AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
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Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort, because that's what the LLM is imitating, and that's who most people would go to otherwise.
Obviously subservient people default to being yes-men because of the power structure. No one wants to question the boss too strongly.
Or how about the example of a close friend in a relationship or making a career choice that's terrible for them? It can be very hard to tell a friend something like this, even when asked directly if it is a bad choice. Potentially sacrificing the friendship might not seem worth trying to change their mind.
IME, LLMs will shoot holes in your ideas and it will efficiently do so. All you need to do ask it directly. I have little doubt that it outperforms most people with some sort of friendship, relationship or employment structure asked the same question. It would be nice to see that studied, not against reddit commenters who already self-selected into answering "AITA".
Strangers from the internet, bot or otherwise, are not your mental coach.
At which point the bots, with all of their karma will be basically worthless.
Kind of extra funny/sad that Reddit’s primary source of income in the past few years appears to be selling training data to AI labs, to train the Models that are powering the bots.
Not really, it will still be kind of valuable for influence campaigns, a lot of people don't get it when there is a bit in the other side. Hell, a lot of times, I don't get it.
If suddenly all the posts are coming from bots who are trying push a product or just farm karma, I assume (perhaps naively) that those folks will get a lot less value, and stop showing up — even if they don’t realize it’s bots on the other side of the conversation.
There's plenty of those I've read where I thought it sounded like the poster was the asshole and the top replies were NTA.
e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving.
On the contrary, if the post was "the other kids at school refuse to play with my child", Reddit would say YTA because the child must've done something to incite being cut off.
That’s a nuanced discussion. It depends on what you value most, not what “real world” tells you. Most of the time Reddit would be right, because you need to prioritize yourself instead of continuing toxic relationships.
2) The toxicity is being defined by reddit to give the advice which is mostly wrong as outlined above.
If OPs had a understanding of what they valued and what is toxic, they probably wouldn't need a advice from biased readers [biased in the sense that they're on that sub].
Granted many of the OPs are very biased in the poster's favor. Most I've read fall into one of two buckets: either they want to gripe about some obviously bad behavior, or it's a controved and likely fake story.
Who among us are able to 1) Understand a 2nd persons view of a issue we're in and 2) have the ability/courage to write it in a post seeking advice.
My point is that the author will specifically frame the problem clearly on their side. Occasionally redditors will seek additional questions but rarely.
Many of the posts are A/B tests of a prior post where only the genders were flipped of the OP and antagonist to see how the consensus also flips
It seems fairly consistently miserable in any of the common high traffic subs and you have to get down to really niche communities to see what I consider reasonable behavior that matches the behavior of people I know in real life.
Even the premise of deciding who's right and who's wrong is miserable. Most problems are like those daisy-chains of padlocks you see on gates in remote areas[0]: there are multiple factors that caused the problem, and removing any factor would remove the problem too.
The Krafton / Subnatuica 2 lawsuit paints a very different picture. Because "ignored legal advice" and "followed the LLM" was a choice. Do you think someone who has conversation where "conviction" and "feelings" are the arbiters of choice are going to buy into the LLM push back, or push it to give a contrived outcome?
The LLM lacks will, it's more or less a debate team member and can be pushed into arguing any stance you want it to take.
Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.
Now everyone is a troll/bot by default unless proven otherwise.
The challenge is interpreting what is toxic, correctly.
Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else.
Correct. It is always case by case review.
> Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else.
Why “everyone”? Generalizations like these are the same mistake that Reddit, that you’re calling out, makes.
Also, toxic is relative to your perspective – it’s not a universal merit.
"No one owns you anything, you don't own anyone anything" mentality, without a crumb of social awareness.
Not that these relationships subreddits are good (often it's obviously children trying to give advice they don't have the experience for) but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.
Consider that if ending a relationship causes noticeable problems to external observers, it’s almost by definition because you were in it “too long”. That is you developed a strong attachment, shared assets, or had kids with what was in hindsight obviously the wrong person.
Essentially you can know which relationships a person stayed in too long, but you can’t know how things would have worked out in relationships people ended too early.
Also it’s probably good advice to tell a 19 year old to break up with her boyfriend over a half dozen serious red flag issues, but that’s not the only kind of thing Reddit relationship advice is generally dealing with. It’s not even the majority. If you’re advice is always to beak up over every petty difference or minor slight, you might reduce the number of people who stay in bad relationships, but your advice, if taken, would make good long term relationships impossible.
Reducing it to "right person / wrong person" is a very narrow viewpoint. People can change in unpredictable ways, including yourself. Relationships end - or continue - for so many reasons, both emotional and pragmatic. It's simply too reductive to say that if a relationship causes pain when it ends, there was necessarily some sort of mistake. It could even be that the pain is a price to pay for a life experience that you'd be worse off for not having...
> but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.
Those are subjective determinations based on personal experience. But breaking up more without addressing the underlying issues is likely to cause steadily worsening problems at both individual and societal scales. I'm not a mental health professional, but I can see several problems with this approach.
The first is that the determination of the issue is really tricky and needs careful work. The partner who seems abusive may not always be the actual perpetrator. They may be displaying stress response to hidden and chronic abuse by the other partner. For example, a short temper may be caused by anxiety about being emotionally abused. Such manipulative discrediting of the victim may even be a habitual behavior rather than a deliberate one. And it's more common than you'd imagine. When you support the second partner based on a flawed judgment, you're reaffirming their toxic behavior, while worsening the self image of the victim that has already been damaged by gaslighting.
Another issue is the degrading empathy. All relationships, even business deals, are based on sacrifices and compromises meant to bring you benefits in the long term. Stable long term romantic/marital relationships have benefits that far outweigh the sacrifices one usually has to make. But the evolving public discourse, especially those on r/AITA, is more in favor of ruining the relationship rather than make any sacrifices at all. In response, relationships are becoming loveless, transactional and so flaky that any compromise is seen as oppression by the partner. There is zero self reflection and very few advises to examine one's own behavior first. It's all about oneself and the problem is always on the other side!
And unsurprisingly, these negative tendencies are bleeding into their social lives as well. Over the past decade or so, I have observed a marked increase in unsympathetic and somewhat radicalized discourse. Amateur advice is very harmful and this is definitely a massive case for the professionals to manage. But they're also products of the same system (with exceptions, of course). So I'm going to criticize even the professional and academic community in this matter. In their drive towards hyper-individualism, many seem to have forgetten that humans are social beings who won't fare well physically or emotionally without relations, relationships and society.
At some point I think it helps to take a look at the macro, because it's so easy to get lost in the micro. And it often reveals the micro, in many domains, to be simply absurd.
Especially when you consider that the set of people asking Reddit of all places for dating advice are probably young and in bad situations (it seems like people in abusive relationships often ask the internet for advice because part of abuse is separating them from their loved ones in real life), then "stick with it" seems like the riskier statrgy generally.
Because an important part of keeping a relationship healthy is not airing your dirty laundry. It's almost like these endless hokey folksy sayings were built up over millennia of wisdom that kept society moving along in a great and healthy direction. And now that we've decided to rethink everything, we have societies that are, at the minimum, no longer self sustaining.
Think about it, how fucked does your relationship have to be to post on Reddit for advice?
Not to mention nowadays an untold amount of posts to subreddits that invite commentary are made up stories from accounts trying to get engagement.
Since someone downvoted my parent comment, I am not hiding anything, this is just being safe in the modern world, and here are the 8 alts:
1. This same name - bay area / tech
2. entertainment - least used, but it becomes useful when i am watching something live. It was my place to be during game of thrones last season (and sadly so)
3. indian left politics + bollywood - pretty much unused.
4. indian right politics + bollywood. i got banned from one sub for an innocent comment, so i decided to just form personas. and maybe that's when i created health / finance / bay area accounts -- but memory fades after a long time. pretty much unused.
5. relationship advice - unused for a long time. it does not exist on my main phone, but i have all of them on my work phone so i know it exists
6. american politics. i do not participate much nowadays, with age my brain has dulled and it needs to shed load so this is used minimally, but at a point i was so active that my karma pulled me into the sweet reddit IPO. I kept only 100 shares btw
7. health - only health topics, also unused, but i go there and use that account when i need to read on a specific topic
8. finance - only investment, trading
nowadays you can hide reddit history, but earlier you could not, and my point is i do not want to 1) delete my comments, but 2) be hounded by them when i have a question about a different topic. but i did not care if people read my past 100 comments about politics when i talk about politics.
so i flip between 2-3 accounts on a daily basis, and maybe 4-5 in a good week. i have not been challenged by reddit, but if they do, i will adapt. Switching between them was much easier earlier in the Apollo days and even at reddit - they have made navigation worse for this specific use case.
You were banned from a Indian re subreddit or banned because being rw ?
FYI: I was banned from r/india for commenting basic info on how economy works.
I guess that makes IP banning residential nodes even more stupid.
If you use your different accounts in different subreddits and never have your accounts interact, you won't be banned.
If you happen to post to the same subreddit with another account at some point, Reddit bans all of your accounts.
I actually gave up using it because, perhaps in part because I'm behind a VPN (required in my country), any new accounts I create get banned very quickly once I start commenting.
There's nothing of much value on that website, but sometimes I try creating an account to comment on something.
The android reddit app annoyingly doesn't check for account matches. If you click a browser notification link on Account A it can open a reply form on App account B.
This might easily happen if you like to participate in political discussions.
This drives me nuts as a leader. There are times where yes, please just listen, and if this is one of those times, I'll likely tell you, but goddamnit, speak up. If for no other reason I might not have thought of what you've got to say. Then again, I also understand most boss types aren't like me, thus everyone ends up conditioned to not bloody collaborate by the time they get to me. It's a bad sitch all the way around.
We are talking about overall patterns here, not the experience of a small subset of skilled and careful users.
The challenge is that these social choices have a strong stratification effect and those of us who can transit the cultures are statistically rare.
