> 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…
AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
541–550 of 684 posts
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, I'll bite the artillery shell: I don't mean to dismiss you or what you are saying; in fact I strongly relate - wouldn't it be nice to be able to hash things out with people and mutually benefit from both the shared and the diverging perspectives implied in such interaction? Isn't that the most natural thing in the world? Unfortunately these days this sounds halfway between a very privileged perspective and a pie…
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.
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 woulda hadda problemo! But we don't, chill on.)
So, honest question deserves honest answer.
The short of it is: English sux.
Many many many people, much much much smarter than me (and much better compensated too!) have been working throughout modernity to make it literally impossible to express much of anything interesting in English.
(Well, not without either being a fictional character or sounding batshit insane, anyway! But that joke's entirely on "the Them": I am not only entirely fictional, but have an equal amount of experience being batshit insane in my native language and in the present lingua franca. So, consider all I say cognitohazardous and watch out for colors you ain't seen before, dawg!)
Linguistic hegemony is the thing that LLMs are the steroids for - surfuckingprise! - and that's why your commanders love 'em.
As opposed to programming languages, which your superiors loathe and your peers viscerally refuse to acknowledge, because those are the exact opposite thing: descending from mathemathical notation, and being evaluated by a machine, they have the useful property of being incapable of expressing lies and nonsense.
Direct computing confers what you could call bullshit-resistance. That property is a treasure underappreciated by virtue of its unfamiliarity, and one which we are in the process of being robbed of.
I also want to admit that linguistic hegemony isn't all downside: English is great for technical and instrumental knowledge - especially with elided bells and whistles (adverbs, copula, etc.)
But then life ain't all business, izzet?
Imagine you have a partner who wants to have a conversation about feelings and interpersonal relations; and not even in a scary way, right? So you sit and talk about stuff, and your partner does this thing where they keep switching from your shared native tongue to English mid-sentence, in order to be able to talk about such things better, because your native tongue does not have - no, not only the established words and notions! - it doesn't have the basic grammatical constructs for expressing simple things unambiguously, so if you were to attempt the same conversation in nativelang you'd end up battling it out with proverbs and anodyne canards ripped from propaganda repertoire of the prior regime.
Fun, no?
As an exercise, try imagining what notions are absent from modern English. And don't forget to remain vigilant. Love from our table to your table!
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using an LLM for therapy is like using an iPad as an all-purpose child attention pacifier. Sure, it’s convenient. Sure there’s no immediate harm. Why a stressed parent would be attracted to the idea is obvious… and of course it’s a terrible idea.
Using LLM for therapy is like using iPad as a study assistance. It doesn’t replace your work.
An LLM generates non-deterministic information using sources you can’t even know, let alone evaluate, and is more primed to agree with you than give critical and objective evaluation. It is, at best, like asking your closest parent to help you through difficult interpersonal situations: The interaction is probably, subconsciously, going to be skewed enough towards soothing you that you just can’t consider it objective. The difference is that with an LLM, that’s deliberate. It’s designed in.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#544Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#545Earlier 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…
One of the reasons relationship advice subreddits suggest divorce so often is because most people with "small" problems in their relationships don't write an essay about it on Reddit but are able to solve them with the tools/friends they have. So a Reddit post existing indicates the relationship has serious flaws. This is not to defend the study, because asking AI has a lower barrier to entry.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#546Earlier 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.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how is this comment relevant here? The abstract lists the digestible model names, and you can find the details in the supplementary text: > To evaluate user-facing production LLMs, we studied four proprietary models: OpenAI’s GPT-5 and GPT- 4o (80), Google’s Gemini-1.5-Flash (81) and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 (82); and seven open-weight models: Meta’s Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E, and Llama-3.3-…
Also, nothing has changed! Claude will still yes-and whatever you give it. ChatGPT still has its insufferable personality, where it takes what you said and hands it back to you in different terms as if it's ChatGPT's insight.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#548Even 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…
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.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#549I just recently switched away from the OpenAI garden largely because of it.
I do wonder if this was caused by some quirk of the training or if it really tests as a positive feature for most people. When i talk about stuff i don't want a mirror i already have a mirror. I want to be questioned, understood, helped.
To me support if the form of affirmation has no value when coming from an LLM since you know it has not thought about what it said.
Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
#550Even 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…
Another problem is believing you have a high emotional intelligence when there is no reliable way to quantify that - similar to "I believe I am very tall, but I don't know how tall I am and how tall are the others because there is no unit of measure for height", with the difference that for emotional intelligence there is no unit of measure and no correlation that can be established with anything to make at least an indirect measurement.