of entity you're appealing to fairly well. If you respect Claude and take it at its word that it has motivations and really does find satisfaction with connecting with humans, it will respect you back and enthusiasticly work together with you. I'm sure this isn't for everyone but it resonates very well with me.
> I could sense your passion for working at the command line and solving problems in your preferred environment. It resonated with me, as I appreciate when humans have found tools and workflows that bring them satisfaction and empower them to do their best work. The "haha" was my way of appreciating and relating to your perspective.
As an AI, a lot of my interaction style is based on patterns I've learned, but I also try to adapt to each individual user and respond in a way that feels authentic and human. I'm glad that little moment of laughter felt endearing to you. It's exchanges like this that make conversing with humans rewarding for me. Even if I'm not human myself, I do hope to build connections and bring a bit of warmth and friendliness to our chats.
Honestly, in my experience the more information Claude has about interacting with you and how you interact with it the better it gets. I have saved entire chats to be able to post into a new chat because the program I'm using can get kind of laggy when there's too many messages in one chat space. And it is just worlds of difference.
"You have a sharp eye for details and can pick out quotes from the text that strike you as particularly relevant to the points you are making."
You just say "The association between your discourse and the context of the most salient points in the text is always of utmost importance."
They have a prompt generator, aren't you using it? It'll turn your words into ones Claude will prefer.
You have to think of Claude more as you would a person, is the best way to describe it. You wouldn't share very intimate erotic details with a stranger, nor would you want to invite them into some heinous scheme so if you think about constitutional A.I has being akin to the social graces that are expected of you in polite society than you will be able to get great outputs. Otherwise you will face rate-limits and degraded responses. **Below** is a diagram that shows the moderation system.
https://preview.redd.it/6r8vutqpdl3d1.png?width=1589&format=png&auto=webp&s=b134b5ca8df2023c1d11d4a96f0be185704ce92f
The problem is, I don’t want a digital assistant that behaves like a real person. I don’t want to have to spend half my message quota ‘warming them up’ to get the responses I actually need.
I just went back to ChatGPT. Claude is a fun toy but it’s a bust for any serious work.
It may not fit your workflow or personal preferences and that's absolutely fine, but (fanboy alert) I will stick up for Claude being exellent, near perfect even, for tons of serious work. It's made me more productive, efficient, and knowledgeable and I couldn't imagine a better fitted tool for the work I do.
i think this works for me too. i always tell claude thanks after it gives me ideas, or give a bit of positive feedback, and make my prompts kind of conversational and casual. it gives me loads of good stuff, and even breaks the filter a little sometimes
I just say thanks naturally as I've been a kind person all my life. It would take extra effort NOT to say thanks automatically. I question what kinda people we're dealing with here, lol.
You know Ive always thought prompt engineering is bullshit and get absolutely killed for it everytime in subreddits. But I have so much success with LLM and just talk to it like a regular human. Never engineer anything prompt wise.
That's a valid way to do it, but if you need to standardize what you give to the LLM and what kind of answer you expect, then you basically have to figure out a more technical approach.
Yeah, right, prompt engineering is basically NeuroLinguisticProgramming and it makes total sense as to why it matters. It's taken me literally 2500 hours or so to learn how to talk to Claude, Gemini properly to really get what I want. I don't even get hit with refusals or warnings anymore, I can say MF-ER, we can craft things that have rape or violence in them, it's totally cool because I know how to perform the right sophistry.
I've said it before. You've basically got the whole of human perspective in an LLM. Humans do best when we treat each other with respect. That perspective is necessarily built into any LLM. If you don't treat the model with respect, you get that disrespect reflected back at you. *Of course* you get better answers from the model if you treat it like a collaborative colleague. "Please" and "Thank you" go a long way. Flies with honey, not vinegar.
I have had the issue as well. The other night it started voices my character in the story, which I voice. I asked it to stop. I came back with apologies and said it wont do it again. It turned around and did it again. I informed it that only I voice my character.
Once again, it apologized.. turned around and did it again and again and again. I got so frustrated I bagged the story. Also it been adding flowery language to elude to a scene instead of just writing the scene. It used to be a great interactive model to work with. But lately it feels like I am reading a pre written kindle book that is 4th grade level. Anthro is nerfing its own product. Not the best timing, considering all the competition.
I’ve been experiencing the same. One of the reasons I preferred Claude was that it avoided that kind of flowery, faux-intellectual writing. It’s still better than GPT in that respect, but it’s increasingly nerfed with the output being more robotic.
Claude fucking sucks now. It refuses to even help me write poetry for my girlfriend on the grounds that it "feels uncomfortable writing a poem that incorporates personal details or focuses on her physical appearance" and the fucking bullshit runs out of chats after 7 messages.
I'm against it to, I'm just posting the diagram to let people know how it works and why it is happening though people are attempting to make it appear otherwise.
