WTF is "yes-men"?
Orignal title:
AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
Dear mods, can we keep the title neutral please instead of enforcing gender bias?
AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
41–50 of 684 posts
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#42Maybe it's not so sensible to offload the responsibility of clear thinking to AI companies? How is a chatbot supposed to determine when a user fools even themselves about what they have experienced? What 'tough love' can be given to one who, having been so unreasonable throughout their lives - as to always invite scorn and retort from all humans alike - is happy to interpret engagement at all as a sign of approval?
> Maybe it's not so sensible to offload the responsibility of clear thinking to AI companies? Markets don't optimize for what is sensible, they optimize for what is profitable.
It's not market driven. AI is ludicrously unprofitable for nearly all involved.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#43There are plenty of sycophantic humans around, especially with regard to relationship advice. I find there is an inverse relationship between how willing people are to give relationship advice, and how good their advice is (whether looking at sycophancy or other factors).
Yup. I know too many people who have a default message when asked for relationship advice: oh, my, the other person is terrible and you should break up.
It's an easy default and it causes so many problems.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#44Maybe it's not so sensible to offload the responsibility of clear thinking to AI companies? How is a chatbot supposed to determine when a user fools even themselves about what they have experienced? What 'tough love' can be given to one who, having been so unreasonable throughout their lives - as to always invite scorn and retort from all humans alike - is happy to interpret engagement at all as a sign of approval?
> clear thinking Most humans working in tech lack this particular attribute, let alone tools driven by token-similarity (and not actual 'thinking').
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Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#45It feels like I'm fighting uphill battle when it comes to bouncing ideas off of a model. I'll set things up in the context with instructions similar to. "Help me refine my ideas, challenge, push back, and don't just be agreeable." It works for a bit but eventually the conversation creeps back into complacency and syncophancy. I'll check it too by asking "are you just placating me?" the funny thing is that often it'll…
That’s because the model isn’t actually thinking, pushing back, and challenging your ideas. It’s just statistically agreeing with you until it reaches too wide of a context. You’re living in the delusion that it’s “working” or having a “conversation” with you.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#46It feels like I'm fighting uphill battle when it comes to bouncing ideas off of a model. I'll set things up in the context with instructions similar to. "Help me refine my ideas, challenge, push back, and don't just be agreeable." It works for a bit but eventually the conversation creeps back into complacency and syncophancy. I'll check it too by asking "are you just placating me?" the funny thing is that often it'll…
So, there's things you're fighting against when trying to constrain the behavior of the llm.
First, those beginning instructions are being quickly ignored as the longer context changes the probabilities. After every round, it get pushed into whatever context you drive towards. The fix is chopping out that context and providing it before each new round. something like `` -> ``.
This would always preface your question with your prefered rules and remove those rules from the end of the context.
The reason why this isn't done is because it poisons the KV cache, and doing that causes the cloud companies to spin up more inference.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it an indication? I think people on here don't realize that most of the people don't think things through as much as (software) engineers
In my local(?) community (like in my city, not my industry) there is a saying "if you had to ask for relationship advice, then you probably should break up". There is some rationale to that. People tend to hold onto relationships that don't lead anywhere in fear of "losing" what they "already have". It's probably a comfort zone thing. So if one is desperate enough to ask random strangers online about a relationship,…
> So if one is desperate enough to ask random strangers online about a relationship
I'd me more inclined to ask random strangers on the internet than close friends...
That said, when me and my SO had a difficult time we went to a professional. For us it helped a lot. Though as the counselor said, we were one of the few couples which came early enough. Usually she saw couples well past the point of no return.
So yeah, if you don't ask in time, you will probably be breaking up anyway.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#48There is a striking data visualization showing the breakup advice trend over 15 years on Reddit. You can see the "End relationship" line spike as AI and algorithmic advice take over: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1o87cy4/oc...
More interesting, IMO, is the general trend that started long before LLMs. The fact that "dump them" is the standard answer to any relationship question is a meme by now. The LLMs appear to be doing exactly what one would expect them to be doing based on their training corpus.
if things are so bad that you’re posting on reddit then breaking up is usually the best answer.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#49This new Stanford study published on March 26, 2026 shows that AI models are sycophantic. They affirm the users position 49% more often than a human would. The researchers found that when people use AI for relationship advice, they become 25% more convinced they are 'right' and significantly less likely to apologize or repair the connection.
To be fair an average therapist is also pretty sycophantic. "The worst person you know is being told by their therapist that they did the right thing" is a bit of a meme, but isn't completely false in my experience.
No, the meme is that the average therapist can be boiled down to "well, what do you think?" or "and how does that make you feel?" (of which ELIZA, the original bot that passed the Turing test, was perhaps an unintentional parody). Even this cartoonish characterization demonstrates that the function of therapists is to get you to question yourself so that you can attempt to reframe and re-evaluate your ways of thinking, in a roughly Socratic fashion.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#50It feels like I'm fighting uphill battle when it comes to bouncing ideas off of a model. I'll set things up in the context with instructions similar to. "Help me refine my ideas, challenge, push back, and don't just be agreeable." It works for a bit but eventually the conversation creeps back into complacency and syncophancy. I'll check it too by asking "are you just placating me?" the funny thing is that often it'll…
Considering 4.6 came with a ton of changes around tooling and prompting this isn't terribly surprising.