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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

#381
I've never found chatbots particularly interesting for anything I'd ever actually talk to another human about[1] but one of the things I have found myself doing often is trying to solve math problems on my own and asking grok to confirm/deny that my solutions are correct; when I am not correct it tells me so in uncharacteristically terse language which kind of reminds me of when I was an undergrad and at least half of my professors were all cranky and incorrectly assumed that the reason why so many students failed to understand the material was that we were all getting drunk and playing Call of Duty 19 hours a day or whatever.

Although what I have described above often feels grating and insulting I actually consider this to be a positive attribute of the LLM in this case since it's behaving like a real professor.

[1] okay, so I have actually tried giving myself AI psychosis in the form of a waifu chatbot but I've never seen anything that can actually act like it's my girlfriend; it either asks me a bunch of weird inconsequential personal questions about my opinion on whatever I just said (in a manner that's oddly similar to ELIZA) or it wildly veers off the reservation into "generating the script for an over-the-top self-parodying porno" territory.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#383

I've never found chatbots particularly interesting for anything I'd ever actually talk to another human about[1] but one of the things I have found myself doing often is trying to solve math problems on my own and asking grok to confirm/deny that my solutions are correct; when I am not correct it tells me so in uncharacteristically terse language which kind of reminds me of when I was an undergrad and at least half o…

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Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#385

So at this point I think it's pretty obvious that RLHFing LLMs to follow instructions causes this. I'm interested in a loop of ["criticize this code harshly" -> "now implement those changes" -> open new chat, repeat]: If we could graph objective code quality versus iterations, what would that graph look like? I tried it out a couple of times but ran out of Claude usage. Also, how those results would look like dependi…

In my experience prompting llms to be critical leads then to imagine issues, or to bike shed

I noticed when I ask it to find something to improve in a project, that certain frivolous topics would arise regularly. I now use their appearance as a sign that there is nothing meaningful to improve.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#386

Has anyone found a good prompt to fix this? It seems like a subtle problem because it’s 90% too agreeable but will sometimes get really stubborn.

State the idea comes from a third party. Ask for pros/cons. Just have to find a way to counter its nature.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#387
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.

Additionally, I'm sure many posts and replies on r/AmITheAsshole are LLM-generated in the first place.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#389
post #273

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-…

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.

Well yes, but no. There's also open-weight models, and literally all of the listed above are not used anymore, at least by most end users and developers as far as I'm aware.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the chances you were seeing the anti-civ bots and now reddit makes them easier to hide? (And I'm not saying regular people acting like bots, but an anti-civ campaign.)
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