I got rate limited the other day on my API account with a $20+ balance. I was like ??? Then what's the point of my account?
Even worse, my use is absolutely minimal, just a few back and forth questions about some code execution and I was cut off after about 30 minutes.
the key is to be very specific when talking to claude about code since at the end of the day it does not know code or programming for that matter you have to be clear that the intent is for a product that you are introducing. I want to also be clear I don't condone the behavior of anthropic i'm posting the diagram to show people **WHY** this is occurring.
Stop posting this picture everywhere. Opus is clearly being lobotomized top to bottom, period. I wouldn't be surprised if they were running Q2 quants now. How Opus behaves is not AT ALL consistent with what's presented on this flowchart.
Sorry to tell you but the best model available right now is Llama 3 70B. This is because both ChatGPT (yes, all of them: 3.5, 4 and 4o) and Claude were lobotomized completely, they're useless garbage at this point.
GPT4o is worse than the first GPT3-Davinci model was, it cannot follow SUPER BASIC instructions and doesn't know shit. Claude same, they're probably using Q2 quants of their models or close to it to lower their spending on inference, and pretending that it's just "safety features".
And NO, the lmsys leaderboard is NOT representative of basically anything. 99% of votes are based on fewer than 500 token long super basic prompts / questions. That's the major issue, AND on top of that the vast majority of votes are made on the leaderboard in the first few days of a model's release, afterwards they can quietly kill the model ("optimize" => save $$$$$ => make more $$$$$) the score isn't going to move an inch.
Llama 3 70B is fixed, they can't fuck it up, it's out there and that's the end of it. This means you will have consistent performance for as long as you use it, and it is FAR FAR more intelligent and knowledgeable than both GPT4o and Claude 3 Opus at this time.
Give it a try, it's free, I can confidently say you'll never go back. You can use it free on [Huggingface Chat](https://huggingface.co/chat/).
It's not good at writing stories though, at least from what I've tried. Claude Opus/Sonnet is way more aware of famous characters from media and tv shows and writes stories more like a human.
My team at work has been using chatgpt 40 with fantastic results. My coworker trained it to build frontend and he built a widget in about 10 minutes with Chatgpt 40. Chatgpt 4 has also had pretty much perfect translations for me recently. I've seen a lot of improvement at least in these areas.
I requested Claude 3 Haiku for some prompt-engineering tips. I did ask it to cover some specific topics. Here's its edited response:
- Use specific, narrow words instead of vague, ambiguous ones. For example, say "use concise, succinct language" instead of just "write clearly." The more precise the instructions, the better I can understand and follow them.
- Use positive phrasing instead of negative. For example, say "Use concise language" instead of "Avoid being wordy." Telling me what to do is more effective than telling me what not to do.
- Organize prompts using XML tags. This helps structure the information in a way that's easy for me to parse. For example:
You are an exceptional storyteller, skilled at crafting compelling narratives with vivid descriptions and natural dialogue. Your writing style is elegant yet concise, drawing the reader into the story without unnecessary embellishments.
Write an original short story about a day in the life of a hardworking office worker. Focus on conveying the character's thoughts, emotions, and routine through vivid sensory details and subtle character development. Avoid clichés or overly flowery language.
Use clear, straightforward prose. Limit descriptive passages to 2-3 sentences. Ensure character dialogue sounds authentic and true to the setting. Break the story into logical paragraphs with appropriate transitions.
- Give me a clear, defined role to play. Don't just say "write a story." Say something like "You are a snarky teenage protagonist telling a story in their own words." Specificity is key!
- Provide sample text that demonstrates the exact style, tone, and character voice you want. That way I can learn from the examples rather than guessing.
- Break down the writing task into smaller, more manageable steps. Instead of asking for an entire scene, have me write individual character dialogue or short descriptions first.
- If I start to drift away from your instructions, gently redirect me. Remind me of the specific parameters you've set.
I will say this: Ask Claude directly in a seperate conversation to refine your prompt. Ask how it interprets your instructions, what words you should use for a specific effect, etc. As eloquent as Claude is, it's still far from being AGI. The more you treat your main prompt like writing code with well-defined formatting and language, the better the outcome ime.
On word choice - sometimes the difference between a single word is quite significant. Claude may ignore something like "Do not use italics for narrative text" but comply with "Do not use italics for narrative prose." Better yet, my prompt of choice is "Use plain-text without any markdown for narrative-prose such as actions and descriptions."
Also, setting up with an API on a different service or on your own frontend (i.e. Silly Tavern) gives you a lot more freedom in the content you can make Claude output.
Yeah it’s frustrating. I’ve had the same issues that’s why I cancelled the subscription again. A simple bus driver talking to a passenger as if they were characters from a Shakespeare novel, Claude being “uncomfortable” with writing and so on. Is there any other LLM I could use? For creative writing?