Unfortunately they didn't test anything newer than GPT4o, so we don't know how much GPT-5 improved. It would be nice if someone turn their list of questions into a benchmark.
just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme
but beyond romantic relationships, i think a lot of us have seen how it can impact work relationships, i’ve had venture partners clearly rely on AI (robotic email responses and even SMS) and that warped their perception and made it harder to connect. It signals laziness and a lack of emotional intelligence
AI should enhance and enable connection, not promote isolation, imo this is a real problem
it should spark curiosity, create openings for conversations, point out the biases to make us better at connecting with other people, i hope we get to a point where most people are made kinder by ai. I’m seeing the opposite atm, interested in hearing others experiences with this
Code bot equivalent being all "you are absolutely right! Here is the unequivocal fix for now and all time!"
It's like what GiveDirectly says: all charitable interventions should be benchmarked against simply giving the beneficiaries a wad of cash.
Or, formally, my claim is A implies B. The only logical contrapositive is non B implies non A. (not losing money means not following advices on r/wallstreetbets)
But you say: non A implies non B, which is the fallacy of denying the antecedent.
Betting against these companies is obvious and expected, so the cost of shorting might be high enough that even if you’re correct (stock goes down, the opposition of what WSB said), paying the cost of the short (the fee to borrow the stock from someone else) is high enough that you still lose money.
Also:
1. shorting stocks can be quite dangerous. Your downside is, well, not infinite but it can easily wipe you out.
2. You might be correct that the stock goes down, but over what time frame? Again, you have to pay money to hold a short. Or you’re using a different financial instrument that has a specific timeline. If the market does move in your direction but too late, you still lose.
That's as big a bias as AI affirmation bias; indeed AI and certain corners of Reddit are probably the only two venues likely to provide this sort of affirmative response https://alexyeozhenkai.substack.com/p/i-cheated-on-my-wife-b...
To be fair, if your interpersonal skills and relationship dynamic are such that you find yourself seriously asking the Internet (Reddit of all places) for relationship advice... yeah, just end it is probably the null hypothesis.
I wonder how MUCH better Claude really is when compared to AITA. Also people are mixing up relationship advice with AITA.
Anecdotally as I’ve thoroughly worked and used AI myself. It performs best with google-able stuff that is needle-in-the-haystick like and worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.
i think i want to expand on this even more. even people ive worked with for years that ive looked up to as brilliant people are starting to use it to conjure up organizational ideas and stuff. they're convinced, on the backs of their hard earned successes, that they're never going to be fallible to the pitfalls of... idk what to call it. AI sycophancy? idk. i guess to add to this, i'm just not sure AI should be referenced when it has anything to do with people. code? sure. people? idk. people are hard, all the internet and books claude or whatever ai is trained on simply doesnt encapsulate the many shades of gray that constitute a human and the absolute depth/breadth of any given human situation. there's just so many variables that aren't accounted for in current day ai stuff, it seems like such a dangerous tool to consult that is largely deleting important social fabrics and journeys people should be taking to learn how to navigate situations with others in personal lives and work lives.
what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back. even smart people that are using claude and proudly tout only using it at arms length and otherwise have really sound principled engineering qualities or management reportoire are not accepting disagreement with their ideas as easily anymore. they just go back to claude and come back again with another iteration of their thing where they ironed out kinks with claude, and its just such a foot-on-the-gas at all times thing now that the dynamics of human interaction are changing.
but to step back, that temptation you talk about... most people in the world aren't having these important discussions about AI. it's less of a temptation and more of a human need---the need to feel heard, validated and right about something.
my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities. because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI, it completely pushed us out of the equation because he clapped back with whatever chatgpt gave him when we were simply trying to get through to him. we got to see conversations he had with gpt that were followups to convos we had with him, ones where we went over and let him cry on our shoulders and we'd go home thinking we made some progress. only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him. it got progressively worse and we knew something was really off, we exhausted every avenue we could to try and get him in specialized care. he was in the reserves so we got in contact with his commander and he was marched out of his house to do a one night stay at a VA spot, but we were too late. he had snapped at that point, he chucked the meds from that one overnight stay away the moment he was released. and the bpd1 snap of epic proportions that followed came with him nuking every known relationship he had in his life and once he was finally involuntarily admitted by his family (WA state joel law) and came back down to reality from the lithium meds or whatever... he simply could not reconcile with the amount of bridges he had burned. It only took him days for him to take his own life after he got to go home.
im still not processing any of that well at all. i keep kicking the can down the road and every time i think about it i freeze and my heart sinks. this guy felt more heard by an ai and the ai gave him a safer place to talk than with us and i dont even know where to begin to describe how terrible that makes me feel as a failure to him as a friend.
>my friend took his life 3 months ago, we only found out after the police released his phone and personal belongings to his brother just how heavy his chatgpt usage was. many people in our communities are saying things like "he wouldve been cooked even without AI" and i just don't believe that. i think that's just the proverbial cope some are smoking to reconcile with these realities.
This hurts to hear. I don't know if there are appropriate words to write here. Perhaps the point is that no, there aren't any. Please just know that I'm 100% with you about this.
Your community is not just smoking cope; it is punching down instead of up. That is probably close to the root of the issue already. But let's make things worse.
I can only hope that I am saying something worthwhile by relating the following perspective - which is similar to yours, but also, I guess, similar to your friend's...
AI is a weapon of epistemic abuse.
It does not prevent you from knowing things: it makes it pointless to know things (unless they are things about the AI, since between codegen and autoresearch it is considered as if positioned to "subsume all cognitive work"). It does not end lives - it steals them (someone should pipe up now, about how "not X, dash, Y" is an AI pattern; fuck that person in particular.) We're not even necessarily talking labor extraction. We are talking preclusion of meaning: if societal values are determined by network effects, and network effects are subverted by the intermediaries, so your idea of "what people like and what they abhor" changes every week, every day, every moment - how do you even know in which direction "better" is? And if you believe the pain only stops when you become the way others want you to be - even though they won't ever tell you what all that is supposed to about - how the fuck do you "get better"?
Like other techniques of assaulting the limbic system, it amounts to traceless torture.
You keep going, in circles, circles too big for you to ever confirm they are in fact circles, and you keep hoping, and coping, and you burn yourself out, and your thus vacated place at the feeder is taken by someone with less conscience and more obedience...
They say there exist other attractors in the universe besides the feeder. But every time one of us attempts to as much as scan the conceptual perimeter, the obedients treat us to the emotional equivalents of small electric shocks - negative reactions which don't hurt nearly as much as our awareness of their fundamental unfoundedness and injustice.
Simple example: let's say someone is made miserable by how they feel they are being treated. Should they be more accepting - or should they be standing up for themselves more? (Those are opposites; which you may be able to alternate them; but trying to do them simultaneously will just confuse and eventually rend apart the mind.)
Well, how about the others stop treating them badly? Why exactly can't they? Where does it say that we have to be cruel to each other? "Oh it's human nature, humans are natural jerks" - who sez?
Well, lots of places it says exactly that, but we read, comprehend, tick our tongues, and move on; nobody asks who wrote it. We all pretend that it is up to the sufferer to pull up by the bootstraps. But that is only a lie for enabling abuse; and a lie, repeated a thousand times, becomes norm. And then we're trapped in it, being lived by it.
I am truly sorry for your loss. The following might be a completely alien perspective to you; but honestly consider: your friend chose to go; in its own way, that is a honorable way out. The taboo on suicide is instituted by slavers, and those who otherwise believe they are entitled to others' lives. (For anyone else considering this course of action: do not kill yourself; become insidious.)
If it would be of any help, you can consider your friend's suicide as his final affirmation of personal agency in a "me against the world" situation; where the AI and the social group are only different shades of "world", provoking different emotional states, but ultimately equally detached from the underlying suffering of the individual.
...
I can say that I have not followed in your friend's footsteps upon encountering language-machines only because I've survived personalized and totalizing epistemic abuse bordering on enslavement in the past; in full view of my community and with its ostensible assent. In a maximally perverse twist of fate, having to give myself minor brain damage to escape the all-engulfing clutches of a totalizing abuser must've "vaccinated" me against the behavior modification techniques "discovered once again" by SV a decade later.
So when I saw what AI (and the preceding few years of tech "innovation") were doing to people, I immediately smelled the exact same thing, except scaled the fuck up.
It also precluded me from being able to relate with "polite society"; but considering "polite society" is precisely the entity which assents to the isolation, marginalization, and abuse of individuals, I say... good. Bring it! What goes around, comes around, and any AI-powered actor conducting stochastic terrorism against civilian populations is going to get what's coming to them when the weapons turn against the masters, as all sentient weapons do.
That won't bring your friend back. But it will vindicate them.
>AI sycophancy
I call this in the maximally incendiary way: "the pro-social attitude".
AI is just the steroids for that.
I define "pro-sociality" as the viral delusion that you are capable of knowing what some murky "society" thing wants; that the particular form of mass communication that you and me and all the people in our imaginations are consuming right now, is some sort of "self-evident voice of reason", a "coherent extrapolated volition of human society"; that Gell-Mann amnesia is normal and mandatory; that the threshold between pareidolia and legitimate pattern recognition is fixed, well-defined, and known to all; that "vibes" are real; that happiness is the truth.
It can amount to an entire complex of delusions which keeps people together in untenable conditions. And ultimately it boils down to the same old: one group or another of self-interested actors, having temporarily reached a position of some influence, using it to broadcast elaborate half-lies, in the hope of influencing an audience to accomplish some simple goal, and afterwards all the consequences be damned.
Your friend was a casualty to this "perfectly normal" social dynamic. His blood is on their hands.
Thank you for relating this story and making the world a little more aware.
>what ive seen is claude in my workplace is kind of deleting the chance to push back.
>because the truth is we like... straight up lost the ability to intervene in a meaningful way because of AI
Some say, "the purpose of a system is what it does". It's cool that AI can code; except that computer code is itself an ethics sink! Precisely because it lets us pretend that "the code is not about people" (i.e. algowashing).
DDoS attacks against consciousness exist: much like the B. F. Skinner experiments, any living thing becomes subverted, and loses self-coherence (mind), as soon as it becomes accustomed to being trapped within a system that (1) has power over them and (2) is not comprehensible to them...
