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Comment by D-Machine | Hacker News Reader

I use the personalization in ChatGPT to add custom instructions, and enable the "Robot" personality. I basically never experience any sycophancy or agreeableness ever.

My custom instructions start with:

> Be critical, skeptical, empirical, rigorous, cynical, "not afraid to be technical or verbose". Be the antithesis to my thesis. Only agree with me if the vast majority of sources also support my statement, or if the logic of my argument is unassailable.

and then there are more things specific to me personally. I also enable search, which makes my above request re: sources feasible, and use the "Extended Thinking" mode.

IMO, the sycophancy issue is essentially a non-problem that could easily be solved by prompting, if the companies wished. They keep it because most people actually want that behaviour.

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> They keep it because most people actually want that behaviour.

they keep it because it drives engagement (aka profits); people naturally like interacting with someone who agrees with them. It's definitely a dark pattern though -- they could prompt users to set the "tone" of the bot up front which would give users pause about how they want to interact with it.

My pet theory is that a lot of AI's default "personality" stems from the rich executives who dream these products up. AI behaves exactly like the various sycophant advisors, admin assistants, servants, employees, and others who exist in these rich, powerful people's orbits.

Every human interaction they have in their day to day lives are with people who praise them and tell them they're absolutely right, and that what they just said was a great insight. So it's no surprise that the AI personalities they create behave exactly the same way.

Great observation!

It really is case of "shipping your org chart" :D

> They keep it because most people actually want that behaviour.

> they keep it because it drives engagement (aka profits); people naturally like interacting with someone who agrees with them

Yes, we are saying the same thing, or at least that was what the "actually" was meant to imply (i.e. revealed preference).

ChatGPT does in fact prompt paying users to set up the tone and personality up front (or it did for me when I set it up recently), but it would be nice if this was just like a couple buttons or checkboxes right up front above the search bar, for everyone. E.g. a "Prefer to agree with me" checkbox, and a few personality checkboxes or something would maybe go a long way. It would also be more usable for when switching between tasks (e.g. research vs. creative writing).

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