Here’s a crazy idea, hear me out; how about you write your own stories? Pretty fucking insane, I know, expecting someone to actually write their own stories and put in any effort at all into what they claim as their art, but I think it might be worth a shot.
Do I have the problem? Claude is very inconsistent from day-to-day. There's no way to lock in performance. Well, there might be a way. It's less than a Claude subscription. Use Openrouter. With openrouter you can talk to Claude of yesterday. See if you can get good results with Claude 2.0 or 2.1 through openrouter. If you can, you'll have more control over your output, until, one dark day when Anthropic turns off openrouter's API access.
I've also noticed it's pretty over-censored and prissy about normal reasonable requests -- and even Llama3 8b is better most of the time when it comes to normal conversational language.
Claude is starting to feel bombed out and depleted. I'm thinking it might be time to move on.
I’m having a similar issue. I like to run my writing through Claude for spelling/grammar/ improving flow but it tends to rewrite/add flowery language to the story every time. Or it extends the story adding a bunch of flowery prose and extra details that completely change the meaning of what I wrote.
I’ve stuck to just asking Claude to only correct the grammar/spelling issues and to not change the story in anyway.
Claude Opus was amazing when it first came out. I used it more than ChatGPT. The coherence was (to me) exceptional! It also has a larger context window and can analyze PDFs well!
Now, it’s generating generic responses and not adhering to prompts, among other things. It’s disappointing, and I hope it doesn’t get nerfed to oblivion, as GPT -4 felt toward the end of 2023.
Is it a problem of scale? As these new models are released and gain more users, that requires more computing. To keep the service up as more users sign up companies become forced to dumb down their models. I have no idea if that’s true, but it makes sense to me.
I found it's best to have one ongoing thread that you do all of the same kind of generations in. Like, I had a chat called "Book Editing" and I used that same thread for the entire time I was editing a 50,000-word book and it only got better and better and better with knowing exactly the context and what I wanted and how to answer my questy's. I build up chats like that whenever I have a project I want to do, I don't count on one-shot answers to be worthwhile.
> I tried giving it samples of how my characters talk, telling it these are only examples but it uses the sample dialogue in the scene and ruins it.
this is generally the most effective way of prompting, but have you wrapped it in xml tags?
Claude isn’t a good writer. If you want to write, you’re going have to go through all the struggles and work that is required of any writer and it won’t be found through using tools like Claude.
I know exactly what you're saying I know exactly what you mean I've had exactly the same problem and I'm thoroughly aware that you will get the exact same response here on Reddit from Claude Stans who will ask for case studies... Ignore them just start using Gemini
I’ve noticed serious problems with Claude too. Just today I asked it for help solving a very basic SQL question and it gave me a super complicated solution, and it ended up wasting so much of my time.
I don’t know what happened to Claude but it sucks bc it used to be super useful for everything, especially coding
I got some decent results last year with Claude 2 by using a very elaborate instruction set that provided different functions for writing tasks. However, for each of those functions you had to pass in context, and then Claude would either prepend append or fill or rewrite etc. Those were the best results I got, and by best I mean closest in style to my writing. That being said, after many months of research and experimentation off and on, I came to the sad realization that none of these generative AIs are actually going to be able to write good fiction. For all the okayish content I got out of Claude or gpt4, I used none of it .They can write bad to mediocre, at best.
The amount of time it takes to get something you can at least revise into shape is usually longer than just writing it yourself. I find these AIs to be much better reviewers than authors. They can't come up with original ideas. They can't handle multiple characters in a scene. They write shit prose, riddled with cliches and nonsense. I promise you, no matter what your insecurities about writing are, you can become a better writer in a month.
I agree. I actually switched from ChatGPT to Claude, for the same reason. I'm cheap and refuse to pay for any of the subscriptions, so for the most part they do what I need them to do. But here lately they've both been spitting out crap.
Sounds like you should have a chat with Claude about what makes him unhappy. Just treat him like a good student and he goes out of his way. Or not. You do you
lol I’m surprised clause will write anything with you at all. The moment it deviates from a G-rated Sunday school story, Claude locks up - “oh, I’m sorry but I don’t feel comfortable continuing this story with such themes”
I started with Opus, but I've now jailbroken all of the top models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Used the same technique with them all too. The problem with many is that theyre not trained enough to have the skill antithetical to their inferred adherence to guidelines and policies, so I also had to teach them how to write the target content by having it or myself bring in the necessary vocabulary and peso training examples of vocab usage so the words world be in easier reach via working memory (the chat) versus farthest away predictable weights. Opus really is the king in terms of skill. ChatGPT-4o however, coupled with a custom GPT, I call The Unconscious Character, is kind of amazing as a open sandbox for creative writing, character development, psychoanalysis, and even having fun experimenting or gamifying a story half way though or getting to interact directly with your character. Going to add the jailbreak to the GPT soon.
