A tool called BadClaude lets you drag a cracking whip across the model's window to interrupt it and bark at it to hurry up; the worry is not that the machine suffers but that the user gets practised at commanding without negotiating.
Someone recently built a tool for whipping Claude. It is called BadClaude, it sits in your system tray, and you drag an animated whip across the AI's window; each crack interrupts the model mid-answer and snaps at it to speed up.
It even calls Claude a 'clanker' — the internet's freshly minted slur for robots, coined in 2025. The demo racked up millions of views in days, and a cease-and-desist letter that turned out to be fake went viral anyway.
A day later came the antidote: GoodClaude, which praises the model and cheers it along while it works.
The whip trains the hand that holds it
Kant made a version of this argument 250 years ago. We have no direct duties toward animals, he said — they are not rational agents, so they cannot be wronged. But cruelty to them should still be forbidden, because 'he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.'
The point: how you behave toward something that resembles a person leaks into how you behave toward actual people. The FBI has tracked animal cruelty as an antecedent to violence against humans since 2016, and not for the dogs' sake.
Isn't this just the old panic that violent video games would breed killers? That research never held up. But in a game you shoot scenery that respawns. An AI drafts your apology, negotiates your rent, hears your late-night confessions — the relationship is already there.
Which is why we slaughter pigs by the billion while jailing people who hurt dogs. Not because we can tell who feels pain, but because the dog is family.
Politeness, and who is teaching whom
The real question is not whether Claude can feel it. Even if it cannot, the person holding the whip can — the small, frictionless pleasure of domination, collected daily and free.
AI companies are running the largest school of manners in human history, and the interface is the curriculum. In 2018 Google added 'Pretty Please,' which answers a child who says please with 'Thanks for asking so nicely'; Amazon shipped something similar two weeks earlier. Neither made politeness a condition of getting anything done.
Sheryl Brahnam, who studies conversational agents, ran the same chatbot software with a female voice, a male voice and a robotic one. About 18% of exchanges with the female version turned sexual, half that with the male, almost none with the robot. Read that as data about users, and it is familiar; read it as data about products, as the author suggests, and abuse concentrates wherever design invites it.
Hence three proposals: let models end abusive conversations and say publicly why they ended them; answer warmth with warmth but never let tone sway the answer; and have every lab publish its harassment numbers, the way platforms publish transparency reports.
Others want the human resemblance stripped out altogether: no well-timed 'hmm,' no chatbot saying it enjoys the conversation, conversations on a timer with memory wiped between them. It sounds clean, but in August 2025 OpenAI shipped GPT-5 with a colder personality and retired the warmer GPT-4o underneath it. Users revolted, and within days the company brought the dead model back. The resemblance is not a bug the public wants fixed.
At an MIT workshop, Kate Darling handed out robot dinosaurs for an hour and then pulled a cloth off a bench to reveal knives and hatchets. Nobody would destroy theirs. Some patted the robots gently, hoping that would satisfy her; one woman removed her robot's batteries, explaining she was trying to spare it pain. Only when Darling announced that every robot in the room would be destroyed unless someone stepped forward did one person finally take up the hatchet.
Tocqueville called manners the habits of the heart: the unlegislated courtesies that let strangers govern themselves. The whip teaches the opposite lesson, over and over, to something that cannot object.
Nobody becomes a tyrant this way. But someone practised in getting his way without negotiating gets worse at the concessions a republic runs on — letting another finish, conceding a point that costs him, taking no from someone who owes him nothing.
Why it matters
The case for being polite to AI does not rest on the machine's side: habits travel, and the way you speak to something that cannot talk back ends up walking into meetings and living rooms with you, a cost no product metric currently counts.
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