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AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

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Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#241

Post by gAI »

jerf wrote: post #210
gAI wrote: post #83

You're essentially summoning a character to role-play with. Just like with esoteric evocation, it's very easy to summon the wrong aspect of the spirit. Anthropic has a lot to say about this: https://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-selection-model https://www.anthropic.com/research/assistant-axis https://www.anthropic.com/research/persona-vectors

I am polite when using AI, not because I mistake it for a human, but because I'm deliberately keeping it in the "professional colleague" persona. Tell it to push back, and then thank it for something it finds in your error. I may put a small self-deprecating joke in from time to time. It keeps the "mood" correct. Another way you can think of it is that when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to a human, you'…

Agreed, putting effort into my side of the role-play almost always improves the model's responses. The attention required to do that also makes it more likely that I'll notice when the conversation first starts going off the rails: when it hits the phase transition (https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01097). It does still seem important to start new chats regularly, regardless of growing context sizes.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#242

Post by moduspol »

QuiDortDine wrote: post #187
potatoskins wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You always have to be careful with LLMs, but to be fair, I felt like Claude is such a good therapist, at least it is good to start with if you want to unpack yourself. I have been to 3 short human therapist sessions in my life, and I only felt some kind of genuine self-improvement and progress with Claude.

And how do you draw the line between feeling progress and actually making progress?

Counter-point: I often raise the same question of people with human therapists. I do not get strong responses.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#243

Post by astrange »

notracks wrote: post #184
dimgl wrote: post #124

Even as someone who (wrongly) believed that I had high emotional intelligence, I too was bit by this. Almost a year ago when LLMs were starting to become more ubiquitous and powerful I discussed a big life/professional decision with an LLM over the course of many months. I took its recommendation. Ultimately it turned out to be the wrong decision. Thankfully it was recoverable, but it really sobered me up on LLMs. Th…

I recently found out that Claude's latest model, Sonnet 4.6, scores the highest in Bullsh*tBench[0] (Funny name - I know). It's a recent benchmark that measures whether an LLM refuses nonsense or pushes back on bad choices so Claude has definitely gotten better. [0] - https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...

I haven't tried talking to Sonnet much, but Opus 4.6 is very sycophantic. Not in the sense of explicitly always agreeing with you, but its answers strictly conform to the worldview in your questions and don't go outside it or disagree with it.

It _does_ love to explicitly agree with anything it finds in web search though.

(Anthropic tries to fight this by adding a hidden prompt that makes it disagree with you and tell you to go to bed, which doesn't help.)

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#244

Post by akurilin »

notracks wrote: post #184
dimgl wrote: post #124

Even as someone who (wrongly) believed that I had high emotional intelligence, I too was bit by this. Almost a year ago when LLMs were starting to become more ubiquitous and powerful I discussed a big life/professional decision with an LLM over the course of many months. I took its recommendation. Ultimately it turned out to be the wrong decision. Thankfully it was recoverable, but it really sobered me up on LLMs. Th…

I recently found out that Claude's latest model, Sonnet 4.6, scores the highest in Bullsh*tBench[0] (Funny name - I know). It's a recent benchmark that measures whether an LLM refuses nonsense or pushes back on bad choices so Claude has definitely gotten better. [0] - https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...

Great link, thanks for sharing. Confirmed what I saw empirically by comparing the different models during daily use.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#245

Post by drfloyd51 »

anorwell wrote: post #232

A pastime I have with papers like this is to look for the part in the paper where they say which models they tested. Very often, you find either A) it's a model from one or more years ago, only just being published now, or B) they don't even say which model they are using. Best I could find in this paper: > We evaluated 11 user-facing production LLMs: four proprietary models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google; and se…

It’s as if they are testing “AI” and not specific agents.

I wonder if that is left over from testing people. I have major version numbers and my minor version number changes daily, often as a surprise. Sometimes several times a day. So testing people is a bit tricky. But AIs do have stable version numbers and can be specifically compared.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#246

Post by astrange »

shimman wrote: post #173
Forgeties79 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very careful doing this

You can't be careful at all doing this, this is like smoking a cigarette in a dynamite factory. Using LLMs for therapy is so deeply dystopian and disgusting, people need human empathy for therapy. LLMs do not emit empathy. Complete disaster waiting to happen for that individual.

Claudes have lots of empathy. The issue is the opposite - it isn't very good at challenging you and it's not capable of independently verifying you're not bullshitting it or lying about your own situation.

But it's better than talking to yourself or an abuser!

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#247

Post by 4ndrewl »

trimbo wrote: post #183

> They also included 2,000 prompts based on posts from the Reddit community r/AmITheAsshole, where the consensus of Redditors was that the poster was indeed in the wrong. Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort, because that's what the LLM is imitating, and that's who most people would go to otherwise. Obv…

What's your research background in this area?

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#248

Post by zulban »

anorwell wrote: post #232

A pastime I have with papers like this is to look for the part in the paper where they say which models they tested. Very often, you find either A) it's a model from one or more years ago, only just being published now, or B) they don't even say which model they are using. Best I could find in this paper: > We evaluated 11 user-facing production LLMs: four proprietary models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google; and se…

Generally, published papers don't give a damn about reproducibility. I've seen it identified as a crisis by many. Publishers, reviewers, and researchers mostly don't care about that level of basic rigor. There's no professional repercussions or embarrassment.

Agreed - if I was a reviewer for LLM papers it would be an instant rejection not listing the versions and prompts used.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#249

Post by legacynl »

trimbo wrote: post #183

> They also included 2,000 prompts based on posts from the Reddit community r/AmITheAsshole, where the consensus of Redditors was that the poster was indeed in the wrong. Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. This needs to be studied against people in real life who have a social contract of some sort, because that's what the LLM is imitating, and that's who most people would go to otherwise. Obv…

> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison.

Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#250

Post by astrange »

Sharlin wrote: post #5
oldfrenchfries wrote: post #3

There 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.

> The LLMs appear to be doing exactly what one would expect them to be doing based on their training corpus.

That is not how full LLM training works. That is how base model pretraining works.

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