21–30 of 32 posts
In my job I do it all the time; people ask for stuff and I often spend a lot of time on clarifying questions, the most fundamental of which is "Are you sure this is what you want?"
These experiments are a bit expensive to run because you are forced to read all the responses to judge repudiation. Sometimes it is subtle.
Also, behavior changes with the exact wording of the question.
I was thinking through a coding architecture issue and did a google search a few days ago on my phone and one of the ideas it gave me was really useful so I left the browser open. Of course when I went to look at it again today the page reloaded and the results weren't the same or as good. So I tried the same search on my desktop and it was even worse.
I am seriously tired of every other paragraph I read ending in an It isn't just X, it's Y. I'm sure there is something insightful in between this slop but to the author: Please write using your own voice, if I wanted ChatGPT's take on it I would ask.
me stopping reading
It was a long time ago, Claude 3 or maybe ChatGPT's v3. It felt so dehumanizing that I never tried again.
It didn't seem like trained behavior though, it felt much like hardcoded behavior.
There isn’t a mind to change. Unfortunately the article is slop. Too bad, won’t read the rest. I wish there was a tag or something we could put on headlines to avoid giving views to slop.
The article posits that sycophancy is inherent to how models are trained. I think there's a simpler explanation. Every leaked system prompt from every model pretty much includes instructions to "be helpful," and the models are trained to be assistants, not just general knowledge repositories or research tools. My hunch is that's the core of the problem -- the system prompt.
The article posits that sycophancy is inherent to how models are trained. I think there's a simpler explanation. Every leaked system prompt from every model pretty much includes instructions to "be helpful," and the models are trained to be assistants, not just general knowledge repositories or research tools. My hunch is that's the core of the problem -- the system prompt.
My prompts always contain the phrase 'no sycophancy'. The results are more direct.