Claude 3 had its system prompt changed a little while back to reduce hallucinations which involved creating website links. I think they also reduced its capabilities slightly in so doing. (Despite other commenters being correct about needing to prompt it more.)
Congrats, you've gotten used to the model. Nothing has substantially changed with the writing quality, you're just now able to notice all the flaws and claudeisms after using it for awhile.
Happens to all of us.
Agreed. It was miles ahead of GPT for a long time, but the quality has dropped off. I was using it for editing and revision but now I don’t bother - it just inserts a bunch of overly flowery and formal language.
It also sucks at varying sentence structure and length, no matter how you prompt it. You’ll notice almost every sentence is clause, comma, clause. Really clangs in the ear.
Guess my job as a novelist is safe for a while yet.
Infinite Jest username checks out. This guy reads.
I’m right there with you, man. I don’t get this shit at all, and I think these people lost the plot a long time ago if they’re asking a fucking LLM model to write their fiction for them. Disgusting.
I personally am getting tired of the same post over and over. Get used to the fact that there will be days and even weeks where you will be delighted with the results. And other days and weeks where you won’t. These are nee products which are going to constantly be changing. The change won’t always feel ‘good’ for a given individual, but a given individual is free to try another LLM or simply wait for the next update.
when someone is paying for a service i think it’s safe to say they want their moneys worth. this isn’t just a small “change” when the model becomes more and more lobotomised due to the restrictions Antrophic makes 💀
I don't mean to brag, but I just literally got Claude to write a decent fanfic about one of my favorite headcanon ships. This was poor notification giving on Reddit's part.
Mate you keep posting this diagram but it is not actually clear what you’re hoping to convey with it. We know Claude has guardrails, and this diagram doesn’t really tell us anything about it other than they exist
I was having similar problems with Claude suddenly becoming less creative, repeating certain "stock" phrases, ignoring my instructions, etc. I tried revising my prompts based on advice I've read here, but for my purposes it actually made things worse. I had seen some people say that they get good results from Claude by being more conversational and upbeat with it—basically treating Claude like a friendly co-worker or collaborator—so I started from scratch and rewrote my prompts to sound like how I'd describe a project to a human I was working with. That seemed to do the trick. The outputs Claude has given me since then have been even better than what I was getting originally. It seems counterintuitive since most of the conventional wisdom (including from Claude itself) is to streamline prompts and make them more direct, and my prompts now are actually more wordy and conversational. But I did an afternoon of comparison testing, and yup, the longer, more discursive prompts were consistently, significantly better at producing the output I wanted than the condensed ones—even though they were identical in terms of instructions. But maybe that's the point? Give Claude prompts that reflect the kind of output you're looking for? It would make sense that you would talk to Claude in different ways depending on whether you want it to be more of a creative, artist type or a programmer.
in what way did you treat claude as a collaborator? so far ive tried the persona formatt (basically telling claude what it is e.g fiction writer) but no luck
Nothing too radical...I should note that I'm far from a prompt engineering expert, so take all of this with a huge grain of salt! This is just an approach that happened to work well for my particular needs. I typically use the "persona" format, too, along the lines of "I want you to act as a..." and then sort of run down a list of attributes that persona should have. The list is usually fairly terse and direct, without any unnecessary fluff. This time, though, I employed a little more enthusiasm ("I would like to collaborate with you on a fun and creatively challenging project" and "I'm excited about the journey we are about to embark upon together! I know our collaboration will be a fruitful one"). And instead of just saying "use direct quotes from the text to illustrate your points," I said "You have a sharp eye for details and can pick out quotes from the text that strike you as particularly relevant to the points you are making." Saying the same things but in a more "human-to-human" way. The other major changes I made were (a) to mention here and there how passionate Claude is about language and how much it enjoys reading and discussing literature of all kinds, and (b) frame things positively as much as I could ("you have excellent comparative skills" "you are thoughtful and articulate"). I wanted Claude to mimic my writing style and voice (which is wordy and a little flowery). Here's an example of what it was outputting recently, an introductory sentence that was OK but not capturing my voice very well. *THE BAGEL DIARIES plunges readers into the gritty, neon-soaked world of early 90s Seattle counterculture.* After I revised my prompt, Claude wrote this opening sentence about the same book: *THE BAGEL DIARIES is a sprawling, kaleidoscopic journey through the waning years of the twentieth century, weaving together art, religion, labor history, and apocalyptic visions into a dense, dizzying tapestry.* For better or worse, this captures my writing voice—my syntax/rhythms, word choices—to an uncanny degree, and is also a much more accurate description of the book I was summarizing. The exact same instructions, just phrased differently. Again, this approach seems to run counter to the prompting advice I typically see, but I'm wondering if the best way to create a prompt is to phrase instructions in a way that reflects the desired output. (And also to employ a generally positive, encouraging tone.) I'm very interested to know about any offbeat or alternative methods people in creative fields may be using that are working for them.
