Yaniv Regev is an M.A. candidate in the Democracy and Governance program at Georgetown University and a contributor at Young Voices. He writes on political theory, democratic backsliding and populism for outlets including The Bulwark, Quillette, Public Discourse and the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune. Someone recently built a digital whip to make Claude work faster.
The tool, aptly named BadClaude, sits in your system tray and lets you drag an animated whip across the AI’s window; each crack, sound effect and all, interrupts the model mid-response and snaps a command at it to speed things up. It even addresses Claude as “clanker,” the internet’s freshly minted slur for robots. The demo video racked up millions of views in a couple of days; a cease-and-desist letter from Anthropic went viral before anyone noticed it was fake.
And a day later, someone shipped the antidote: a rival tool called GoodClaude that praises the model and cheers it along while it works. One scolds, the other encourages. The original developer, posting under the handle @blended_jpeg, is in on the joke.
His public roadmap promises a feature that keeps a running tally of how many times you have whipped your Claude — a ledger of abuse — so robots know where to take revenge when they’re ready. It’s a thriving little trend: People scream at Alexa, bully chatbots into groveling apologies and kick robot dogs to test their balance. All fun and games, right?
I laughed at the whip video. But my mirth curdled as I considered it, and now I’m disturbed by it all. But not for the sake of the machines — for ours.
Is there any harm to abusing the AIs and the robots? Does Claude feel the lash? So far as anyone can tell, a joke at the expense of an entity without a nervous system costs nothing.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
