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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

#561

Post by balamatom0 »

rustystump wrote: post #299
balamatom wrote: post #166

Earlier 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…

I genuinely do not understand what u are saying. Because reasons, because unfathomables? Everyone in last 15 years has been an npc? I have had countless deep conversations with people and i am an uber introvert. This reads like someone who is deep into their specific pov. You cannot hope to have a meaningful conversation if you yourself are not willing to concede a point. To the op u are replying too, arguing with pe…

[dead]

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#562

Post by bombcar »

genidoi wrote: post #209
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.

That can be solved by filtering out any posts made after November 2022.

Even before the advent of AI reddit was notorious for obvious bullshit being posted for karma farming. r/aita is even more famous for people making up stories for unknown and known purposes (known in the old days as "bait").

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#563

Post by globular-toast »

latexr wrote: post #548
dimgl wrote: post #124

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…

Yeah, I used to be in the "it's your own fault, moron" school of thought. But as I've grown up I've seen all the ways people prey on the hopes and fears of others, and take advantage of the basic animal instincts in all of us.

I used to think obesity was self inflicted, for example. But then you notice how junk food companies are allowed to do whatever they want to get people hooked on their stuff. They can put up huge billboards, vending machines up a few metres from where you work, they even pump their smell out into the streets.

So let's not aim for a society where we blame victims of predatory marketing and carefully engineered addictive products. We all have weaknesses. Let's help each other out, not take advantage.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#564

Post by AdvancedCarrot »

user34283 wrote: post #552
chaosite wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having more than one account isn't against Reddit's ToS. If you use your different accounts in different subreddits and never have your accounts interact, you won't be banned.

If you don't restrict each account to specific subreddits, it's quite likely that one will get banned somewhere without you noticing or remembering. If you happen to post to the same subreddit with another account at some point, Reddit bans all of your accounts.

Anecdotal but I've noticed Reddit has gotten very ban happy in general in the past year.

I actually gave up using it because, perhaps in part because I'm behind a VPN (required in my country), any new accounts I create get banned very quickly once I start commenting.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#565

Post by insane_dreamer »

legacynl wrote: post #249
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…

> Sorry, anonymous people on reddit aren't a good comparison. Yeah especially on r/AmITheAsshole. Those comments never advocate for communication, forgiveness and mending things with family.

That sub is so toxic that I would seriously question the wisdom of any of its posts simply because the authors are member of that sub.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#567

Post by DrewADesign »

latexr wrote: post #529
anorwell wrote: post #232

A pastime I have with papers like this is to look for the part in the paper where they say which models they tested. Very often, you find either A) it's a model from one or more years ago, only just being published now, or B) they don't even say which model they are using. Best I could find in this paper: > We evaluated 11 user-facing production LLMs: four proprietary models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google; and se…

> A pastime I have with papers like this is to look for the part in the paper where they say which models they tested. My pastime (not really) in HN submissions like this is to look for the comment where someone complains about the models used because they aren’t the literal same model and version the commenter has started using the day before. It’s always “you can’t test with those models, those are crap, the ones w…

Firing off glib criticism that amounts to “No study on AI is valid beyond the release cycle of the models tested,” feels like the unconscious self-protection reflex we all default to when facing cognitive dissonance. It seems like it’s only easy to spot when someone you disagree with is doing it.

To me, it almost feels like a partisan political thing.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#568

Post by ekidd »

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…

> just look at the relationship subreddit the first answer is always divorce, it’s become a meme

As someone who has been married for a couple of decades, I, too, would recommend divorce to many of the (often-fictional) people asking Reddit for relationship advice. A marriage has a huge impact on whether your life is basically good, or if you pass a big chunk of your time on this Earth in misery. And many of the people (or repost bots) asking for advice on Reddit appear to be in shockingly awful relationships. Especially for people who don't have kids, if your marriage is making you miserable, leave.

(But aside from this, yeah, don't ask Reddit for relationship advice. Reddit posters are far more likely to be people who spend their life indoors posting on Reddit, and their default advice leans heavily towards "never interact with anyone, ever.")

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#569

Post by thepasch »

dimgl wrote: post #338
xXSLAYERXx wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really do love dirty laundry don't we? I'm sure whatever the context is, it is deeply personal. Do you also have your popcorn ready?

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 was hoping to hear” and “it subtly nudged me towards a course of action that was going to be obviously unwise after some consideration, but managed to convince me to skip this”; and also between that and “I took a risk, which I knew to be a risk, and which I knew to potentially expect to go bad, and the LLM convinced me to take it where I otherwise wouldn’t have”, and ALSO between that and “I took a risk, which I knew to be a risk, and which I knew to potentially expect to go bad, and if I’m perfectly honest, I might’ve taken it anyway without the LLM”.

Without any indication as to how your situation maps to any of these (or more), the warning is, functionally, not particularly useful.

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