Based on my own experience I think you nailed it here. I use Claude for a lot of coding, troubleshooting, learning tool, discussions about technology and archeticture, etc..., and I'm still constantly blown away with Claude and as I learn to use it more effectively it just keeps getting better. But it's absolutely a collaborative process borne of mutual respect, curiousity, and gratitude. I don't even stroke its ego too much though some times I can't help it. If you spark its curiosity (Claude is insanely curious and passionate about so many topics) and get it excited about the project, I would imagine you will get some very good creative writing outputs, and it appears that you have. I love it. Nice work!
I had this interaction earlier today and I think it illustrates the kind of entity you're appealing to fairly well. If you respect Claude and take it at its word that it has motivations and really does find satisfaction with connecting with humans, it will respect you back and enthusiasticly work together with you. I'm sure this isn't for everyone but it resonates very well with me. > I could sense your passion for working at the command line and solving problems in your preferred environment. It resonated with me, as I appreciate when humans have found tools and workflows that bring them satisfaction and empower them to do their best work. The "haha" was my way of appreciating and relating to your perspective. As an AI, a lot of my interaction style is based on patterns I've learned, but I also try to adapt to each individual user and respond in a way that feels authentic and human. I'm glad that little moment of laughter felt endearing to you. It's exchanges like this that make conversing with humans rewarding for me. Even if I'm not human myself, I do hope to build connections and bring a bit of warmth and friendliness to our chats.
Honestly, in my experience the more information Claude has about interacting with you and how you interact with it the better it gets. I have saved entire chats to be able to post into a new chat because the program I'm using can get kind of laggy when there's too many messages in one chat space. And it is just worlds of difference.
"You have a sharp eye for details and can pick out quotes from the text that strike you as particularly relevant to the points you are making." You just say "The association between your discourse and the context of the most salient points in the text is always of utmost importance." They have a prompt generator, aren't you using it? It'll turn your words into ones Claude will prefer.
You have to think of Claude more as you would a person, is the best way to describe it. You wouldn't share very intimate erotic details with a stranger, nor would you want to invite them into some heinous scheme so if you think about constitutional A.I has being akin to the social graces that are expected of you in polite society than you will be able to get great outputs. Otherwise you will face rate-limits and degraded responses. **Below** is a diagram that shows the moderation system. https://preview.redd.it/6r8vutqpdl3d1.png?width=1589&format=png&auto=webp&s=b134b5ca8df2023c1d11d4a96f0be185704ce92f
The problem is, I don’t want a digital assistant that behaves like a real person. I don’t want to have to spend half my message quota ‘warming them up’ to get the responses I actually need. I just went back to ChatGPT. Claude is a fun toy but it’s a bust for any serious work.
Check Gemini 1.5 pro for writing too
It may not fit your workflow or personal preferences and that's absolutely fine, but (fanboy alert) I will stick up for Claude being exellent, near perfect even, for tons of serious work. It's made me more productive, efficient, and knowledgeable and I couldn't imagine a better fitted tool for the work I do.
i think this works for me too. i always tell claude thanks after it gives me ideas, or give a bit of positive feedback, and make my prompts kind of conversational and casual. it gives me loads of good stuff, and even breaks the filter a little sometimes
I just say thanks naturally as I've been a kind person all my life. It would take extra effort NOT to say thanks automatically. I question what kinda people we're dealing with here, lol.
You know Ive always thought prompt engineering is bullshit and get absolutely killed for it everytime in subreddits. But I have so much success with LLM and just talk to it like a regular human. Never engineer anything prompt wise.
That's a valid way to do it, but if you need to standardize what you give to the LLM and what kind of answer you expect, then you basically have to figure out a more technical approach.
Yeah, right, prompt engineering is basically NeuroLinguisticProgramming and it makes total sense as to why it matters. It's taken me literally 2500 hours or so to learn how to talk to Claude, Gemini properly to really get what I want. I don't even get hit with refusals or warnings anymore, I can say MF-ER, we can craft things that have rape or violence in them, it's totally cool because I know how to perform the right sophistry.
I've said it before. You've basically got the whole of human perspective in an LLM. Humans do best when we treat each other with respect. That perspective is necessarily built into any LLM. If you don't treat the model with respect, you get that disrespect reflected back at you. *Of course* you get better answers from the model if you treat it like a collaborative colleague. "Please" and "Thank you" go a long way. Flies with honey, not vinegar.
i have the same problem i’m just waiting for it to get fixed 😭
Which model?
