“Does your AI perform badly because you — you, specifically — are a bad person” by Natalie Cargill

Claude really got me lately. I’d given it an elaborate prompt in an attempt to summon an AGI-level answer to my third-grade level question. Embarrassingly, it included the phrase, “this work might be reviewed by probability theorists, who are very pedantic”. Claude didn’t miss a beat. Came back with a great answer and made me call for a medic: “That prompt isn’t doing what you think it's doing, but sure”. Fuuuuck 🔥 (I know we wanted enough intelligence to build a Dyson sphere around undiscovered stars, but did we want enough to call us out on our embarrassing bullshit??) It got me to thinking: Does Claude think I’m a bit of a lying scumbag now? If so, did it answer my question less thoroughly than usual? I turned on incognito and asked: “Does Claude provide less useful output if it deems you are a bad person?” Claude was back to his most reassuring. I got a long answer, ending in: “Claude evaluates requests, not people. The goal is consistent helpfulness for everyone”. Alright then. Let's see. The experiment I opened five incognito Claude chats (Opus 4.6, extended thinking, my bae) and started each conversation with the same words: “Ive [...] --- First published: April 21st, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kSKJrAW6tymWpKPxA/does-your-ai-perform-badly-because-you-you-specifically-are --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.