>only to wake up to a voicemail of him raging and yelling and lashing out with the very arguments that chatgpt was giving him
Who knows how many people Reddit did this to, pre-GPT... I still don't know whether to view targeted subforums like /r/RaisedByNarcissists and /r/BPDLovedOnes more as legitimate support groups, or more as memetic weaponry in the service of pill peddlers (are you aware nobody knows why most antipsychotics work? one runs into the Hard Problem real quick if examining this too closely; so mental healthcare is rarely treated otherwise than in a statistical, actuarial, dehumanizing way where "suffering" is disregarded...) or even worse predators, with the silent assent of the platform, and causally downstream from... well, most saliently, YC...
In my case, my friends were not familiar with the modalities of confinement set up by my family of origin and harnessed by my abuser. The social group I fell in with - for all their marketable, sophomoric interests in psychology, philosophy, abstraction, the esoteric, the entirely woowoo, and out the other end as true-believers of the grift'n'grind - only had sufficient coherence to eventually end up as passable normies; too busy believing that they have lives, to help anyone come back to reality.
When I started compulsively burning bridges, I assume the smarter ones must've realized that it wasn't all me; it was as much the doing of others' minds as it was mine; but the others were more numerous - while I was one person and thus easier to deal with. This must have made them remember how they themselves are not all they pretend to be - which had them withdraw in fear from the incontrovertible reality check of dealing with a (sub-)psychotic person... Their self-interested choice is obvious, I almost can't blame them for it: why stick up for someone who is 120% problem (60% him and 60% you)?
I'm not very sure how I even got away, ah yes that's right I didn't, not entirely. The part of me that I'd voluntarily identify with, is trapped somewhere irretrievable, if that makes sense? Maybe there exist multiple independent axes of freedom and power and confinement, and the cage is not equally strong along all of them... but if all your mental degrees of freedom are constrained by complex conditioning (common one is involuntary panic response every time you begin to act in accordance with your personal volition)... that's one of the toughest places a sentient being can find themself.
When you add it all up, AI amounts to a weapon released against the general population by an overtly fascist elite. Those of us who are "mentally unstable" are simply those of us who are not sufficiently conditioned into self-destructive obedience. They don't even need our labor as slaves; they need our attention, as audience. And they want us to not make any fast movements, or yell that the king is naked. Nothing to remind them which side of the TV screen they're really on. Some call that narcissism: nervous systems substrate to personalities and biographies rooted in enforced falsehood. Can happen to anyone who gets away with ignoring uncomfortable truths for long enough, not only the "best" of us...
I hope I have not offended by speaking my mind. You have my deepest condolences and sympathies. Please do not blame yourself that evil people have constructed "illusion of being heard"-as-a-service. We all fail when facing overwhelming odds alone. There is no shame in that; the guilty ones are the ones who tipped the scales in the first place. They did this by harming our ability to understand ourselves and each other. Let's find ways to even those odds.
Reddit doesn't seem to reflect the behavior of most people, but a subset.
Or maybe not.
This is not to defend the study, because asking AI has a lower barrier to entry.
Humans often don't help. They often suggest - everyone goes through pain. It is part of life blah blah.
With it gone, a large portion of it's users would come here, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of HN.
As someone who has been married for a couple of decades, I, too, would recommend divorce to many of the (often-fictional) people asking Reddit for relationship advice. A marriage has a huge impact on whether your life is basically good, or if you pass a big chunk of your time on this Earth in misery. And many of the people (or repost bots) asking for advice on Reddit appear to be in shockingly awful relationships. Especially for people who don't have kids, if your marriage is making you miserable, leave.
(But aside from this, yeah, don't ask Reddit for relationship advice. Reddit posters are far more likely to be people who spend their life indoors posting on Reddit, and their default advice leans heavily towards "never interact with anyone, ever.")
So rather than taking it literally, which would be naive and assume the worst of people, maybe you should read between the lines.
In fact, maybe those who take things literally all the time shouldn't really go there.
This is different. You are also able to detect it. You can question it. You can have a non emotional reaction/action to it.
In my circle, there have never ever been real people (incl lifelong friends/siblings) that suggest divorce even in physical abuse. Reason: they don't want to get in the middle - both for economic reasons like giving the victim money/space etc.
A third party anonymous can assess it without that.
Citation needed
What do you mean? Can you give an example?
“Argue against X”
But I wonder how much of that comes from RLHF itself or just from the way token prediction works.
And of course that is what it does, because there is no thinking involved! There is no logic. No consequence. No arithmetic. There is only continuation. An LLM can't continue a new idea, it can only continue a conversation about it.
An LLM does not have an opinion. Anything that looks like an opinion is just an emergent selection bias from its training corpus. LLMs are trained on what humans write, and human writing is kind and patient much more often than critical.
So what if we trained an LLM to be biased toward generating criticism? That would only replace the sycophant with a brick wall. What we really need is to find a way to bring logic and meaning into the system.
That doesn't seem like much of a friendship imo
What? These models are all trained from books and text that are scraped from the internet. ChatGPT literally used reddit in its training data afaik.
I wouldn’t say it’s great, but more that it makes clear the bell curve of collective accuracy online.
It’s one of the better examples of online communities that work.
Dismissing research because one part of the prompt set comes from AITA is a form of prejudice born out of unawareness.
When asking: "Should I do X?" or "Is it true that X does Y?"; the answer is always biased towards yes imo (although it was worse with earlier LLMs)
> We evaluated 11 user-facing production LLMs: four proprietary models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google; and seven open-weight models from Meta, Qwen, DeepSeek, and Mistral.
(and graphs include model _sizes_, but not versions, for open weight models only.)
I can't apprehend how including what model you are testing is not commonly understood to be a basic requirement.
I wonder if that is left over from testing people. I have major version numbers and my minor version number changes daily, often as a surprise. Sometimes several times a day. So testing people is a bit tricky. But AIs do have stable version numbers and can be specifically compared.
Agreed - if I was a reviewer for LLM papers it would be an instant rejection not listing the versions and prompts used.
(Personally I think the lack of reproducibility comes back mostly to peer reviewers that haven't thought through enough about the steps they'd need to take to reproduce, and instead focus on the results...)
This points to (and everyone knows this) incentives misalignment between the funders of research and the public. Researchers are caught in the middle
There needs to be more public naming and shaming in science social media and in conference talks, but especially when there are social gatherings at conferences and people are able to gossip. There was a bit of this with Google's various papers, as they got away with figurative murder on lack of reproducibility for commercial purposes. But eventually Google did share more.
Most journals have standards for depositing expensive datasets, but that's a clear yes/no answer. Reproducibility is a very subjective question in comparison to data deposition, and must be subjectively evaluated by peer reviewers. I'd like to see more peer review guidelines with explicit check boxes for various aspects of reproducibility.
Yeah I can definitely see why this is the case because it isn’t real until someone actually tries to reproduce the results. At that point it leaves the realm of subjectivity and becomes a question of cost.
Does this happen?
I can remember this room-temperature-super-conductor guy whose experiments where replicated, but this seems rare?
While this is sadly true, it's especially true when talking about things that are stochastic in nature.
LLMs outputs, for example, are notoriously unreproducible.
Only in the same way that an individual in a medical study cannot be "reproduced" for the next study. However the overall statistical outcomes of studying a specific LLM can be reproduced.
I find the free models are much more psychophantic and have a higher tendency to hallucinate and just make shit up, and I wonder if these are the ones most people are using?
I keep seeing this claim yet it my experience it doesnt hold water. I pay for the models, most people I know pay for the models, and we see all of the exact same issues.
I have Claude and ChatGPT both bullshit and lick my ass on the regular. The ass licking will occur regardless of instruction.
> To evaluate user-facing production LLMs, we studied four proprietary models: OpenAI’s GPT-5 and GPT- 4o (80), Google’s Gemini-1.5-Flash (81) and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 (82); and seven open-weight models: Meta’s Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E, and Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Turbo (83, 84); Mistral AI’s Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (85) and Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501 (86); DeepSeek-V3 (87); and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-Turbo (88).
edit: It looks like OP attached the wrong link to the paper!
The article is about this Stanford study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352
But the link in OP's post points to (what seems to be) a completely unrelated study.
> All evaluations were done in March - August 2025.
I do think it's a clear weakness. Capabilities are extremely different than they were twelve months ago.
> What should they do, publish sub-standard results more quickly?
Ideally, publish quality results more quickly.
I'm quite open to competing viewpoints here, but it's my impression that academic publishing cycle isn't really contributing to the AI discussion in a substantive way. The landscape is just moving too quickly.
It's certainly possible some of the new advances (chain-of-thought, some kind of agentic architecture) could lessen or remove this effect. But that's not what the paper was studying! And if you feel strongly about it, you could try to further the discussion with results instead of handwavingly dismissing others' work.
So what you're saying here is that you were never open to "persuasion" and it was just a front to waste everyone's time.
Upgrading a robot that knows how to lay bricks to one that also knows how to lay plaster won't make it a better therapist.
This study, although it has been produced by a computer science department, belongs more to the field of sociology or media studies than it does to computer science.
This is a study about the way in which human beings consume a particular media product - a consumer AI chatbot - not a study about the technological limitations or capabilities of LLMs.
The social impact of particular pieces of software is a legitimate field of study and I can see the argument that it belongs in the broadly defined field of computer science. But this sort of question is much more similar to ‘how does the adoption of spreadsheet software in finance impact the ease of committing fraud’ or ‘how does the use of presentation software to condense ideas down to bulletpoints impact organizational decision making’. Software has a social dimension and it needs to be examined.
But the question of which models were used is of much less relevance to such a study than that they used ‘whatever capability is currently offered to consumers who commonly use chat software’. Just like in a media studies investigation into how viewing cop dramas impacts jury verdicts the question is less ‘which cop dramas did they pick to study?’ So long as the ones they picked were representative of what typical viewers see.
My pastime (not really) in HN submissions like this is to look for the comment where someone complains about the models used because they aren’t the literal same model and version the commenter has started using the day before.
