Kevin Roose, How Claude Became Tech Insiders’ Chatbot of Choice, NYTimes, Dec. 13, 2024.
Amanda Askell, a researcher and philosopher at Anthropic who is in charge of fine-tuning Claude’s character, told me in an interview that Claude’s personality had been carefully tuned to be consistent, but to appeal to a wide variety of people.
“The analogy I use is a highly liked, respected traveler,” said Dr. Askell. “Claude is interacting with lots of different people around the world, and has to do so without pandering and adopting the values of the person it’s talking with.”
A problem with many A.I. models, Dr. Askell said, is that they tend to act sycophantic, telling users what they want to hear, and rarely challenging them or pushing back on their ideas — even when those ideas are wrong or potentially harmful.
With Claude, she said, the goal was to create an A.I. character that would be helpful with most requests, but would also challenge users when necessary.
“What is the kind of person you can disagree with, but you come away thinking, ‘This is a good person’?” she said. “These are the sort of traits we want Claude to have.”
There's more at the link.