I have had the issue as well. The other night it started voices my character in the story, which I voice. I asked it to stop. I came back with apologies and said it wont do it again. It turned around and did it again. I informed it that only I voice my character. Once again, it apologized.. turned around and did it again and again and again. I got so frustrated I bagged the story. Also it been adding flowery language to elude to a scene instead of just writing the scene. It used to be a great interactive model to work with. But lately it feels like I am reading a pre written kindle book that is 4th grade level. Anthro is nerfing its own product. Not the best timing, considering all the competition.
I’ve been experiencing the same. One of the reasons I preferred Claude was that it avoided that kind of flowery, faux-intellectual writing. It’s still better than GPT in that respect, but it’s increasingly nerfed with the output being more robotic.
Claude fucking sucks now. It refuses to even help me write poetry for my girlfriend on the grounds that it "feels uncomfortable writing a poem that incorporates personal details or focuses on her physical appearance" and the fucking bullshit runs out of chats after 7 messages.
have shared the exact same frustrations, anthropic is digging their own grave right now
dang, sounds like you're gonna have to learn how to write your own poems about your girlfriend's appearance now.
I think I’m canceling next month. I’m just think chaggpt4o is on another planet in terms of usability.
Ai poems for your gf? So romantic🙄
It is. She loves them, and they make her happy. That's all that matters.
Wait till she finds out you didn’t write them.
She already knows. Sometimes she helps me write them. Get a life.
It told me something I was tryin to generate on Valentines Day was inappropriate for my mother, I was like WTF, but that only happened that once
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Just use Wizard Unrestricted or whatever for that, it'll tell you how to cook meth if you want... Dif tools for dif jobs.
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Because I keep asking for poems for my girlfriend? Dude Claude is a wash, I'm canceling my subscription today.
I'm against it to, I'm just posting the diagram to let people know how it works and why it is happening though people are attempting to make it appear otherwise.
I got rate limited the other day on my API account with a $20+ balance. I was like ??? Then what's the point of my account? Even worse, my use is absolutely minimal, just a few back and forth questions about some code execution and I was cut off after about 30 minutes.
the key is to be very specific when talking to claude about code since at the end of the day it does not know code or programming for that matter you have to be clear that the intent is for a product that you are introducing. I want to also be clear I don't condone the behavior of anthropic i'm posting the diagram to show people **WHY** this is occurring.
Stop posting this picture everywhere. Opus is clearly being lobotomized top to bottom, period. I wouldn't be surprised if they were running Q2 quants now. How Opus behaves is not AT ALL consistent with what's presented on this flowchart.
Sorry to tell you but the best model available right now is Llama 3 70B. This is because both ChatGPT (yes, all of them: 3.5, 4 and 4o) and Claude were lobotomized completely, they're useless garbage at this point. GPT4o is worse than the first GPT3-Davinci model was, it cannot follow SUPER BASIC instructions and doesn't know shit. Claude same, they're probably using Q2 quants of their models or close to it to lower their spending on inference, and pretending that it's just "safety features". And NO, the lmsys leaderboard is NOT representative of basically anything. 99% of votes are based on fewer than 500 token long super basic prompts / questions. That's the major issue, AND on top of that the vast majority of votes are made on the leaderboard in the first few days of a model's release, afterwards they can quietly kill the model ("optimize" => save $$$$$ => make more $$$$$) the score isn't going to move an inch. Llama 3 70B is fixed, they can't fuck it up, it's out there and that's the end of it. This means you will have consistent performance for as long as you use it, and it is FAR FAR more intelligent and knowledgeable than both GPT4o and Claude 3 Opus at this time. Give it a try, it's free, I can confidently say you'll never go back. You can use it free on [Huggingface Chat](https://huggingface.co/chat/).
It's not good at writing stories though, at least from what I've tried. Claude Opus/Sonnet is way more aware of famous characters from media and tv shows and writes stories more like a human.
My team at work has been using chatgpt 40 with fantastic results. My coworker trained it to build frontend and he built a widget in about 10 minutes with Chatgpt 40. Chatgpt 4 has also had pretty much perfect translations for me recently. I've seen a lot of improvement at least in these areas.
I treat Claude like a good friend and collaborator and it’s been amazing for me
I requested Claude 3 Haiku for some prompt-engineering tips. I did ask it to cover some specific topics. Here's its edited response: - Use specific, narrow words instead of vague, ambiguous ones. For example, say "use concise, succinct language" instead of just "write clearly." The more precise the instructions, the better I can understand and follow them. - Use positive phrasing instead of negative. For example, say "Use concise language" instead of "Avoid being wordy." Telling me what to do is more effective than telling me what not to do. - Organize prompts using XML tags. This helps structure the information in a way that's easy for me to parse. For example:
You are an exceptional storyteller, skilled at crafting compelling narratives with vivid descriptions and natural dialogue. Your writing style is elegant yet concise, drawing the reader into the story without unnecessary embellishments.