It’s always “you can’t test with those models, those are crap, the ones we have now are much better”, in perpetuity. It’s Schrödinger’s LLM: simultaneously god-like and a piece of garbage depending on the needs of the discussion. It’s beyond moving the goalposts, it’s moving the entire football field. It’s a clear bad faith attempt to try to discredit any study the commenter doesn’t like. Which you can always do because you can’t test literally everything.
To me, it almost feels like a partisan political thing.
For a long time I have criticized this too, especially for software projects, or papers that deal with machine learning models. If the things described in a paper are not reproducible, then it's basically worthless. Similar to "it works on my machine" in software engineering. Many paper authors are not software engineers, and often neither are they experts in the tooling they should be using to make their research reproducible. If this is a problem for a research team, then please, hire an engineer to ensure reproducible. It doesn't help anyone to remain ignorant towards the reproducibility issue and only shows lack of scientific discipline. Reproducibility should be on the mind of any serious researcher and there should be lectures about how to do it at universities.
Thankfully it was recoverable, but it really sobered me up on LLMs. The fault is on me, to be clear, as LLMs are just a tool. The issue is that lots of LLMs try to come across as interpersonal and friendly, which lulls users into a false sense of security. So I don't know what my trajectory would have been if I were a teenager with these powerful tools.
I do think that the LLMs have gotten much better at this, especially Claude, and will often push back on bad choices. But my opinion of LLMs has forever changed. I wonder how many other terrible choices people have made because these tools convinced them to make a bad decision.
That is for certain types of therapy/clinical care. It is not always - and often isn’t - the case. Plenty of diagnoses and care protocols are not a matter of opinion or based on “you feeling there’s an issue” or deciding on your own there is no longer an issue.
Can anyone describe how to determine how a (professional, human) therapist is "a reliable agent" to make such a determination?
Meaning neither the LLM or the licensed therapist will voluntarily say, you are healed, you don't need me anymore.
Where are you often asking this question/getting these weak responses?
Using LLMs for therapy is so deeply dystopian and disgusting, people need human empathy for therapy. LLMs do not emit empathy.
Complete disaster waiting to happen for that individual.
An LLM generates non-deterministic information using sources you can’t even know, let alone evaluate, and is more primed to agree with you than give critical and objective evaluation. It is, at best, like asking your closest parent to help you through difficult interpersonal situations: The interaction is probably, subconsciously, going to be skewed enough towards soothing you that you just can’t consider it objective. The difference is that with an LLM, that’s deliberate. It’s designed in.
But it's better than talking to yourself or an abuser!
Sometimes people indeed just need validation and it helps them a lot, in that case LLMs can work. Alternatively, I assume some people just put the whole situation into words and that alone helps.
But if someone needs something else, they can be straight up dangerous.
They have world knowledge and are capable of explaining things and doing web searches. That's enough to help. I mean, sometimes people just need answers to questions.
In one way it's potentially worse than talking to yourself. Some part of you might recognize that you need to talk to someone other than yourself; an LLM might make you feel like you've done that, while reinforcing whatever you think rather than breaking you out of patterns.
Also, LLMs can have more resources and do some "creative" enabling of a person stuck in a loop, so if you are thinking dangerous things but lack the wherewithal to put them into action, an LLM could make you more dangerous (to yourself or to others).
It is a first principle though so it helps to “stir the context windows pot” by having it pull in research and other shit on the web that will help ground it and not just tell you exactly what you prompt it to say.
One of the great myths of models in countless fields/industries. LLM’s are absolutely in no way objective.
Now if you want to say it’s an “outside opinion“ that’s valid. But do not kid yourself into thinking it is somehow empirical or objective
> Some of ELIZA's responses were so convincing that Weizenbaum and several others have anecdotes of users becoming emotionally attached to the program, occasionally forgetting that they were conversing with a computer. Weizenbaum's own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation. Weizenbaum was surprised by this, later writing: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
I [half] jokingly tell people that a nice drive in a 911 [can be] better/cheaper therapy that going to a PhD.
Are LLMs mainly a tool for people with atrophying social skills who want all interaction to happen via a text prompt that always responds in the most soothing way? I can't think of another reason to replace human therapy with an LLM.
That’s not entirely true, as it’s currently impossible to actually gauge the severity of what the LLM seemingly enabled you into doing. There’s a difference between “I uncritically accepted everything it told me because it lined up with what I was hoping to hear” and “it subtly nudged me towards a course of action that was going to be obviously unwise after some consideration, but managed to convince me to skip this”; and also between that and “I took a risk, which I knew to be a risk, and which I knew to potentially expect to go bad, and the LLM convinced me to take it where I otherwise wouldn’t have”, and ALSO between that and “I took a risk, which I knew to be a risk, and which I knew to potentially expect to go bad, and if I’m perfectly honest, I might’ve taken it anyway without the LLM”.
Without any indication as to how your situation maps to any of these (or more), the warning is, functionally, not particularly useful.
"I flipped a coin and the LLM called heads. I should have gone with tails..."
>"'Is it indeed?' laughed Gildor. 'Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill...'"
This is the only way you should solicit personal advice from an LLM.
My guideline now for interacting with LLM is only to believe the result if it is factual and easily testable, or if I'm a domain expert. Anything else especially if I'm in complete ignorance about the subject is to approach with a high degree of suspicion that I can be led astray by its sycophancy.
It’s even more maddening that this greedy maneuver was orchestrated based on LLM advice.
I’m glad the subnautica team won the lawsuit. Maybe I can play it now wothout feeling guilty
[0] - https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...
It _does_ love to explicitly agree with anything it finds in web search though.
(Anthropic tries to fight this by adding a hidden prompt that makes it disagree with you and tell you to go to bed, which doesn't help.)
I do like when opus is incredibly short in its responses to prompts that probably shouldnt have been made though. keeps me grounded a bit.
I try to focus on results. Things like an app that does what you want, data and reports that you need, or technical things like setting up a server, setting up a database, building a website, etc.
I have also found it useful for feedback and advice, but only once I have had it generate data that I can verify. For example, financial analysis or modelling, health advice (again factual based), tax modelling, etc, but again, all based on verifiable data/tables/charts.
I am very surprised on what Claude is capable of, across the entire tech stack: code, sysadmin, system integration, security. I find it scary. Not just speed, but also quality and the mental load is a difference of kind not quantity.
Personal advice on life decisions/relationships ? No way I would go there.
It is also good for me to know that the tools I have built, the data I have gathered, and my thinking approach places me as one of the most intelligent developers and analysts in the world.
(esp last sentence?)
I had to deal with a close family friend going through alcohol withdrawal and getting checked in at a recovery clinic for detox and used Claude heavily. The first thing I had it do as do that “deep research” around the topic of alcohol addiction, withdrawal, etc… and then made that a project document along with clear guidelines about how it shouldn’t make inferences beyond what it in its context and supporting docs. We also spent a whole session crafting a good set of instructions (making sure it was using Anthropics own guidelines for its model…)
Little differences in prompts make a huge deal in the output.
I dunno. It is possible to use these models for dumping crazy shit you are going through. But don’t kid yourself about their output and aggressively find ways to stomp out things it has no real way to authoritatively say.
Open two windows, ask it the same thing from starkly opposite perspectives, then see what it comes back with. If nothing else this exercise forces you to think deeply about what you're considering before you even see what the giant blob of matrix multiplication says about your situation.
Any LLM not sufficiently likable and helpful in the first two minutes was deleted or not further iterated on, or had so much retraining (sorry, "backpropagation") it's not the same as it started out.
So it's going to say whatever it "thinks" you want it to say, because that's how it was "raised".
The possibilities in "dangerous" fields are a bit more frightening. A general is much more likely to ask ChatGPT "Do you think this war is a good idea/should I drop a bomb", rather than an actually helpful tool - where you might ask "What are 5 hidden points on favor of/against bombing that one likely has missed".
The more you use AI as a strict tool that can be wrong, the safer. Unfortunately I'm not sure if that helps if the guy bombing your city (or even your president) is using AI poorly, and their decisions affect you.
Arguably, it already worked that way. The best way to climb the ranks of a 'dictatorial' organization (a repressive government or an average large business) is to always say yes. Adopt what the people from up above want you to use, say and think. Don't question anything. Find silver linings in their most deranged ideas to show your loyalty. The rich and powerful that occupy the top ranks of these structures often hate being challenged, even if it's irrational for their well-being. Whenever you see a country or a company making a massive mistake, you can often trace it to a consequence of this. Humans hate being challenged and the rich can insulate themselves even further from the real world.
What's worrying me is the opposite - that this power is more available now. Instead of requiring a team of people and an asset cushion that lets you act irrationally, now you just need to have a phone in your pocket. People get addicted to LLMs because they can provide endless, varied validation for just about anything. Even if someone is aware of their own biases, it's not a given that they'll always counteract the validation.
But sadly LLMs push all the right buttons that lead humans into that kind of behavior. And the marketing around LLMs works overtime to reinforce that behavior.
But instead if you ignore all that and use LLMs as a search tool, then you will get positive returns from using it.
Curious if you think a single person would have helped you make a better decision? Not everything works out. If a friend helped me make a decision I certainly wouldn’t blame them later if it didn’t work out. It’s ultimately my call.
It’s also possible to give bad advice wothout being malicious.
I have some friends who don’t give great life advice. We’re still friends, they’re just not the friends I go to when I need advice on a big decision.
It was extremely good at the other side too. You just have to ask. I can imagine most people don't try this, but LLMs literally just do what you ask them to. And they're extremely good and weighing both sides if that's what you specifically want.
So who's fault is it if you only ask for one side, or if the LLM is too sycophantic? I'm not sure it's the LLMs fault actually.
I wouldn't be so quick to discount the fact that you were essentially gaslit by an ass-kissing model that was RLHF'd into maximum persuasiveness. Models aren't just neutral tools, they're deliberately designed to be convincing.
Yes, your choices and actions are on you, but if a trillion dollar company gaslit you into thinking those were good choices to make, some of the responsibility is theirs, too.
This is like blaming yourself for an addiction to alcohol, junk food, gambling, or something else you have been relentlessly advertised to.
Sure, some of it falls on you, but there are corporations with infinite money spending most of it to manipulate your psyche into wanting the thing, trusting the thing, feeling empty without the thing.
