201–210 of 560 posts
I've spent a lot of time trying to get LLM to generate things in a specific way, the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" When working on art projects, my trick is to specifically give all feedback constructively, carefully avoiding framing things in terms of the inverse or parts to remove.
..people do that too
I'm pretty sure they want it kissing people's asses because it makes users feel good and therefore more likely to use the LLM more. Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans) wouldn't like to use it as much. Just a hypothesis.
Genuine people personalities FTW.
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I have this same problem. I’ve added a bunch of instructuons to try and stop ChatGPT being so sycophantic, and now it always mentions something about how it’s going to be ‘straight to the point’ or give me a ‘no bs version’. So now I just have that as the intro instead of ‘that’s a sharp observation’
Any time you're fighting the training + system prompt with your own instructions and prompting the results are going to be poor, and both of those things are heavily geared towards being a cheery and chatty assistant.
I’ve gotten good results so far not by giving custom instructions, but by choosing the pre-baked “robot” personality from the dropdown. I suspect this changes the system prompt to something without all the “please be a cheery and chatty assistant”.
"You're absolutely right" (song) https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mep2jo/youre_abs...
I've spent a lot of time trying to get LLM to generate things in a specific way, the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" When working on art projects, my trick is to specifically give all feedback constructively, carefully avoiding framing things in terms of the inverse or parts to remove.
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I'm more reminded of Tom Scott's talk at the Royal Institution "There is no Algorithm for Truth"[0]. A lot of what you're talking about is the ability to detect Truth, or even truth! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU
> I'm more reminded of Tom Scott's talk at the Royal Institution "There is no Algorithm for Truth"[0]. Isn't there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
I've spent a lot of time trying to get LLM to generate things in a specific way, the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" When working on art projects, my trick is to specifically give all feedback constructively, carefully avoiding framing things in terms of the inverse or parts to remove.
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Sure but different people have different preferences. Some people mourn replacement of GPT4 with 5 because 5 has way less of a bubbly personality.
There is evidence from Reddit that particularly women used GPT-4o as their AI "boyfriend". I think that's unhealthy behavior and it is probably net positive that GPT-5 doesn't do that anymore.
This applies to so many AIs. I don't want a bubbly sycophant. I don't want a fake personality or an anime avatar. I just want a helpful assistant. I also don't get wanting to talk to an AI. Unless you are alone, that's going to be irritating for everyone else around.
I want an AI modeled after short-tempered stereotypical Germans or Eastern Europeans, not copying the attitude of non-confrontational Californians that say “dude, that’s awesome!” a dozen times a day. And I mean that unironically.
For reference, see how Linus Torvalds was criticized for trying to protect the world's most important open source project from weaponized stupidity at the cost of someone experiencing minor emotional damage.
I'm starting to think this is a deeper problem with LLMs that will be hard to solve with stylistic changes. If you ask it to never say "you're absolutely right" and always challenge, then it will dutifully obey, and always challenge - even when you are, in fact, right. What you really want is "challenge me when I'm wrong, and tell me I'm right if I am" - which seems to be a lot harder. As another example, one common…
It's a really hard problem to solve! You might think you can train the AI to do it in the usual fashion, by training on examples of the AI calling out errors, and agreeing with facts, and if you do that—and if the AI gets smart enough—then that should work. If. You. Do. That. Which you can't, because humans also make mistakes. Inevitably, there will be facts in the 'falsehood' set—and vice versa. Accordingly, the AI…