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
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AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
451–460 of 684 posts
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Does that explain Trump's numerous wives?
Reading your comments is a wonderland of right wing bias.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#453Earlier 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.
Are you a therapist?
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#454Earlier 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.)
In addition to availability, usually because you want to take advantage of the knowledge that is baked into the models, which for all its flaws still vastly exceeds the knowledge of any single human.
For this use case, how do LLMs provide more value than a standard search engine? They may actually be destroying value here, as LLM-generated text pollutes search results.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#455It is better to reason about the spectrum of possible users than to assume "users" can be simplified to a single concept of "user". Not only are there different neurotypes, but there are also different skillsets, upbringings, and contexts. Rather than picking a single ideal user, the best user experiences for account for all the variation of their target audience.
For example: the best documentation includes both "learn by doing" material for jumping right in, and "learn by reading" material that explains everything. This usually results in both a "getting started" section for doing, sometimes also with tutorials, and by a reference for reading. But it is important not to conflate them. Some minds are incredibly "learn by doing" and some minds are incredibly "learn by reading". I am more "learn by reading" than by doing, but I am not quite as "learn by reading" as some I've met.
(This comment is a slight tangent, but "users prefer" somewhat irks me because "users" are not homogenous. You should not always make a decision solely because "users" prefer it. That decision may matter much more to a minority, and that minority may exert more influence than the majority would.)
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#456> 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…
> 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
Citation needed
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#457It 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…
Yeah, I have never had good results with refining ideas with models or really any interactions with models outside of rote task such as coding or analyzing document structures, I don't know why I was ever surprised by this as its obvious that LLMs just aren't capable of original thinking. I think part of the problem is that these things were marketed originally as chatbots when that is honestly their weakest use-case. I think even when I was expressly try to not anthropomorphize LLMs I still sorta did in early days, but the less I do so the more utility I get from them.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#458I think people are learning what actually makes a good question.
Ask yes/no questions, get bad answers.
Ask questions that start with "what" or "why," and the sycophancy loses its purchase.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#459Earlier 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.
I mean... it's a solution guaranteed to work in a trivial sense. It's not meant to be a serious suggestion but more of a thought experiment, like "hold this as the bar, can you find a solution better than this?"
It's like what GiveDirectly says: all charitable interventions should be benchmarked against simply giving the beneficiaries a wad of cash.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#460AI being a Yes-Man is slowly sabotaging it's own answers, because it negatively impact the user's decision. Yes/No are equally important, within a coherent context, for objective reasons. But being supported in the wrong direction is a castastrophe multiplier, down the road. The AI should be neutral, doubtful at times.
To be doubtful would imply that there is a world model full of some kind of Bayesian reasoning. Priors updating based on the context of the conversation, the question, the user asking the question, and cross referencing of facts well outside the scope of the current conversation.
“What are the chances this user is full of shit?” Is not something we are close to