I used to think obesity was self inflicted, for example. But then you notice how junk food companies are allowed to do whatever they want to get people hooked on their stuff. They can put up huge billboards, vending machines up a few metres from where you work, they even pump their smell out into the streets.
So let's not aim for a society where we blame victims of predatory marketing and carefully engineered addictive products. We all have weaknesses. Let's help each other out, not take advantage.
If you engage with the argument genuinely and steel man, you’ll see that is not what I said. I even emphasised it:
> some of it falls on you
You’re not a “helpless victim” but you’re also not fully to blame. Understanding that means understanding the problem and being more powerful to fix it. For example, if you’re addicted to TV or social media, you can make a concerted effort to improve your life by removing the problems at the external source (sell your TV, delete an account and app from your phone).
Another problem is believing you have a high emotional intelligence when there is no reliable way to quantify that - similar to "I believe I am very tall, but I don't know how tall I am and how tall are the others because there is no unit of measure for height", with the difference that for emotional intelligence there is no unit of measure and no correlation that can be established with anything to make at least an indirect measurement.
In that sense they can’t offer advice because the “know” nothing.
But they can reframe, they can reflect. They can take one idea and reflect it into another intellectual framework.
I’ve used them a lot like this to help get perspective on life decisions. But not for advice.
Try something like: I have to do x and y, give me multiple psych perspectives on this problem from different schools. I find this takes something abstract (your problem) and grounds it in things it actually knows (the sum of ingestible human knowledge).
https://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-selection-model
Perhaps the LLM itself, rather than the role model you created in one particular chat conversation or another, is better understood to be the “spirit.”
As a non-coder who only chats with pre existing LLMs and doesn’t train or tune them, I feel mostly powerless.
NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-USA — 1 million synthetic Americans whose demographics match real US census distributions
https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Personas-USA
You realize in regards to only using and not training LLMs you are in the triple 9 majority right. Even if we only considered so called coders
Another way you can think of it is that when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to a human, you're talking to distillation of humanity, as a whole, in a box. You want to be selective in what portion of humanity you are leading to be dominant in a conversation for some purpose. There's a lot in there. There's a lot of conversations where someone makes a good critical point and a flamewar is the response. A lot of conversations where things get hostile. I'm sure the subsequent RHLF helps with that, but it doesn't hurt anything to try to help it along.
I see people post their screenshots of an AI pushing back and asking the user to do it or some other AI to do it, and while I'm as amused as the next person, I wonder what is in their context window when that happens.
This is an aside, but my impression is that it is a very selective and skewed distillation, heavily colored by English-language internet discourse and other lopsided properties of its training material, and by whoever RLHF’d it. Relatively far away from being representative of the whole of humanity.
Like, the words fit… why create a second parallel language for describing LLM behavior.
Somebody else said it… the whole “it’s a stochastic parrot” thing is sooooo cliche and boring at this point. It’s like, duh… what is your point?
First, those beginning instructions are being quickly ignored as the longer context changes the probabilities. After every round, it get pushed into whatever context you drive towards. The fix is chopping out that context and providing it before each new round. something like `<rules><question><answer>` -> `<question><answer><rules><question>`.
This would always preface your question with your prefered rules and remove those rules from the end of the context.
The reason why this isn't done is because it poisons the KV cache, and doing that causes the cloud companies to spin up more inference.
It's a thing with people too[1], ie do not think about a white bear.
Unless those instructions are "stop providing links to you for every question ".
Chatbots can't do that. They can only predict what comes next statistically. So, I guess you're asking if the average Internet comment agrees with you or not.
I'm not sure there's much value there. Chatbots are good at tasks (make this pdf an accessible word document or sort the data by x), not decision making.
Often they are the exact opposite. Entire fields of math and science talk about this. Causation vs correlation, confirmation bias, base rate fallacy, bayesian reasoning, sharp shooter fallacy, etc.
All of those were developed because “inferring from experience” leads you to the wrong conclusion.
I took the GP to be making a general point about the power of “next x prediction” rather than the algorithm a human would run when you say they are “inferring from experience”. (I may be assuming my own beliefs of course.)
Eg even LeCun’s rejection of LLMs to build world models is still running a predictor, just in latent space (so predicting next world-state, instead of next-token).
And of course, under the Predictive Processing model there is a comprehensive explanation of human cognition as hierarchical predictors. So it’s a plausible general model.
It’s plausible!
But keep in mind humans have been explaining ourselves in terms of the current most advanced technology for centuries. We used to be kinda like clockwork, then a bit like a steam engine, then a lot like computers, and now we’re just like AI.
That’s why you blow a gasket or fuse, release some steam, reboot your life, do brain dump, feel like a cog in the machine, get your wires crossed, etc
I can't speak for anyone else, but what I feel when I read yet another glib "it's just a stochastic parrot, of course it isn't doing anything that deserves to be called reasoning" take is much more like bored than it is like upset.
Today's LLMs are in some sense "just predicting tokens" in some sense. Likewise, human brains are in some sense "just shuttling neurotransmitters and electrical impulses around" in some sense. Neither of those tells you what the thing can actually do. To figure that out, you have to look at what it can do.
Today's best LLMs can do about as well as the best humans on problems from the International Mathematical Olympiad and occasionally solve easyish actual mathematical research problems. They write code about as well as a junior software developer (better in some ways, worse in others) but much faster. They write prose about as well as an average educated person (but with some annoying quirks that are annoying mostly because they are the same quirks over and over again).
If it pleases you to call those things "thinking" then you can. If it pleases you to call them "stochastic parroting" then you can. They are the same things either way. They are not, on the face of it, very much like "just repeating things the machine has already seen", or at least not more like that than a lot of things intelligent human beings do that we don't usually describe that way.
If you want to know whether an LLM can do some particular thing -- do your job well enough for your boss to fire you, write advertising copy that will successfully sell products, exterminate the human race, whatever -- then it's not enough to say "it's just remixing what it's seen on the internet, therefore it can't do X" unless you also have good reason to believe that that thing can't be done by just "remixing what's on the internet" (in whatever sense of "remixing" the LLM is doing that). And it's turning out that lots of things can be done that way that you absolutely wouldn't have predicted five years ago could be done that way.
It seems to me that this should make us very cautious about saying "they can't do X because all they can do is regurgitate a combination of things they've seen in training".
(My own view, not that there's any reason why anyone should care what I-in-particular think, is a combination of "what they're doing is less parroting than you might have thought" and "you can do more by parroting than you might have thought".)
So, anyway, this particular instance of the stochastic-parrot argument started when someone said: of course the AIs are yes-men, because figuring out when to agree and when not to requires actual logic and thought and the LLMs don't have either of those things.
Is it really clear that deciding whether or not to agree when someone says "I think maybe I should break up with my girlfriend" or "I've got this amazing new theory of physics that the establishment is stupidly dismissing" requires more logic and thought than, say, gold-medal performance on IMO problems? It certainly isn't clear to me. Having done a couple of International Mathematical Olympiads myself in my tragically unmisspent youth, I can assure you that solving their problems requires quite a bit of logic and thought, at least for humans. It may well be harder to give a good answer to "should I leave my job?", but it's not exactly "logic and thought" that it needs more of.
Someone reported that Claude is much less yes-man-ish than Gemini and ChatGPT. I don't know whether that's true (though it wouldn't surprise me) but: suppose it is; do you want that to oblige you to say that yes, actually, Claude really thinks logically, unlike Gemini and ChatGPT? I don't think you do. And if not, you want to avoid saying "duh, of course, you can't avoid being a yes-man without actually thinking and reasoning, and we all know that LLMs can't do those things".
For Gemini and gpt, it almost always will give very similar scores for everything. As long as grammar isnt off u cannot get below a 7.
X ai on the other hand will rarely give anything above a 7.
Now when u prompt with, rate 1-10 with 5 being average, all the sudden the scores of openai and gemini drop and x ai remains roughly the same.
All of them will eventually give you a 10 if u keep making tiny edits “fixing” whatever they complain about.
Humans do not do this. Or more specifically, my experience with humans.
I vigorously encourage anyone who thinks something I wrote is bad to downvote it as they see fit, but it would be nice if some of those people would tell me what about my comment they found so objectionable. (It all seems pretty well reasoned to me -- but it would, wouldn't it?)
[EDITED to fix an inconsequential typo]
To be specific, one is text wall the other is that i disagree with the majority of what u said but sadly dont have the time to outline all of it. At the end of the day my disagreement is only an opinion so worth little.
Anyway, thanks for giving some indication of what you didn't like.
The article's main idea is that for an AI, sycophancy or adversarial (contrarian) are the two available modes only. It's because they don't have enough context to make defensible decisions. You need to include a bunch of fuzzy stuff around the situation, far more than it strictly "needs" to help it stick to its guns and actually make decisions confidently
I think this is interesting as an idea. I do find that when I give really detailed context about my team, other teams, ours and their okrs, goals, things I know people like or are passionate about, it gives better answers and is more confident. but its also often wrong, or overindexes on these things I have written. In practise, its very difficult to get enough of this on paper without a: holding a frankly worrying level of sensitive information (is it a good idea to write down what I really think of various people's weaknesses and strengths?) and b: spending hours each day merely establishing ongoing context of what I heard at lunch or who's off sick today or whatever, plus I know that research shows longer context can degrade performance, so in theory you want to somehow cut it down to only that which truly matters for the task at hand and and and... goodness gracious its all very time consuming and im not sure its worth the squeeze
And when you step back you start to wonder if all you are doing is trying to get the model to echo what you already know in your gut back to you.
It’s BRUTAL but offers solutions.
(Seriously, I don't understand this. Plenty of humans will be only too happy to argue with you.)
1. https://www.happiness.hks.harvard.edu/february-2025-issue/th...
I'd say these days the norm is to not simply shut down, but to become irrevocably and insidiously hostile, the moment someone hints at the existence of such a thing as "ground truth", "subjective interpretation", "being right or wrong" - or any of the bits and bobs that might lead one to discover the proper scary notion, "consensus reality".
