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
I think people really have a hard time understanding a sycophant can be contrarian. But a yesman can say yes by saying noWhat 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.
(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?
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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?