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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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll check it too by asking "are you just placating me?" the funny thing is that often it'll admit that, yes, it wasn't being very critical, and then procede to over correct and become a complete contrarian. and not in a way that's useful either. It's not admitting anything. Your question diverts it down a path where it acts the part of a former sycophant who is now being critical, because that question is now upst…

> Your question diverts it down a path where it acts the part of a former sycophant who is now being critical I think people really have a hard time understanding a sycophant can be contrarian. But a yesman can say yes by saying no https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484664

> a yesman can say yes by saying no

What a great way to summarize LLM behaviour in 2026

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it interesting how, in Reddit any trivial fight or even just different opinions, the advice it's always to end the relationship.

You deserve better

A very sycophantic AI style answer.

Code bot equivalent being all "you are absolutely right! Here is the unequivocal fix for now and all time!"

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#443

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…

Yeah, these idiots obviously should have been testing models from 1-2 years in the future so that by the time their paper is released, the models are current.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#444
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think this is necessarily that the advice is getting worse. My friends are pretty mature and stable people and I've found that they've had way more issues staying in relationships longer than they should've compared to breaking up earlier. Especially for relationships earlier in people's lives (where many people I know has a story about being in a relationship for way longer than they should've and seems ofte…

> I don't think this is necessarily that the advice is getting worse.

> but I don't think that telling people to break up more is less accurate advice.

Those are subjective determinations based on personal experience. But breaking up more without addressing the underlying issues is likely to cause steadily worsening problems at both individual and societal scales. I'm not a mental health professional, but I can see several problems with this approach.

The first is that the determination of the issue is really tricky and needs careful work. The partner who seems abusive may not always be the actual perpetrator. They may be displaying stress response to hidden and chronic abuse by the other partner. For example, a short temper may be caused by anxiety about being emotionally abused. Such manipulative discrediting of the victim may even be a habitual behavior rather than a deliberate one. And it's more common than you'd imagine. When you support the second partner based on a flawed judgment, you're reaffirming their toxic behavior, while worsening the self image of the victim that has already been damaged by gaslighting.

Another issue is the degrading empathy. All relationships, even business deals, are based on sacrifices and compromises meant to bring you benefits in the long term. Stable long term romantic/marital relationships have benefits that far outweigh the sacrifices one usually has to make. But the evolving public discourse, especially those on r/AITA, is more in favor of ruining the relationship rather than make any sacrifices at all. In response, relationships are becoming loveless, transactional and so flaky that any compromise is seen as oppression by the partner. There is zero self reflection and very few advises to examine one's own behavior first. It's all about oneself and the problem is always on the other side!

And unsurprisingly, these negative tendencies are bleeding into their social lives as well. Over the past decade or so, I have observed a marked increase in unsympathetic and somewhat radicalized discourse. Amateur advice is very harmful and this is definitely a massive case for the professionals to manage. But they're also products of the same system (with exceptions, of course). So I'm going to criticize even the professional and academic community in this matter. In their drive towards hyper-individualism, many seem to have forgetten that humans are social beings who won't fare well physically or emotionally without relations, relationships and society.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#445
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.

[deleted]

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is notorious for being awful at real life interactions just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme but beyond romantic relationships, i think a lot of us have seen how it can impact work relationships, i’ve had venture partners clearly rely on AI (robotic email responses and even SMS) and that warped their perception and made it harder to connect. It signals l…

I always find it interesting how, in Reddit any trivial fight or even just different opinions, the advice it's always to end the relationship.

The power of an echo chamber; makes extremism seem logical.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very careful doing this

You can't be careful at all doing this, this is like smoking a cigarette in a dynamite factory. Using LLMs for therapy is so deeply dystopian and disgusting, people need human empathy for therapy. LLMs do not emit empathy. Complete disaster waiting to happen for that individual.

Therapy can be basically paid (I would argue - false) empathy, and in many cases vastly inferior to less transactional relationships.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#448
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…

What's your research background in this area?

How is that relevant. A decent scientist can critique general design aspects of a paper in any field. They're hardly splitting hairs on some niche topic.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don’t think I’ve read a Reddit thread in the last few years that didn’t devolve into politics on the highest upvoted comments fairly quickly.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#450

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…

"Apprehend"?
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