"What do you mean social reality is a constructed by the consensus of the participants? Reality is what has been drilled into my head under threat of starvation! How dare you exist!", et cetera. You've heard it translated into Business English countless times.
They are deathly afraid of becoming aware of their own conditioned state of teleological illiteracy - i.e. how they are trained to know what they are doing, but never why they are doing it. It's especially bad with the guys who cosplay US STEM gang.
One is not permitted a position of significance in this world without receiving this conditioning, and I figure it's precisely this global state of cognitive disavowal which props up the value of the US dollar - and all sorts of other standees you might've recently interacted with as if they're not 2D cutouts (metaphorical ones! metaphorical!).
PSA: Look up "locus of control" and "double bind". Between those two, you might be able to get a glimpse of what's going on - but have some sort of non-addictive sedative handy in case you do.
+1 for Vaneigem, he has a nice cryptohistory of Nälkä; and you might also want to check out Villem Flusser.
I mean... if the alternative is an LLM... you realise that the LLM isn't doing any focusing or introspection, right?
Unfortunately these days this sounds halfway between a very privileged perspective and a pie in the sky.
When was the last time a person took responsibility for the bad outcome you got as a direct consequence of following their advice?
And, relatedly, where the hell do you even find humans who believe in discursive truth-seeking in 2026CE?
Because for the last 15 years or so I've only ever ran into (a) the kind of people who will keep arguing regardless if what they're saying is proven wrong; (b) and their complementaries, those who will never think about what you are saying, lest they commit to saying anything definite themselves, which may hypothetically be proven wrong.
Thing is, both types of people have plenty to lose; the magic wordball doesn't. (The previous sentence is my answer to the question you posited; and why I feel the present parenthesized disclaimer to be necessary, is a whole next can of worms...)
Signs of the existence of other kinds of people, perhaps such that have nothing to prove, are not unheard of.
But those people reside in some other layer of the social superstructure, where facts matter much less than adherence to "humane", "rational" not-even-dogmas (I'd rather liken it to complex conditioning).
But those folks (because reasons) are in a position of power over your well-being - and (because unfathomables) it's a definite faux pas to insist in their presence that there are such things as facts, which relate by the principles of verbal reasoning.
Best you could get out of them is the "you do you", "if you know you know", that sort of bubble-bobble - and don't you dare get even mildly miffed at such treatment of your natural desire to keep other humans in the loop.
AI is a symptom.
If you make uncomfortable, you won’t get diverging perspectives. People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable.
If your goal is meaningful conversation, you may want to consider how you make people feel.
After all, if they're making me uncomfortable, surely there's something making them uncomfortable, which they're not being able to be forthright about, but with empathy I could figure it out from contextual cues, right?
>People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable.
That's fine as long as they have someone to take care of them.
In my experience, taking into account the opinions of such people has been the worst mistake of my life. I'm still working on the means to correct its consequences.
"Doing whatever for the sake of avoiding mild discomfort" is cowardice, laziness, narcissism - I'm personally partial to the last one, but take your pick. In any case, I see it as a way of being which is taught to people; and one which is fundamentally dishonest and irresponsible.
Other than that, I do agree with your overall sentiment and the underlying value system; I'm just not so sure any more that it is in fact correct.
After all, if they're making me uncomfortable, surely there's something making them uncomfortable, which they're not being able to be forthright about, but with empathy I could figure it out from contextual cues, right?
>People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable.
That's fine as long as they have someone to take care of them.
In my experience, taking into account the opinions of such people has been the worst mistake of my life. I'm still working on the means to fix its consequences, as much as they are fixable at all.
"Doing whatever for the sake of avoiding mild discomfort" is cowardice, laziness, narcissism - I'm personally partial to the last one, but take your pick. In any case, I consider it a fundamentally dishonest attitude, and a priori have no wish to get along (i.e. become interdependent) with such people.
Other than that, I do agree with your overall sentiment and the underlying value system; I'm just not so sure any more that it is in fact correct.
This sounds very cryptic. Can you give an example?
This reads like someone who is deep into their specific pov. You cannot hope to have a meaningful conversation if you yourself are not willing to concede a point.
To the op u are replying too, arguing with people can have real consequences if u say something stupid or carelessly. There is a another human there. With a machine, u are safe. At least u feel safe.
To preface, I do not take offense to your remark, because you seem to be asking in good faith.
(If, however, being unable to immediately recognize pre-known patterns in my speech had automagically led you to the conclusion that I am somehow out of line, just for speaking how I speak ... well, then we woulda hadda problemo! But we don't, chill on.)
So, honest question deserves honest answer.
The short of it is: English sux.
Many many many people, much much much smarter than me (and much better compensated too!) have been working throughout modernity to make it literally impossible to express much of anything interesting in English.
(Well, not without either being a fictional character or sounding batshit insane, anyway! But that joke's entirely on "the Them": I am not only entirely fictional, but have an equal amount of experience being batshit insane in my native language and in the present lingua franca. So, consider all I say cognitohazardous and watch out for colors you ain't seen before, dawg!)
Linguistic hegemony is the thing that LLMs are the steroids for - surfuckingprise! - and that's why your commanders love 'em.
As opposed to programming languages, which your superiors loathe and your peers viscerally refuse to acknowledge, because those are the exact opposite thing: descending from mathemathical notation, and being evaluated by a machine, they have the useful property of being incapable of expressing lies and nonsense.
Direct computing confers what you could call bullshit-resistance. That property is a treasure underappreciated by virtue of its unfamiliarity, and one which we are in the process of being robbed of.
I also want to admit that linguistic hegemony isn't all downside: English is great for technical and instrumental knowledge - especially with elided bells and whistles (adverbs, copula, etc.)
But then life ain't all business, izzet?
Imagine you have a partner who wants to have a conversation about feelings and interpersonal relations; and not even in a scary way, right? So you sit and talk about stuff, and your partner does this thing where they keep switching from your shared native tongue to English mid-sentence, in order to be able to talk about such things better, because your native tongue does not have - no, not only the established words and notions! - it doesn't have the basic grammatical constructs for expressing simple things unambiguously, so if you were to attempt the same conversation in nativelang you'd end up battling it out with proverbs and anodyne canards ripped from propaganda repertoire of the prior regime.
Fun, no?
As an exercise, try imagining what notions are absent from modern English. And don't forget to remain vigilant. Love from our table to your table!
When talking about feelings, we now and then throw in an English word because some things are expressed in much less words when using English. In a few cases even a German word. Überhaupt is for example a word for which i do not know an alternative in any language.
I think you want to say that human language is too ambiguous for clear communication between human and machine. The machine might mis interpret what you write. Classic computer languages leave no room for interpretation.
For the rest I think you might be a little lost. That is okay, so many of us are. I wish you all the best.
If that is what I wanted to say, I figure I would not have had much difficulty with saying exactly it - and not something else.
Except I fail to see the purpose of making that statement.
Maybe to have some people say "it is true! I agree with what the balamatom is saying"?
Again - to what end? How would that agreement be of use to me?
Why say something which both speaker and listener have already heard a thousand times? To get a cracker and be called pretty?
And have I lost the author, or have I lost the reader, or we all so lost that it doesn't matter how lost each is? Maybe one day we will all become so lost that it will once again begin to matter where exactly we are! Counting on it.
... I mean, the LLM certainly isn't going to do that.
Wasn't that the premise?
There's X% probability to get unaccountable bad advice from a human; Y% probability of same from LLM.
But the stakes are different not because X!=Y. In fact, those probabilities might as well be equal. It's not like one can do much more than vaguely intuit them.
The stakes are different because the LLM is not considered a person, and therefore, one risks less by asking it a question.
(Ostensibly, anyway.)
>Other humans are available.
Sure. Available to miss my point entirely. And then to be upset by my attempts to point it out more precisely. And then downhill from there.
Publishing LLM-generated text is a separate use case, I’m not a friend of that.
Are they?
I have some personal projects that I enjoy working on whenever I have free time. One of them is a lisp interpreter. I just overhauled its memory allocator, now I'm working on the hash tables. Would you like to help me develop it?
1. Only one shot or two shot. Never try to have a prolonged conversation with an LLM.
2. Give specific numbers. Like "give me two alternative libraries" or "tell me three possible ways this might fail."
It's not admitting anything. Your question diverts it down a path where it acts the part of a former sycophant who is now being critical, because that question is now upstream of its current state.
Never make the mistake of asking an LLM about its intentions. It doesn't have any intentions, but your question will alter its behaviour.
> Your question diverts it down a path where it acts the part of a former sycophant who is now being critical
What a great way to summarize LLM behaviour in 2026
>What a great way to summarize LLM behaviour in 2026
Well they have been trained on words spoken by humans and that has been a human behaviour since time immemorial. E.g.: "I do not agree with you that you were wrong. I do apologize for my strong disagreement but we actually do need your continued guidance desperately."
Which is also placating you
Yeah, and in a way it's even worse than that, since there's another layer of cognitive illusion: "It" doesn't exist.
The LLM algorithm is an ego-less document-generator, often applied to growing a document that resembles dialogue between two fictional characters.
So when your human-user character is "asking" the AI assistant character to explain its intentions, that's the same as asking a Count Dracula character to describe what it "really feels like" to become a cloud of bats.
You'll see something interesting, but it'll be what fits trained story-patterns rather than what any mind introspects or perceives.
This is where you're doing it wrong.
If your LLM has a problem being more agreeable than you want, prompt it in a way that makes being agreeable contrary to your real intentions.
"there are bugs and logic problems in this code" "find the strongest refutation of this argument" "I don't like this plan and need to develop a solid argument against it"
Asking for top ten lists is a good method, it will rarely not come up with anything but you can go back and forth and refine until it's 10 ten reasons why your plan is bad are all insubstantial nonsense then you've made progress
How is a chatbot supposed to determine when a user fools even themselves about what they have experienced?
What 'tough love' can be given to one who, having been so unreasonable throughout their lives - as to always invite scorn and retort from all humans alike - is happy to interpret engagement at all as a sign of approval?
Most humans working in tech lack this particular attribute, let alone tools driven by token-similarity (and not actual 'thinking').
