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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

#361

Post by logifail »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #230
layer8 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way you distinguish between feeling like having a problem and actually having a problem.

This is needlessly flippant and not really the same thing. Determining progress in a therapy setting is usually a collaborative effort between the therapist and the client. An LLM is not a reliable agent to make that determination.

> Determining progress in a therapy setting is usually a collaborative effort between the therapist and the client. An LLM is not a reliable agent to make that determination

Can anyone describe how to determine how a (professional, human) therapist is "a reliable agent" to make such a determination?

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#362

Post by BoorishBears »

theoreticalmal wrote: post #352
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s a good theory. My theory is, for whatever reason, jaded, narcissistic, miserable people congregate in r/AITA and try to drag other people into their misery because that’s easier than accepting responsibility and doing something to change.

Before Reddit made hiding profiles easy you'd click on a user's unreasonably scorched earth advice to the OP, and find their post history is essentially going to every story they come across and advocating for scorched earth.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#363

Post by expedition32 »

genidoi wrote: post #209
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.

That can be solved by filtering out any posts made after November 2022.

That's not a good solution. We don't use medical textbooks from 20 years go.

Strangers from the internet, bot or otherwise, are not your mental coach.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#364

Post by ianbutler »

yard2010 wrote: post #251
alberto467 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IMHO it's not about being nice. AITA threads show an interesting phenomenon of social consensus, I think the authors wanted to show that the LLMs they checked don't have that.

I don't think Reddit is a great place to determine social consensus for well adjusted people or representative of the average adult view. I never see people on Reddit have opinions of any the people I consider reasonable in real life and I don't mean politics I wouldn't know, I don't frequent political subreddits.

It seems fairly consistently miserable in any of the common high traffic subs and you have to get down to really niche communities to see what I consider reasonable behavior that matches the behavior of people I know in real life.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#365

Post by worksonmine »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #331
worksonmine wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't try to do anything. It doesn't work like that. It regurgitates the most likely tokens found in the training set.

That is so reductive of an analysis that it is almost worthless. Technically true, but very unhelpful in terms of using an LLM. It is a first principle though so it helps to “stir the context windows pot” by having it pull in research and other shit on the web that will help ground it and not just tell you exactly what you prompt it to say.

They are amazing tools, but when people try to give them agency someone has to explain it in simple terms.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#366

Post by vorticalbox »

dns_snek wrote: post #343
vorticalbox wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

while true, all the others got precise identifiers but for openAI it makes it hard to reproduce because i have no idea "which" GPT-5 was used.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#369

Post by dwaltrip »

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…

Are you saying there isn’t an actual sycophancy problem?

We are talking about overall patterns here, not the experience of a small subset of skilled and careful users.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#370

Post by Robotbeat »

LinXitoW wrote: post #357
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.

Well, because that's never the correct choice. There's a big big filter on people actually posting there. Any easy problems with obvious solutions never make it to there. Think about it, how fucked does your relationship have to be to post on Reddit for advice?

Someone has a chart somewhere that shows responses in that subreddit getting more and more anti-conciliatory over time. I think it’s online misanthropy (measured by Reddit responses) increasing over time rather than it being objectively never the correct choice.
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