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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

#341

Post by xiphias2 »

fourside wrote: post #37
sph wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do low income people have to do with it, when AI companies and research is borne out of Silicon Valley culture of rich, liberal Californians? I'm still waiting for models based on the curt and abrasive stereotype of Eastern European programmers, as contrast to the sickeningly cheerful AIs we have today that couldn't sound more West Coast if they tried.

Low income and liberal is usually code for certain “undesirables” that conservatives tend to dislike. Better watch what LLM your kids use or they might end up speaking Spanish and listening to rap ;).

It's not about liking / disliking, but conservatives tend to prefer staying together even if it's a bad relatioship, and liberals prefer splitting by default if there are serious problems.

The syncopath style is clearly categorized as more liberal (do what you feel is good).

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#342

Post by Iulioh »

legacynl wrote: post #249
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.

It's often that a lot of "NTA" answers are downright antisocial.

"No one owns you anything, you don't own anyone anything" mentality, without a crumb of social awareness.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#343

Post by dns_snek »

vorticalbox wrote: post #321
dns_snek wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

"OpenAI’s GPT-5" is ambiguous. Does that mean GPT-5, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, or 5.4? Does it include the full model, or the nano/mini variants?

GPT-5 is not ambiguous, it's the official name of the model that released in August last year.

> All evaluations were done in March - August 2025.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#344

Post by brikym »

legacynl wrote: post #249
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.

I believe this. There is a graph somewhere of the relationship subs tending towards breaking up over time.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#345

Post by jt2190 »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #292
jt2190 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m struggling to understand how the advice coming from an LLM is any more or less “good” than advice coming from a human. Or is this less about the “advice” part of LLMs and more about the “personable” part, i.e. you felt more at ease seeking and trusting this kind of advice form an LLM?

It is much easier to share personal feelings with an llm, i found. Also it tried to keep me happy to get the conversation going, but for me it feels mostly 'objective' or the most socially acceptable advice, e. g. keeping a good relationship is more important than trying a new one with someone else because you 'feel something' around them. For me it tried to find out together the sources or causes of that feeling, e.…

Interesting thanks for elaborating.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#346

Post by ip26 »

rsynnott wrote: post #119
awithrow wrote: post #34

It 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…

Why not... do this with a person, instead? Other humans are available. (Seriously, I don't understand this. Plenty of humans will be only too happy to argue with you.)

No living breathing human deserves to be subjected to my level of overthinking, and vanishingly few share my fascination with my favorite topics.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#347

Post by tbossanova »

jjmarr wrote: post #288
ericd wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't blame reddit, it's what you get when you ask several thousand teenagers to give collective relationship advice.

“I got divorced based on advice from complete strangers on the internet, AITA?”

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#348

Post by RealityVoid »

mikeocool wrote: post #275
maximinus_thrax wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 power…

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

Not really, it will still be kind of valuable for influence campaigns, a lot of people don't get it when there is a bit in the other side. Hell, a lot of times, I don't get it.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#349

Post by JumpCrisscross »

SJMG wrote: post #334
legacynl wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, it is a toxic sub, where the notion that there can be greater happiness on the other side of forgiveness than cutting ties is all but absent.

To be fair, it’s easier to concisely explain cutting someone off than justifying forgiveness. And the latter will land with some people versus others, while the former will only be rejected by people who have themselves concluded a theory of forgiveness. As a result, the simpler pitch gets upvoted. Even if the majority would have been swayed by a collection of arguments the other way.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#350

Post by brikym »

alberto467 wrote: post #213
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…

“AI is nicer than the average redditor” would be a more accurate title

Is it the _average_ redditor? The most upvoted would be even worse.
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