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Sycophancy in GPT-4o

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Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#321

I haven’t used ChatGPT in a good while, but I’ve heard people mentioning how good Chat is as a therapist. I didn’t think much of it and thought they just where impressed by how good the llm is at talking, but no, this explains it!

Peopled like elizer for that, so I don’t think that is a good metric

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#322

I feel like this has been going on for long before the most recent update. Especially when using voice chat, every freaking thing I said was responded to with “Great question! …” or “Oooh, that’s a good question”. No it’s not a “good” question, it’s just a normal follow up question I asked, stop trying to flatter me or make me feel smarter. I’d be one thing if it saved that “praise” (I don’t need an LLM to praise me,…

It’s not a bad default to go to when asked a question by humans

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#323
post #20

I 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...

It's funny how in even the better runs, like this one [1], the machine seems to bind itself to taking the assertion of market appeal at face value. It's like, "if the humans think that poop on a stick might be an awesome gag gift, well I'm just a machine, who am I to question that".

I would think you want the reply to be like: I don't get it. Please, explain. Walk me through the exact scenarios in which you think people will enjoy receiving fecal matter on a stick. Tell me with a straight face that you expect people to Instagram poop and it's going to go viral.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/comment/mp...

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.

I'm not reading most conversations on Outlook or Word, so explain how they do it on reddit and other sites? Are you suggesting they draft comments in Word and then copy them over?

I don’t think there’s a need to use Word. On iOS, I can trivially access those characters—just hold down the dash key in the symbols part of the keyboard. You can also get the en-dash that way (–) but as discussed it’s less useful in English.

I don’t know if it works on the Finnish keyboard, but when I switch to another Scandinavian language it’s still working fine.

On macOS, option-dash will give you an en-dash, and option-shift-dash will give you an em-dash.

It’s fantastic that just because some people don’t know how to use their keyboards, all of a sudden anyone else who does is considered a fraud.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only AI enthusiasts know about Grok, and only some dedicated subset of fans are advocating for it. Meanwhile even my 97 year old grandfather heard about ChatGPT.

First mover advantage. This won't change. Same as Xerox vs photocopy. I use Grok myself but talk about ChatGPT is my blog articles when I write something related to LLM.

First mover advantage tends to be a curse for modern tech. Of the giant tech companies, only Apple can claim to be a first mover -- they all took the crown from someone else.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.

I'm not reading most conversations on Outlook or Word, so explain how they do it on reddit and other sites? Are you suggesting they draft comments in Word and then copy them over?

Fair point! I am talking about when people receive Outlook emails or Word docs that contain em-dashes, then assume it came from ChatGPT. You are right: If you are typing "plain text in a box" on the Reddit website, the incidence of em-dashes should be incredibly low, unless the sub-Reddit is something about English grammar.

Follow-up question: Do any mobile phone IMEs (input method editors) auto-magically convert double dashes into em-dashes? If yes, then that might be a non-ChatGPT source of em-dashes.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#327

We 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…

I spend $20/month on ChatGPT. I'm not going to loudly anything. Relax and modify your custom prompt. You'll make it through this, I promise.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is anyone actually using grok on a day to day? Does an OpenAI even consider it competition. Last I checked a couple weeks ago grok was getting better but still not a great experience and it’s too childish.

I use both, grok and chatgpt on a daily basis. They have different strenghts. Most of the time I prefer chatgpt, bit grok is FAR better answering questions about recent events or collecting data. In the second usecase I combine both: collect data about stuff with grok, copy-paste CSV to chatgpt to analyzr and plot.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.

I'm not reading most conversations on Outlook or Word, so explain how they do it on reddit and other sites? Are you suggesting they draft comments in Word and then copy them over?

Although I’m an outlier, Compose Key makes typing them trivial.
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