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Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
221–230 of 560 posts
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's common for foreigners to come to America and feel that everyone is extremely polite. Especially eastern bloc countries which tend to be very blunt and direct. I for one think that the politeness in America is one of the cultures better qualities. Does it translate into people wanting sycophantic chat bots? Maybe, but I don't know a single American that actually likes when llms act that way.
> I for one think that the politeness in America is one of the cultures better qualities. Politeness makes sense as an adaptation to low social trust. You have no way of knowing whether others will behave in mutually beneficial ways, so heavy standards of social interaction evolve to compensate and reduce risk. When it's taken to an excess, as it probably is in the U.S. (compared to most other developed countries) it…
That's one way of looking at it. A bit of a cynical view I might add. People are polite to each other for many reasons. If you hold the door and smile at an old lady, it usually isn't because you dont trust her.
Service industry in America is a different story that could use a lot of improvement.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#223I've spent a lot of time trying to get LLM to generate things in a specific way, the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" When working on art projects, my trick is to specifically give all feedback constructively, carefully avoiding framing things in terms of the inverse or parts to remove.
LLMs love to do malicious compliance. If I tell them to not do X, they will then go into a “Look, I followed instructions” moment by talking about how they avoided X. If I add additional instructions saying “do not talk about how you did not do X since merely discussing it is contrary to the goal of avoiding it entirely”, they become somewhat better, but the process of writing such long prompts merely to say not to d…
You’re giving them way too much agency. The don’t love anything and cant be malicious.
You may get better results by emphasizing what you want and why the result was unsatisfactory rather than just saying “don’t do X” (this principle holds for people as well).
Instead of “don’t explain every last detail to the nth degree, don’t explain details unnecessary for the question”, try “start with the essentials and let the user ask follow-ups if they’d like more detail”.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#224Reminds me of the 'interactive' video from the 1960s Fahrenheit 451 movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOs8U50T3l0 For the 'you're right!' bit see: https://youtu.be/ZOs8U50T3l0?t=71
Small world. This has to be the channel of the Brian Moriarty, right?
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#225I've spent a lot of time trying to get LLM to generate things in a specific way, the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" When working on art projects, my trick is to specifically give all feedback constructively, carefully avoiding framing things in terms of the inverse or parts to remove.
I think you cannot really change the personality of an LLM by prompting. If you take the statistical parrot view, then your prompt isn't going to win against the huge numbers of inputs the model was trained with in a different personality. The model's personality is in its DNA so to speak. It has such an urge to parrot what it knows that a single prompt isn't going to change it. But maybe I'm psittacomorphizing a bit…
Yeah different system prompts make a huge difference on the same base model”. There’s so much diversity in the training set, and it’s such a large set, that it essentially equals out and the system prompt has huge leverage. Fine tuning also applies here.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#226flattery is a feature, not a bug, of LLMs; designed to make people want to spend more time with them
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#227I've spent a lot of time trying to get LLM to generate things in a specific way, the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" When working on art projects, my trick is to specifically give all feedback constructively, carefully avoiding framing things in terms of the inverse or parts to remove.
I have this same problem. I’ve added a bunch of instructuons to try and stop ChatGPT being so sycophantic, and now it always mentions something about how it’s going to be ‘straight to the point’ or give me a ‘no bs version’. So now I just have that as the intro instead of ‘that’s a sharp observation’
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Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" You're absolutely right! This can actually extend even to things like safety guardrails. If you tell or even train an AI to not be Mecha-Hitler, you're indirectly raising the probability that it might sometimes go Mecha-Hitler. It's one of many reasons w…
> You're absolutely right! Is this irony, actual LLM output or another example of humans adopting LLM communication patterns?
Certainly, it’s reasonable to ask this.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#229I'm starting to think this is a deeper problem with LLMs that will be hard to solve with stylistic changes. If you ask it to never say "you're absolutely right" and always challenge, then it will dutifully obey, and always challenge - even when you are, in fact, right. What you really want is "challenge me when I'm wrong, and tell me I'm right if I am" - which seems to be a lot harder. As another example, one common…
In human learning we do this process by generating expectations ahead of time and registering surprise or doubt when those expectations are not met.
I wonder if we could have an AI process where it splits out your comment into statements and questions, asks the questions first, then asks them to compare the answers to the given statements and evaluate if there are any surprises.
Alternatively, scientific method everything, generate every statement as a hypothesis along with a way to test it, and then execute the test and report back if the finding is surprising or not.
Re: Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the biggest take away I have is, if you tell it "don't do xyz" it will always have in the back of its mind "do xyz" and any chance it gets it will take to "do xyz" You're absolutely right! This can actually extend even to things like safety guardrails. If you tell or even train an AI to not be Mecha-Hitler, you're indirectly raising the probability that it might sometimes go Mecha-Hitler. It's one of many reasons w…
This reminds me of a phenomena in motorcyling called "target fixation". If you are looking at something, you are more likely to steer towards it. So it's a bad idea to focus on things you don't want to hit. The best approach is to pick a target line and keep the target line in focus at all times. I had never realized that AIs tend to have this same problem, but I can see it now that it's been mentioned! I have in the…
Also in racing and parachuting. Look where you want to go. Nothing else exists.