babblingfish

What goes totally unmentioned in the article is that this feature is designed to help mitigate dark usage patterns. My major concern with chatbots is excessive usage can lead to AI psychosis or negative rumination (depression). A feature that makes user's more self-aware of their usage patterns is a good thing. Making the user more self-aware is a necessary first step that will precede any kind of intervention to reduce their reliance.

Where this fails is it frames the intervention as a moderation problem. It may seem counterintuitive, but moderation takes more self-control than elimination. If you struggle with your relationship to LLMs, then every time you make a choice whether or not to engage with a LLM is an opportunity to struggle. The more you struggle, the worse you feel.

Obviously Anthropic cannot advocate for churning from their product. The psychological stickiness of their product is its primary selling point for investors. When they say "set quiet hours and breaks" it frames this as a user problem. Just get good bruh, it's not that the technology hallucinates or is sycophantic, or basically designed to be a AI girlfriend / boyfriend, it's a skill issue. Rather than a technology being applied incorrectly and a company floundering to hook users before they try to jack up the prices to stay solvent.

I find the "AI Fluency" course particularly ridiculous.

> Build AI skills that support your original thinking

This is a straight-up lie. When you outsource your thinking to Claude then your ability to produce original thought degrades. The whole framework for using LLMs is the sort of thing you see from tech bros on Twitter trying to sell online courses. It reminds me of the intellectual yet idiot essay by Nassim Taleb[1]. Don't let Anthropic tell you how to think under the guise of doom trolling[2] and tech bro "thinking frameworks". Think for yourself!