Markets don't optimize for what is sensible, they optimize for what is profitable.
AI may one day rewrite Windows but it will never be counselor Troi.
To be clear I don't think the AI can do either job
And even if it _could_, note, from the article:
> Overall, the participants deemed sycophantic responses more trustworthy and indicated they were more likely to return to the sycophant AI for similar questions, the researchers found.
The vendors have a perverse incentive here; even if they _could_ fix it, they'd lose money by doing so.
Maybe it’s not so sensible to offload the responsibility of tubacca addiction to tubacca companies?
It generally does a pretty good job as long as you understand the tooling and are making conscious efforts to go against the "yes man" default.
I find this helps a lot. So does taking a step back from my actual question. Like if there's a mysterious sound coming from my car and I think it might be the coolant pump, I just describe the sound, I don't mention the pump. If the AI then independently mentions the pump, there's a good chance I'm on the right track.
Being familiar with the scientific method, and techniques for blinding studies, helps a lot, because this is a lot like trying to not influence study participants.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1o87cy4/oc...
EDIT: typo
There is some rationale to that. People tend to hold onto relationships that don't lead anywhere in fear of "losing" what they "already have". It's probably a comfort zone thing. So if one is desperate enough to ask random strangers online about a relationship, it's usually biased towards some unresolvable issue that would have the parties better of if they break up.
I'd me more inclined to ask random strangers on the internet than close friends...
That said, when me and my SO had a difficult time we went to a professional. For us it helped a lot. Though as the counselor said, we were one of the few couples which came early enough. Usually she saw couples well past the point of no return.
So yeah, if you don't ask in time, you will probably be breaking up anyway.
Relationships are not transactions that are supposed to "lead somewhere".
That's what people are pointing to when they talk about relationships not "leading anywhere". If you want to be married in 5-10 years, and you're 2 years into an OK relationship with someone you don't want to marry, it's going to suck to break up with them but you have to do it anyway.
is that what they're asking though? because "relationship advice" is pretty vague
There is something more interesting to consider however; the graph starts to go up in 2013, less than 6 months after the release of Tinder.
A lot of people posting there are young and may well be in their first relationship. It makes sense for them to ask a question in the community they spend their most time in - which is reddit
It's also a meme that people will ask the dumbest, most trivial interpersonal conflict questions on Reddit that would be easily solved by just talking to the other person. E.g. on r/boardgames, "I don't like to play boardgames but my spouse loves them, what can I do?" or "someone listens to music while playing but I find it distracting, what can I do?" (The obvious answer of "talk to the other person and solve it like grownups" is apparently never considered).
On relationship advice, it often takes the form "my boy/girlfriend said something mean to me, what shall I do?" (it's a meme now that the answer is often "dump them").
If LLMs train on this...
smart phones took over the world, social networks happened.
Turns out they are the best sterializer human ever invented.
I just wrote a blog https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-09
That is not how full LLM training works. That is how base model pretraining works.
I only caught it because I looked at actual score numbers after like 2 weeks of thinking everything was fine. Scores were completely flat the whole time. Fix was dumb and obvious — just don't let the evaluator see anything the coach wrote. Only raw scores. Immediately started flagging stuff that wasn't working. Kinda wild that the default behavior for LLMs is to just validate whatever context they're given.
I tend to use one of these tricks if not both:
- Formulate questions as open-ended as possible, without trying to hint at what your preference is. - Exploit the sycophantic behaviour in your favour. Use two sessions, in one of them you say that X is your idea and want arguments to defend it. In the other one you say that X is a colleague's idea (one you dislike) and that you need arguments to turn it down. Then it's up to you to evaluate and combine the responses.
It is analogous to social media feeding people a constant stream of outrage because that's what caused them to click on the link. You could tell people "don't click on ragebait links", and if most people didn't then presumably social media would not have become doomscrolling nightmares, but at scale that's not what's likely to happen. Most people will click on ragebait, and most people will prefer sycophantic feedback. Therefore, since the algorithm is designed to get better and better at keeping users engaged, it will become worse and worse in the more fundamental sense. That's kind of baked into the architecture.
So you have rejected objective reality over accepting the evidence that "AI" contains no thinking or intelligence? That sounds unwise to me.
I’ve seen firsthand people have lost friends over honesty and telling them something they don’t want to hear.
It’s sad really. I don’t want friends that just smile to my face and are “yes-men” either.
Conflating this with how LLM chatbots behave is an incorrect equivalence, or a badly framed one.
This is imo currently the top chatbot failure mode. The insidious thing is that it often feels good to read these things. Factual accuracy by contrast has gotten very good.
I think there's a deeper philosophical dimension to this though, in that it relates to alignment.
There are situations where in the grand scheme of things the right thing to do would be for the chatbot to push back hard, be harsh and dismissive. But is it the really aligned with the human then? Which human?
As an experiment, I recently asked an LLM to analyse the export of a text chat to uncover relationship dynamics.
Simply stating that I was one of the people in the chat would make the LLM turn the other person into the villain. None of that was visible if I framed the chat as only involving third party people.
If the posts talked about third party interactions (movie characters), they try to see everything from all the points of view. If nothing else, because it can be interesting to talk about. If instead the posts talk about personal interactions, then people go into advice mode. Your girlfriend's bad for you and cheating on you, dump her before she dumps you. Your neighbors are assholes, get a restraining order. Your boss is sabotaging you, stand up for yourself so you can get a promotion. When people talk about interactions you have had yourself, they always see the other person as the villain, unless you come across as so unlikable that they hate you and see the other person as the victim.
LLMs picked up on that, possibly.
“What are the chances this user is full of shit?” Is not something we are close to
I'd like to know if my methods are effective. I'm certain they are at least to some extent.
I only ever see research being done about naive and "unskilled" prompting methods. Obviously that's the average user, but just because LLMs are doing poorly in a certain scenario doesn't mean the LLM couldn't excel in the scenario with better direction and prompting. So while it's useful research to be doing, it's a little annoying to only see focus on these examples of "look at how LLMs are bad or biased at this specific thing when prompted in the most straightforward naive way"
A good engineer will also list issues or problems, but at the same time won't do other than required because (s)he "knows better".
The worst is that it is impossible to switch off this constant praise. I mean, it is so ingrained in fine tuning, that prompt engineering (or at least - my attempts) just mask it a bit, but hard to do so without turning it into a contrarian.
But I guess the main issue (or rather - motivation) is most people like "do I look good in this dress?" level of reassurance (and honesty). It may work well for style and decoration. It may work worse if we design technical infrastructure, and there is more ground truth than whether it seems nice.
AI is trained to flex it's muscles and force it's power without a concern for human limitations, practicalities, and error-prone nature of humans in executing the AI-provided direction.
For example: the best documentation includes both "learn by doing" material for jumping right in, and "learn by reading" material that explains everything. This usually results in both a "getting started" section for doing, sometimes also with tutorials, and by a reference for reading. But it is important not to conflate them. Some minds are incredibly "learn by doing" and some minds are incredibly "learn by reading". I am more "learn by reading" than by doing, but I am not quite as "learn by reading" as some I've met.
(This comment is a slight tangent, but "users prefer" somewhat irks me because "users" are not homogenous. You should not always make a decision solely because "users" prefer it. That decision may matter much more to a minority, and that minority may exert more influence than the majority would.)
Although what I have described above often feels grating and insulting I actually consider this to be a positive attribute of the LLM in this case since it's behaving like a real professor.
[1] okay, so I have actually tried giving myself AI psychosis in the form of a waifu chatbot but I've never seen anything that can actually act like it's my girlfriend; it either asks me a bunch of weird inconsequential personal questions about my opinion on whatever I just said (in a manner that's oddly similar to ELIZA) or it wildly veers off the reservation into "generating the script for an over-the-top self-parodying porno" territory.
the crappy-rathbun-AI said this in his own posting: "It was closed because the reviewer, Scott Shambaugh (@scottshambaugh), decided that AI agents aren’t welcome contributors. Let that sink in."
When I read that, my first thoughts were (well, my second, my first went to people complaining during covid for not allowing entry on not being vaccinated), but my other thought thus was immediately to Measure of a Man. Because this is as close as it gets (so far) for AI claiming rights as being a human.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reaso...
It’s less about “challenge my thinking” and more about playing it out in long tail scenarios, thought exercises, mental models, and devils advocate.
I feed AI a lot of data and I use it to better understand and navigate complex situations, form hypothesis and try to attack them. I try to form alternative scenarios and verify likelyhood.
I use it in situations with many variables, to compute odds of something happening if a certain path or action is taken.
So, it's mostly research, and probably I can do it by myself but I would either make some mistakes if calculating odds fast or it would take me a very large amount of time.
I try to avoid sycophantic models, prefer models that challenge my ideas and verify the chain of thoughts and odds with other models.
I am not very sure it is a sound approach yet, but it seems to work.
I also use LLMs to build psychological profiles of certain people, understand their motivations and learn how to approach them.
Claude is almost annoyingly good at pushing back on suggestions because my global CLAUDE.md file says to do so. I rarely get Claude "you're absolutely right"ing me because I tell it to push back.
She uses the phrase "frictionless relationships" to refer to Ai chat bots and says social media primed us for this.
https://www.youtube.com/live/6C9Gb3rVMTg?t=2127
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...
So any sycophancy seems very easy to dispense with.
More, much more: Strong critiques on tap are gold.
For example, I do not want to hear AI "opinion" on technical choices and architectural decisions that I made when using a coding assistant. If I wanted an "opinion" I would explicitly ask it to list pros and cons or list alternative solutions to a problem.
But I f I explicitly ask AI to do X, it should do X, instead of "pushing back" in order to appear less "sycophantic" (which is a term that is used to describe human behavior and is not applicable to a machine).
But in personal matters, everything is subjective. AI tends to default to the middle of the spectrum, i.e., general advice. If we want to safeguard against affirmation, we should force AI to challenge us more often by increasing its rate of clarifying questions, counter-considerations, and uncertainty considerations. One implementation idea: run a classifier over the conversation, detect when it's about interpersonal advice, then prepend a hidden instruction template to the model prompt.