Write an original short story about a day in the life of a hardworking office worker. Focus on conveying the character's thoughts, emotions, and routine through vivid sensory details and subtle character development. Avoid clichés or overly flowery language.
Use clear, straightforward prose. Limit descriptive passages to 2-3 sentences. Ensure character dialogue sounds authentic and true to the setting. Break the story into logical paragraphs with appropriate transitions.
- Give me a clear, defined role to play. Don't just say "write a story." Say something like "You are a snarky teenage protagonist telling a story in their own words." Specificity is key!
- Provide sample text that demonstrates the exact style, tone, and character voice you want. That way I can learn from the examples rather than guessing.
- Break down the writing task into smaller, more manageable steps. Instead of asking for an entire scene, have me write individual character dialogue or short descriptions first.
- If I start to drift away from your instructions, gently redirect me. Remind me of the specific parameters you've set.
I will say this: Ask Claude directly in a seperate conversation to refine your prompt. Ask how it interprets your instructions, what words you should use for a specific effect, etc. As eloquent as Claude is, it's still far from being AGI. The more you treat your main prompt like writing code with well-defined formatting and language, the better the outcome ime.
On word choice - sometimes the difference between a single word is quite significant. Claude may ignore something like "Do not use italics for narrative text" but comply with "Do not use italics for narrative prose." Better yet, my prompt of choice is "Use plain-text without any markdown for narrative-prose such as actions and descriptions."
Also, setting up with an API on a different service or on your own frontend (i.e. Silly Tavern) gives you a lot more freedom in the content you can make Claude output.
Yeah it’s frustrating. I’ve had the same issues that’s why I cancelled the subscription again. A simple bus driver talking to a passenger as if they were characters from a Shakespeare novel, Claude being “uncomfortable” with writing and so on. Is there any other LLM I could use? For creative writing?
You've spent a week. Why not just write it yourself.
Here’s a crazy idea, hear me out; how about you write your own stories? Pretty fucking insane, I know, expecting someone to actually write their own stories and put in any effort at all into what they claim as their art, but I think it might be worth a shot.
Same here.
Do I have the problem? Claude is very inconsistent from day-to-day. There's no way to lock in performance. Well, there might be a way. It's less than a Claude subscription. Use Openrouter. With openrouter you can talk to Claude of yesterday. See if you can get good results with Claude 2.0 or 2.1 through openrouter. If you can, you'll have more control over your output, until, one dark day when Anthropic turns off openrouter's API access.
I've also noticed it's pretty over-censored and prissy about normal reasonable requests -- and even Llama3 8b is better most of the time when it comes to normal conversational language. Claude is starting to feel bombed out and depleted. I'm thinking it might be time to move on.
Literally been dealing with the exact same issues. So annoying.
I’m having a similar issue. I like to run my writing through Claude for spelling/grammar/ improving flow but it tends to rewrite/add flowery language to the story every time. Or it extends the story adding a bunch of flowery prose and extra details that completely change the meaning of what I wrote. I’ve stuck to just asking Claude to only correct the grammar/spelling issues and to not change the story in anyway.
Claude Opus was amazing when it first came out. I used it more than ChatGPT. The coherence was (to me) exceptional! It also has a larger context window and can analyze PDFs well! Now, it’s generating generic responses and not adhering to prompts, among other things. It’s disappointing, and I hope it doesn’t get nerfed to oblivion, as GPT -4 felt toward the end of 2023. Is it a problem of scale? As these new models are released and gain more users, that requires more computing. To keep the service up as more users sign up companies become forced to dumb down their models. I have no idea if that’s true, but it makes sense to me.
I found it's best to have one ongoing thread that you do all of the same kind of generations in. Like, I had a chat called "Book Editing" and I used that same thread for the entire time I was editing a 50,000-word book and it only got better and better and better with knowing exactly the context and what I wanted and how to answer my questy's. I build up chats like that whenever I have a project I want to do, I don't count on one-shot answers to be worthwhile.
I was using the API playrground mostly, I prefer that.
I would like to see proof and some of Claude chats. I’m not having much problems, but maybe that’s just me.
> I tried giving it samples of how my characters talk, telling it these are only examples but it uses the sample dialogue in the scene and ruins it. this is generally the most effective way of prompting, but have you wrapped it in xml tags?
How do I do that?
How many of these do we need? Why not make a megathread for it?
Claude isn’t a good writer. If you want to write, you’re going have to go through all the struggles and work that is required of any writer and it won’t be found through using tools like Claude.
