611–620 of 684 posts
Most people who ask for advice actually want affirmation. If you ever give them advice instead of affirmation, you end up kicking off a rousing game of “Why Don’t You/Yes But”. (https://ericberne.com/games-people-play/why-dont-you-yes-but...)
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I’m struggling to understand how the advice coming from an LLM is any more or less “good” than advice coming from a human. Or is this less about the “advice” part of LLMs and more about the “personable” part, i.e. you felt more at ease seeking and trusting this kind of advice form an LLM?
LLM is much better on average just for the fact that it was trained on a large corpus of human knowledge, including psychology, therapy and study material. Most of the humans in your vicinity only have some shallow knowledge of local cargo cults and religious teachings.
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If a friend gave me bad advice about a major life decision I would stop consulting them for future life decisions
Bad as in malicious or bad as in they offered/you asked for their advice and it didn’t work out? Because if it’s the later, that’s an unfair burden to put on your friends or anyone else. People can give great advice, genuinely want to help, and it still not work out the way you wanted. If you require friends to be 100% with their help, I’m not sure how you have any friends left.
It’s also possible to give bad advice wothout being malicious.
I have some friends who don’t give great life advice. We’re still friends, they’re just not the friends I go to when I need advice on a big decision.
Even as someone who (wrongly) believed that I had high emotional intelligence, I too was bit by this. Almost a year ago when LLMs were starting to become more ubiquitous and powerful I discussed a big life/professional decision with an LLM over the course of many months. I took its recommendation. Ultimately it turned out to be the wrong decision. Thankfully it was recoverable, but it really sobered me up on LLMs. Th…
Yeah, I think Claude is a lot more logical in that sense, I use it for some therapy sessions myself and it pushes back a bit more than Open AI and Gemini
Are LLMs mainly a tool for people with atrophying social skills who want all interaction to happen via a text prompt that always responds in the most soothing way? I can't think of another reason to replace human therapy with an LLM.
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> I don't understand why the models being a year or two old now is worth noting as though it's a clear weakness? I do think it's a clear weakness. Capabilities are extremely different than they were twelve months ago. > What should they do, publish sub-standard results more quickly? Ideally, publish quality results more quickly. I'm quite open to competing viewpoints here, but it's my impression that academic publish…
The onus is on you to prove or at least convincingly argue that the results are unlikely to generalize across incremental model releases. In my personal experience, the overly affirming nature seems to have held since GPT-3. What makes you think a newer, larger model would not exhibit this behavior? Beyond "they're more capable"? I'd argue that being more capable doesn't mean less sycophantic. It's certainly possible…
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Thank you. Yes, I'm going to refrain from airing out my dirty laundry. I made a bad decision, now I'm living with it, and more context doesn't actually change the intent behind my message: these tools are dangerous. Getting better, but still dangerous.
> Yes, I’m going to refrain from airing out my dirty laundry. I made a bad decision, now I’m living with it, and more context doesn’t actually change the intent behind my message That’s not entirely true, as it’s currently impossible to actually gauge the severity of what the LLM seemingly enabled you into doing. There’s a difference between “I uncritically accepted everything it told me because it lined up with what…
"I flipped a coin and the LLM called heads. I should have gone with tails..."
Even as someone who (wrongly) believed that I had high emotional intelligence, I too was bit by this. Almost a year ago when LLMs were starting to become more ubiquitous and powerful I discussed a big life/professional decision with an LLM over the course of many months. I took its recommendation. Ultimately it turned out to be the wrong decision. Thankfully it was recoverable, but it really sobered me up on LLMs. Th…
> The fault is on me, to be clear, as LLMs are just a tool. This is like blaming yourself for an addiction to alcohol, junk food, gambling, or something else you have been relentlessly advertised to. Sure, some of it falls on you, but there are corporations with infinite money spending most of it to manipulate your psyche into wanting the thing, trusting the thing, feeling empty without the thing. https://www.youtube…
It 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…
Thought experiment: If you could turn off all the sycophancy in your chatGPT / Claude account forever, and have it tell you all the ways it was previously blowing smoke up your ass — would you do it? US Policy is too weak of a tool to counter this beast of economic force, which is really trillions of dollars of capital at war for the most fierce speculation that’s occurred in history afaik. The sycophancy meaningfull…
It's not just a thought experiment. You can google how to do this and it works pretty well.
My point is if the sycophancy helps drive user engagement, how does that impact the incentive labs and AI product builders have to counteract it.
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Why is your wording so complicated? It is very hard for me to understand what you try to say, even though I am very interested.
TL;DR: Probably because I'm having fun and you are expending effort. Hope you find what I say to be worth the effort. To preface, I do not take offense to your remark, because you seem to be asking in good faith. (If, however, being unable to immediately recognize pre-known patterns in my speech had automagically led you to the conclusion that I am somehow out of line, just for speaking how I speak ... well, then we…
When talking about feelings, we now and then throw in an English word because some things are expressed in much less words when using English. In a few cases even a German word. Überhaupt is for example a word for which i do not know an alternative in any language.
I think you want to say that human language is too ambiguous for clear communication between human and machine. The machine might mis interpret what you write. Classic computer languages leave no room for interpretation.
For the rest I think you might be a little lost. That is okay, so many of us are. I wish you all the best.