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Sycophancy in GPT-4o

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Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#361

Post by jjk7 »

drakonka wrote: post #234
yard2010 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like saying to someone who hates the internet in 2003 good news you don't have to use it like ever

Not really. AI will be ubiquitous of course, but humans who will offer advice (friends, strangers, therapists) will always be a thing. Nobody is forcing this guy to type his problems into ChatGPT.

Surely AI will only make the loneliness epidemic even worse?

We are already seeing AI-reliant high schoolers unable to reason, who's to say they'll still be able to empathize in the future?

Also, with the persistent lack of psychiatric services, I guarantee at some point in the future AI models will be used to (at least) triage medical mental health issues.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#362

Post by thrance »

dsubburam wrote: post #357
dev0p wrote: post #176

As an engineer, I need AIs to tell me when something is wrong or outright stupid. I'm not seeking validation, I want solutions that work. 4o was unusable because of this, very glad to see OpenAI walk back on it and recognise their mistake. Hopefully they learned from this and won't repeat the same errors, especially considering the devastating effects of unleashing THE yes-man on people who do not have the mental cap…

Another way to say this is truth matters and should have primacy over e.g. agreeability. Anthropic used to talk about constitutional AI. Wonder if that work is relevant here.

Alas, we live in a post-truth world. Many are pissed at how the models are "left leaning" for daring to claim climate change is real, or that vaccines don't cause autism.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#363

Post by plaguuuuuu »

clysm wrote: post #263
simonw wrote: 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...

Absolute bull. The writing style is exactly the same between the “prompt” and “response”. Its faked.

FWIW grok also breathlessly opines the sheer genius and creativity of shit on a stick

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#364

Post by sharemywin »

whatnow37373 wrote: post #108

Wow - 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…

but what if I want an a*s kissing assistant? Now, I have to go back to paying good money to a human again.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#365

Post by plaguuuuuu »

NiloCK wrote: post #277
aembleton wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

On the other hand, responses can be kind of chaotic. Adding in a token somewhere can sometimes flip things unpredictably.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#366

Post by JohnMakin »

Heh, I sort of noticed this - I was working through a problem I knew the domain pretty well and was just trying to speed things up, and got a super snarky/arrogant response from 4o "correcting" me with something that I knew was 100% wrong. When I corrected it and mocked its overly arrogant tone, it seemed to react to that too. In the last little while corrections like that would elicit an overly profuse apology and praise, this seemed like it was kind of like "oh, well, ok"

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#367

Post by layer8 »

Grimblewald wrote: post #294
d1sxeyes wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For us habitual users of em-dashes, it is saddening to have to think twice about using them lest someone think we are using an LLM to write…

Its about the actual character - if it's a minus sign, easily accessible and not frequntly autocorrected to a true em dash - then its likely human. I'ts when it's the unicode character for an em dash that i start going "hmm"

Us habitual users of em dashes have no trouble typing them, and don’t think that emulating it with hyphen-minus is adequate. The latter, by the way, is also different typographically from an actual minus sign.

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#368

Post by layer8 »

jillyboel wrote: post #199
d1sxeyes wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For us habitual users of em-dashes, it is saddening to have to think twice about using them lest someone think we are using an LLM to write…

Most keyboards don't have an em-dash key, so what do you expect?

Mobile keyboards have them, desktop systems have keyboard shortcuts to enter them. If you care about typography, you quickly learn those. Some of us even set up a Compose key [0], where an em dash might be entered by Compose ‘3’ ‘-’.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

Re: Sycophancy in GPT-4o

#369

Post by alganet »

alganet wrote: post #67
josephg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent Lex Friedman podcast episode where they interviewed a few people at Anthropic. One woman (I don't know her name) seems to be in charge of Claude's personality, and her job is to figure out answers to questions exactly like this. She said in the podcast that she wants claude to respond to most questions like a "good friend". A good friend would be supportive, but still push back when you're making b…

I don't want _her_ definiton of a friend answering my questions. And for fucks sake I don't want my friends to be scanned and uploaded to infer what I would want. Definitely don't want a "me" answering like a friend. I want no fucking AI. It seems these AI people are completely out of touch with reality.

As I said before: useless.
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