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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

#511

Post by DeathArrow »

somenameforme wrote: post #483
fortmeier wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is some kind of survivership bias. Who is going to give advise on reddit? Maybe people shying away from difficult social interactions?

Paired with the echo chamber effect voting systems create. Anything that affirms the biases of a majority of upvoters gets elevated, anything that contradicts it gets hidden, and so you not infrequently end up with ubiquitous nonsense that then further reinforces the echo chamber as they become self assured. Then real life intervenes, completely goes against the online zeitgeist, and they're all confused.

If you want to get poor fast, you can follow the most up voted advices on r/wallstreetbets.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#513

Post by prepend »

wiseowise wrote: post #495
SJMG wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is a toxic sub, where the notion that there can be greater happiness on the other side of forgiveness than cutting ties is all but absent.

Except it’s not toxic to suggest that cutting toxic relationship out yields greater happiness.

Well, maybe.

The challenge is interpreting what is toxic, correctly.

Also, if everyone I know is “toxic” then that’s a good sign that the problem is me and not everyone else.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#514

Post by MaxBarraclough »

PhoenixFlame101 wrote: post #446
kelvinjps10 wrote: post #438

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.

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

I think it's more than just an echo chamber, it's the community wanting drama more than it wants to help people.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#515

Post by mlrtime »

wiseowise wrote: post #498
jjmarr wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/AmItheAsshole is biased towards breaking off relationships rather than fixing them. They also hate social obligations. e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving. On the contrary, if the post was "the other kids at school refuse to play with my child", Reddit would say YTA because…

> e.g. If the OP is asking "I ghosted my friend in AA who insulted me during a relapse", Reddit would say NTA in a heartbeat, while the real world would tell OP to be more forgiving. That’s a nuanced discussion. It depends on what you value most, not what “real world” tells you. Most of the time Reddit would be right, because you need to prioritize yourself instead of continuing toxic relationships.

1) Reddit is horrible at nuance, almost non existent in some subs.

2) The toxicity is being defined by reddit to give the advice which is mostly wrong as outlined above.

If OPs had a understanding of what they valued and what is toxic, they probably wouldn't need a advice from biased readers [biased in the sense that they're on that sub].

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#516

Post by mlrtime »

rurp wrote: post #281
mattmanser wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say people on /r/amitheasshole are more biased towards the poster, i.e. nicer. There's plenty of those I've read where I thought it sounded like the poster was the asshole and the top replies were NTA.

Yeah every single time I click on one of those posts the top comments are NTA. A couple times I tried randomly opening a few dozen posts and checking the top comments to see if I could find a single YTA and struck out. Granted many of the OPs are very biased in the poster's favor. Most I've read fall into one of two buckets: either they want to gripe about some obviously bad behavior, or it's a controved and likely f…

The problem with any of these is that they are so incredibly biased towards the author's frame of reality (understandably so).

Who among us are able to 1) Understand a 2nd persons view of a issue we're in and 2) have the ability/courage to write it in a post seeking advice.

My point is that the author will specifically frame the problem clearly on their side. Occasionally redditors will seek additional questions but rarely.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#517

Post by mlrtime »

mikeocool wrote: post #275
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.

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…

How do you clearly define a bot?

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#518

Post by Roshan_Roy »

I wonder if the deeper issue isn’t just “AI is too agreeable”, but that most advice (AI or human) doesn’t actually translate into action. A lot of people aren’t really looking for accurate feedback, they’re looking for something that feels coherent enough to sit with. Reddit gives extreme answers, AI gives agreeable ones, but in both cases the outcome is often the same: no real change in behavior. That might be why this feels worse with AI, it removes the friction you’d normally get from another human pushing back.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#519

Post by j45 »

redanddead wrote: post #436
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…

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…

It's also overrun with AI content that I hope the highly trained researchers would be able to detect and filter out.

Or maybe not.

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