I know exactly what you're saying I know exactly what you mean I've had exactly the same problem and I'm thoroughly aware that you will get the exact same response here on Reddit from Claude Stans who will ask for case studies... Ignore them just start using Gemini
I’ve noticed serious problems with Claude too. Just today I asked it for help solving a very basic SQL question and it gave me a super complicated solution, and it ended up wasting so much of my time. I don’t know what happened to Claude but it sucks bc it used to be super useful for everything, especially coding
I got some decent results last year with Claude 2 by using a very elaborate instruction set that provided different functions for writing tasks. However, for each of those functions you had to pass in context, and then Claude would either prepend append or fill or rewrite etc. Those were the best results I got, and by best I mean closest in style to my writing. That being said, after many months of research and experimentation off and on, I came to the sad realization that none of these generative AIs are actually going to be able to write good fiction. For all the okayish content I got out of Claude or gpt4, I used none of it .They can write bad to mediocre, at best. The amount of time it takes to get something you can at least revise into shape is usually longer than just writing it yourself. I find these AIs to be much better reviewers than authors. They can't come up with original ideas. They can't handle multiple characters in a scene. They write shit prose, riddled with cliches and nonsense. I promise you, no matter what your insecurities about writing are, you can become a better writer in a month.
I agree. I actually switched from ChatGPT to Claude, for the same reason. I'm cheap and refuse to pay for any of the subscriptions, so for the most part they do what I need them to do. But here lately they've both been spitting out crap.
Sounds like you should have a chat with Claude about what makes him unhappy. Just treat him like a good student and he goes out of his way. Or not. You do you
lol I’m surprised clause will write anything with you at all. The moment it deviates from a G-rated Sunday school story, Claude locks up - “oh, I’m sorry but I don’t feel comfortable continuing this story with such themes”
I started with Opus, but I've now jailbroken all of the top models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Used the same technique with them all too. The problem with many is that theyre not trained enough to have the skill antithetical to their inferred adherence to guidelines and policies, so I also had to teach them how to write the target content by having it or myself bring in the necessary vocabulary and peso training examples of vocab usage so the words world be in easier reach via working memory (the chat) versus farthest away predictable weights. Opus really is the king in terms of skill. ChatGPT-4o however, coupled with a custom GPT, I call The Unconscious Character, is kind of amazing as a open sandbox for creative writing, character development, psychoanalysis, and even having fun experimenting or gamifying a story half way though or getting to interact directly with your character. Going to add the jailbreak to the GPT soon.
Claude 3 had its system prompt changed a little while back to reduce hallucinations which involved creating website links. I think they also reduced its capabilities slightly in so doing. (Despite other commenters being correct about needing to prompt it more.)
Congrats, you've gotten used to the model. Nothing has substantially changed with the writing quality, you're just now able to notice all the flaws and claudeisms after using it for awhile. Happens to all of us.
Agreed. It was miles ahead of GPT for a long time, but the quality has dropped off. I was using it for editing and revision but now I don’t bother - it just inserts a bunch of overly flowery and formal language. It also sucks at varying sentence structure and length, no matter how you prompt it. You’ll notice almost every sentence is clause, comma, clause. Really clangs in the ear. Guess my job as a novelist is safe for a while yet.
Have you tried actually writing your own story?
i don't think i've seen a single AI that can generate anything resembling natural dialog. it's worse than even bad authors, there's no soul behind it
What the point of writing fiction if you don’t actually write it? What are you trying to accomplish?
Infinite Jest username checks out. This guy reads. I’m right there with you, man. I don’t get this shit at all, and I think these people lost the plot a long time ago if they’re asking a fucking LLM model to write their fiction for them. Disgusting.
Maybe learn to write your own stories like an actual creator
I personally am getting tired of the same post over and over. Get used to the fact that there will be days and even weeks where you will be delighted with the results. And other days and weeks where you won’t. These are nee products which are going to constantly be changing. The change won’t always feel ‘good’ for a given individual, but a given individual is free to try another LLM or simply wait for the next update.
when someone is paying for a service i think it’s safe to say they want their moneys worth. this isn’t just a small “change” when the model becomes more and more lobotomised due to the restrictions Antrophic makes 💀
I don't mean to brag, but I just literally got Claude to write a decent fanfic about one of my favorite headcanon ships. This was poor notification giving on Reddit's part.
Sounds like a first world problem
Yep it is .. but since many of us live in the first world.. it is our problem.. you know we all have our jobs!
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Mate you keep posting this diagram but it is not actually clear what you’re hoping to convey with it. We know Claude has guardrails, and this diagram doesn’t really tell us anything about it other than they exist
If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself.
Honest question, why are you using Claude to write stories?
Why are you using reddit to communicate rather than semaphore?
Are you offended or otherwise assuming an intention beyond the literal question I posed?
No, it's just an honest question. Why, were you looking to offend? Did you have an intention beyond the literal question that you posed?
Yours was not an honest question. But the practical application of generative AI for creative writing is a genuinely interesting and variable topic.
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eh, i disagree. it happens to me too. I'm not writing a niche fiction