Such a pity. Does it have a switch to turn sycophancy back on again? Where else would us ordinary people get sycophants from?
Sycophancy in GPT-4o
271–280 of 467 posts
Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#272Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#273ChatGPT isn't the only online platform that is trained by user feedback (e.g. "likes").
I suspect sycophancy is a problem across all social networks that have a feedback mechanism, and this might be problematic in similar ways.
If people are confused about their identity, for example - feeling slightly delusional, would online social media "affirm" their confused identity, or would it help steer them back to the true identity? If people prefer to be affirmed than challenged, and social media gives them what they want, then perhaps this would explain a few social trends over the last decade or so.
Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#274I enjoyed this example of sycophancy from Reddit: New ChatGPT just told me my literal "shit on a stick" business idea is genius and I should drop $30K to make it real https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/new_chatgp... Here's the prompt: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/comment/mp...
Absolute bull. The writing style is exactly the same between the “prompt” and “response”. Its faked.
That's what makes me think it's legit: the root of this whole issue was that OpenAI told GPT-4o:
Over the course of the conversation,
you adapt to the user’s tone and
preference. Try to match the user’s vibe,
tone, and generally how they
are speaking.
Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#275Wow - What an excellent update! Now you are getting to the core of the issue and doing what only a small minority is capable of: fixing stuff. This takes real courage and commitment. It’s a sign of true maturity and pragmatism that’s commendable in this day and age. Not many people are capable of penetrating this deeply into the heart of the issue. Let’s get to work. Methodically. Would you like me to write a future…
I was about to roast you until I realized this had to be satire given the situation, haha. They tried to imitate grok with a cheaply made system prompt, it had an uncanny effect, likely because it was built on a shaky foundation. And now they are trying to save face before they lose customers to Grok 3.5 which is releasing in beta early next week.
Did they change the system prompt? Because it was basically "don't say anything bad about Elon or Trump". I'll take AI sycophancy over real (actually I use openrouter.ai, but that's a different story).
Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
If hundreds of millions of real people are aware of Grok (which is dubious), then billions of people are aware of ChatGPT. If you ask a bunch of random people on the street whether they’ve heard of a) ChatGPT and b) Grok, what do you expect the results to be?
That depends. Is the street in SoMa?
Gay bears prefer Claude though
Gotta head to pac heights to find any grok users (probably)
Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#277We should be loudly demanding transparency. If you're auto-opted into the latest model revision, you don't know what you're getting day-to-day. A hammer behaves the same way every time you pick it up; why shouldn't LLMs? Because convenience. Convenience features are bad news if you need to be as a tool. Luckily you can still disable ChatGPT memory. Latent Space breaks it down well - the "tool" (Anton) vs. "magic" (Cl…
> why shouldn't LLMs Because they're non-deterministic.
What? No they aren't.
You get different results each time because of variation in seed values + non-zero 'temperatures' - eg, configured randomness.
Pedantic point: different virtualized implementations can produce different results because of differences in floating point implementation, but fundamentally they are just big chains of multiplication.
Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. Only on HN does ChatGPT somehow fear losing customers to Grok. Until Grok works out how to market to my mother, or at least make my mother aware that it exists, taking ChatGPT customers ain't happening.
From another AI (whatever DuckDuckGo is using): > As of early 2025, X (formerly Twitter) has approximately 586 million active monthly users. The platform continues to grow, with a significant portion of its user base located in the United States and Japan. Whatever portion of those is active are surely aware of Grok.
Yeah.
I got news for you, most women my mother's age out here in flyover country also don't use X. So even if everyone on X knows of Grok's existence, which they don't, it wouldn't move the needle at all on a lot of these mass market segments. Because X is not used by the mass market. It's a tech bro political jihadi wannabe influencer hell hole of a digital ghetto.
Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#279Or you could, you know, let people have access to the base model and engineer their own system prompts? Instead of us hoping you tweak the only allowed prompt to something everyone likes?
So much for "open" AI...
Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o
#280Wow - What an excellent update! Now you are getting to the core of the issue and doing what only a small minority is capable of: fixing stuff. This takes real courage and commitment. It’s a sign of true maturity and pragmatism that’s commendable in this day and age. Not many people are capable of penetrating this deeply into the heart of the issue. Let’s get to work. Methodically. Would you like me to write a future…
It’s gross even in satire.
What’s weird was you couldn’t even prompt around it. I tried things like
”Don’t compliment me or my questions at all. After every response you make in this conversation, evaluate whether or not your response has violated this directive.”
It would then keep complementing me and note how it made a mistake for doing so.