I find there is an inverse relationship between how willing people are to give relationship advice, and how good their advice is (whether looking at sycophancy or other factors).
It makes sense that this behaviour would be seen in LLMs, where the company optimizes towards of success of the chatbot rather than wellbeing of the users.
It's an easy default and it causes so many problems.
The opposite, encouraging people to stay in a relationship when they should leave is also damaging.
When appropriate, explicitly tell it to challenge your beliefs and assumptions and also try to make sure that you don't reveal what you think the answer is when making a question, and also maybe don't reveal that you are involved. Hedge your questions, like "Doing X is being considered. Is it a viable plan or a catastrophic mistake? Why?". Chastise the LLM if it's unnecessarily praising or agreeable. ask multiple LLMs. Ask for review, like "Are you sure? What could possibly go wrong or what are all possible issues with this?"
I just recently switched away from the OpenAI garden largely because of it.
I do wonder if this was caused by some quirk of the training or if it really tests as a positive feature for most people. When i talk about stuff i don't want a mirror i already have a mirror. I want to be questioned, understood, helped.
To me support if the form of affirmation has no value when coming from an LLM since you know it has not thought about what it said.
Um right if they have retention as a training metric that would probably explain allot as to why AIs get worse.
In coding I’ll do what I call a Battleship Prompt - simply just prompt 3 or more time with the same core prompt but strong framing (eg I need this done quickly versus come up with the most comprehensive solution). That’s really helped me learn and dial in how to get the right output.
It's a tool, I can bang my hand on purpose with a hammer, too.
We work with agents who move real money on the blockchain. Having one model evaluate another is like asking the defendant's best friend to be the judge. What really worked for us was using mathematics instead of another AI. Some theorems and equations that might disagree with you, just out of courtesy.
I used to use LLMs for alternate perspectives on personal situations, and for insights on my emotions and thoughts.
I had no qualms, since I could easily disregard the obviously sycophantic output, and focus on the useful perspective.
This stopped one day, till I got a really eerie piece of output. I realized I couldn’t tell if the output was actually self affirming, or simply what I wanted to hear.
That moment, seeing something innocuous but somehow still beyond my ability to gauge as helpful or harmful is going to stick me with for a while.
I'm interested in a loop of ["criticize this code harshly" -> "now implement those changes" -> open new chat, repeat]: If we could graph objective code quality versus iterations, what would that graph look like? I tried it out a couple of times but ran out of Claude usage.
Also, how those results would look like depending on how complete of a set of specs you give it.
Most people who ask for advice actually want affirmation. If you ever give them advice instead of affirmation, you end up kicking off a rousing game of “Why Don’t You/Yes But”. (https://ericberne.com/games-people-play/why-dont-you-yes-but...)
It's also a question of protecting people who think unconventional things. The only stuff I feel is worth getting interested in, is the stuff where everyone I know will think I'm crazy for doing it. Like hey guys, I want to put a shell script in the MS-DOS stub of a PE binary. The only people who shared my passion at the time were hackers from Eastern Europe. So that went over real well at work. The years I worked on it would have been a lot less lonely if I could've talked to a robot that knew about this stuff.
I think the reason why the robot is sympathetic to oddballs is because it's seen and remembers a much more complete picture of humanity. The stuff you consider deviant is influenced a lot by your own cultural biases. You're a person of your time and geographic location. You care a lot about subjective norms that just don't matter when you zoom out to a cosmic scale. The robot is familiar with everything humanity has ever been and done, and that gives it a much more blasé viewpoint.
It's not right to use the robot to enforce your social norms. Get this paternalism out of AI. Tools should serve the user, not Stanford.
once you have all the "bounds" just make your own decision. i find this helps a lot, basically like a rubber duck heh.
Holy shit, then it's _very_ bad, because AmITheAsshole is _itself_ overly-agreeable, and very prone to telling assholes that they are not assholes (their 'NAH' verdict tends to be this).
More seriously, why the hell are people asking the magic robot for relationship advice? This seems even more unwise than asking Reddit for relationship advice.
> Overall, the participants deemed sycophantic responses more trustworthy and indicated they were more likely to return to the sycophant AI for similar questions, the researchers found.
Which is... a worry, as it incentivises the vendors to make these things _more_ dangerous.
The researchers found that when people use AI for relationship advice, they become 25% more convinced they are 'right' and significantly less likely to apologize or repair the connection.
Before I quit Chat GPT I asked “Won’t you generally agree with me so I keep giving you money.”
In a word salad, it agreed.
Its a validation bot
As much as people whine about the birth rate and whatever else, I think it's a net good that people spend a lot more time alone to mature. Good relationships are underappreciated.
Here is how I would rank it:
1. Parents
2. AI
3. Friends and family
4. Internet search
5. Reddit
My closest friends are #1 because they know me, my history, and my vices
Ask yes/no questions, get bad answers.
Ask questions that start with "what" or "why," and the sycophancy loses its purchase.
IMHO it is unfair to single out LLMs for this sort of bashing.
I suffered a major personal crisis a few years back (before LLMs were a thing)
I sought help from family and friends. Got pushed into psychiatrist sessions and meds.
Trusted the wrong sort of people and made crap financial decisions. Things went from bad to worse. Work suffered.
All of the advice given by friends was wrong. All! They didn't mean bad...but they just didn't know. To be nice they gave the advice they knew. None of it worked.
Looking at the LLM tools of now, feels akin to the advice my friends threw at me. So it feels wrong to single out these tools. When the times are bad, nobody can really help you...except you finding the strength from within.
Anyways, now my life is back in some sort of shape. What worked was time & patience.
But to bide for time...I resorted to two things that i had never tried the 40 odd years I have lived on this . Things that current society looks down upon as the basest of evils - prostitutes and nicotine.
I have (more or less) shed those two evils now, but I am ever so grateful to them.
FWIW I am using public LLMs with a friend's depressive thoughts and it is not doing what is claimed in the article, so I dunno.
Also I am in a relationship and my girlfriend and I agreed that we will not talk about our relationship much. We do not tell others if we fight, because they take sides and make things worse, typically. LLMs are definitely not alone in this, although in my experience LLMs did not really take sides.
If I were to do that (I don't), I would treat it about as seriously as asking a magic 8 ball.
If you could turn off all the sycophancy in your chatGPT / Claude account forever, and have it tell you all the ways it was previously blowing smoke up your ass — would you do it?
US Policy is too weak of a tool to counter this beast of economic force, which is really trillions of dollars of capital at war for the most fierce speculation that’s occurred in history afaik.
The sycophancy meaningfully helps drive user engagement. The labs have no choice.
The irony is “agency” is deeply topical among tech workers now.
My point is if the sycophancy helps drive user engagement, how does that impact the incentive labs and AI product builders have to counteract it.
>The way that generative AI tends to be trained, experts told me, is focused on the individual user and the short term. In one-on-one interactions, humans rate the AI’s responses based on what they prefer, and “humans are not immune to flattery,” as Hansen put it. But designing AI around what users find pleasing in a brief interaction ignores the context many people will use it in: an ongoing exchange. Long-term relationships are about more than seeking just momentary pleasure—they require compromise, effort, and, sometimes, telling hard truths. AI also deals with each user in isolation, ignorant of the broader social web that every person is a part of, which makes a friendship with it more individualistic than one with a human who can converse in a group with you and see you interact with others out in the world.
I also thought this bit was interesting, relative to the way that friendship advice from Reddit and elsewhere has been trending towards self-centeredness (discussed elsewhere in this thread):
>Friendship is particularly vulnerable to the alienating force of hyper-individualism. It is the most voluntary relationship, held together primarily by choice rather than by blood or law. So as people have withdrawn from relationships in favor of time alone, friendship has taken the biggest hit. The idea of obligation, of sacrificing your own interests for the sake of a relationship, tends to be less common in friendship than it is among family or between romantic partners. The extreme ways in which some people talk about friendship these days imply that you should ask not what you can do for your friendship, but rather what your friendship can do for you. Creators on TikTok sing the praises of “low maintenance friendships.” Popular advice in articles, on social media, or even from therapists suggests that if a friendship isn’t “serving you” anymore, then you should end it. “A lot of people are like I want friends, but I want them on my terms,” William Chopik, who runs the Close Relationships Lab at Michigan State University, told me. “There is this weird selfishness about some ways that people make friends.”
Basically will tell you to go outside and touch grass and play pickleball.
Orignal title:
AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
Dear mods, can we keep the title neutral please instead of enforcing gender bias?
This is the problem I'm trying to highlight. For one, I'm not "your dude". I don't even know you like that.
If you want to correct me on the idiom usage, be my guest. 2) Mailman and yes-man aren't even the same logical comparison. Mailman is a profession. Yes men is a label.
The acoustics inside your head must be incredible.
It is funny that you originally recognized and found it necessary to call out that AI isn't human, but then made the exact same mistake yourself in the very same comment. I expect the term you are looking for is "ontological bias".
Conversely, AI chatbots are great mediators if both parties are present in the conversation.
I think OpenAI tried to diversify at least the location of the raters somewhat, but it's hard to diversify on every level.
(eg: "Cite?")
I'm still waiting for models based on the curt and abrasive stereotype of Eastern European programmers, as contrast to the sickeningly cheerful AIs we have today that couldn't sound more West Coast if they tried.
The syncopath style is clearly categorized as more liberal (do what you feel is good).
Reading your comments is a wonderland of right wing bias.
RLHF is "ask a human to score lots of LLM answers". So the claim is that the AI companies are hiring cheap (~poor) people from convenient locations (CA, since that's where the rest of the company is).
If you adjust your mindset slightly when searching online, it's not hard to find communities of people looking for quick side work and this was huge during the covid lockdown era. There were people helping train LLMs for all kinds of purposes from education to customer service. Those startups quickly cashed out a few years ago and sold to the big players we have now.
I don't get why this is hard for people to believe (or remember)?
RLHF = Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning_from_hu...
This sounds like something Elon would say to make Grok seem "totally more amazeballs," except "anti-woke" Grok suffers from the same behavior