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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

#391

Post by joquarky »

ranger_danger wrote: post #65
megous wrote: post #28

Can't you just prompt for a critical take, multiple alternative perspectives (specifically not yours, after describing your own), etc.? It's a tool, I can bang my hand on purpose with a hammer, too.

Yes, if you're smart. But most people asking it random questions and expecting it to read their minds and spit out the perfect answer are not so much. They don't know what a prompt is, and wouldn't be bothered to give it prior instructions either way.

I think that the type of people who can easily pick up subtext have come to rely on that channel of communication and don't realize they need to be more direct and verbose when chatting with language models.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#394

Post by mikeocool »

RealityVoid wrote: post #348
mikeocool wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know a fair number of people “normies” who get some value out of smaller niche Reddit communities — for advice, and things like product recommendations.

If suddenly all the posts are coming from bots who are trying push a product or just farm karma, I assume (perhaps naively) that those folks will get a lot less value, and stop showing up — even if they don’t realize it’s bots on the other side of the conversation.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#395

Post by erikerikson »

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…

Doesn't sound like a close friend to me. If I tell them what I really think they may not be a friend? Close may not mean what you think it means.

The challenge is that these social choices have a strong stratification effect and those of us who can transit the cultures are statistically rare.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#396

Post by rsynnott »

layla5alive wrote: post #138
rsynnott wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Many other humans are .... Not very available - certainly many shut down when conversations reach a certain level of depth or require great focus or introspection..

> when conversations reach a certain level of depth or require great focus or introspection..

I mean... if the alternative is an LLM... you realise that the LLM isn't doing any focusing or introspection, right?

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#397

Post by rsynnott »

balamatom wrote: post #166
rsynnott wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

OK, I'll bite the artillery shell: I don't mean to dismiss you or what you are saying; in fact I strongly relate - wouldn't it be nice to be able to hash things out with people and mutually benefit from both the shared and the diverging perspectives implied in such interaction? Isn't that the most natural thing in the world? Unfortunately these days this sounds halfway between a very privileged perspective and a pie…

> When was the last time a person took responsibility for the bad outcome you got as a direct consequence of following their advice?

... I mean, the LLM certainly isn't going to do that.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#398

Post by thin_carapace »

layer8 wrote: post #206
notracks wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You don’t have to star out things like that on HN.

it would be interesting to me if you could explain the motivation behind posting your comment. from my perspective, if somebody with 5 years of forum tenure had the intelligence to comment about advanced benchmarks, they probably noticed that censorship was a voluntary decision here, and had made a personal decision on that front.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#400

Post by ijk »

Robotbeat wrote: post #370
LinXitoW wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also the rules and norms of the subreddit has changed over time, which has led to spin-off subreddits that serve those purposes.
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