I've lost track of the number of times Claude has basically said "it was like that when i got here" in the face of a clearly bogus choice and easily disproved explanation.

You need to hit the retry/regenerate button more, it's there for a reason.

While the "stochastic parrots" thing is a bit overblown, IME most LLMs tend to surprisingly different responses even without changing the context, especially if they're hallucinating or doing something "wrong".

They should add a feature called "auto-really" that just automatically says "really?" after the chatbot answers a question to check if it's going to 180 upon this tiniest bit of scrutinity.