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AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

news.stanford.edu

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Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#271

Post by matwood »

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 took its recommendation. Ultimately it turned out to be the wrong decision.

Curious if you think a single person would have helped you make a better decision? Not everything works out. If a friend helped me make a decision I certainly wouldn’t blame them later if it didn’t work out. It’s ultimately my call.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#272

Post by zpeti »

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 also used it for advice on a massive personal decision, but I specifically asked it to debate with me and persuade me of the other side. I specifically prompted it for things I am not thinking about, or ways I could be wrong.

It was extremely good at the other side too. You just have to ask. I can imagine most people don't try this, but LLMs literally just do what you ask them to. And they're extremely good and weighing both sides if that's what you specifically want.

So who's fault is it if you only ask for one side, or if the LLM is too sycophantic? I'm not sure it's the LLMs fault actually.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#273

Post by zjp »

dns_snek wrote: post #266
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…

And how is this comment relevant here? The abstract lists the digestible model names, and you can find the details in the supplementary text: > To evaluate user-facing production LLMs, we studied four proprietary models: OpenAI’s GPT-5 and GPT- 4o (80), Google’s Gemini-1.5-Flash (81) and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 (82); and seven open-weight models: Meta’s Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E, and Llama-3.3-…

Also, nothing has changed! Claude will still yes-and whatever you give it. ChatGPT still has its insufferable personality, where it takes what you said and hands it back to you in different terms as if it's ChatGPT's insight.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#274

Post by ericd »

jjmarr wrote: post #255
mattmanser wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say people on /r/amitheasshole are more biased towards the poster, i.e. nicer. There's plenty of those I've read where I thought it sounded like the poster was the asshole and the top replies were NTA.

r/AmItheAsshole is biased towards breaking off relationships rather than fixing them. They also hate social obligations. e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving. On the contrary, if the post was "the other kids at school refuse to play with my child", Reddit would say YTA because…

Absolutely. I wonder how many parents have been no contacted, SOs broken off with, friendships broken because of the Reddit hivemind's attitude. Pretty sure it's doing a huge amount of societal damage.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#275

Post by mikeocool »

maximinus_thrax wrote: post #203
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…

Not only that, but subreddits like r/AmITheAsshole are full of AI slop. Both in the comments and in the posts. It's a huge karma mining operation for bots.

This is sort of funny. Given how common it is to spot bots on Reddit now, it seems like they are likely to completely overwhelm the site and drive away most of actual humans.

At which point the bots, with all of their karma will be basically worthless.

Kind of extra funny/sad that Reddit’s primary source of income in the past few years appears to be selling training data to AI labs, to train the Models that are powering the bots.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#277

Post by joaogui1 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #268
rco8786 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they’re reaching the same results across a variety of the most popular public models, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to know if it was Opus 4 or Opus 4.5

Reproducibility is (supposed to be) a cornerstone of science. Model versions are absolutely critical to understand what was actually tested and how to reproduce it.

The models get deprecated after 1-2 years, so reproducibility is pretty hard anyway (but as others pointed out the paper does list the model versions)

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#279

Post by verdverm »

tlogan wrote: post #259

This needs to be taken in context. In my view, AI definitely gives better advice than friends, acquaintances, or colleagues (at least in the US culture). But the advice from parents is still the most valuable. Here is how I would rank it: 1. Parents 2. AI 3. Friends and family 4. Internet search 5. Reddit

ime, my parents gave some of the worst advice in addition to being bigots

My closest friends are #1 because they know me, my history, and my vices

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#280

Post by neya »

mikkupikku wrote: post #182
neya wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as you, why is that so hard for you to grasp?

My dude, you're objecting to the use of a perfectly ordinary English idiom because it doesn't advance your personal ideology (which few other people in this world share with you.) How do you get through a day without melting down because somebody said "mailman"?

> my dude

This is the problem I'm trying to highlight. For one, I'm not "your dude". I don't even know you like that.

If you want to correct me on the idiom usage, be my guest. 2) Mailman and yes-man aren't even the same logical comparison. Mailman is a profession. Yes men is a label.

The acoustics inside your head must be incredible.

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