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Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

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Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#61
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone still has to come up with the A and B to do AB testing. I'm sure that "Yes" "Not now, I hate kittens" gets better metrics in the AB test than "Yes "No," but I find it implausible that the person who came up with the first one wasn't intentionally coercing the user into doing what they want.

That's true for UI, it's not true when you're arbitrarily injecting user feedback into a dynamic system where you do not know how the dominoes will be affected as they fall.

I wouldn’t call those dark patterns.

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yo it was an engagement pattern openAI found specifically grew subscriptions and conversation length. It’s a dark pattern for sure.

It doesn’t appear that anyone at OpenAI sat down and thought “let’s make our model more sycophantic so that people engage with it more”. Instead it emerged automatically from RLHF, because users rated agreeable responses more highly.

I can tell you’ve never worked in big tech before.

Dark patterns are often “discovered” and very consciously not shut off because the reverse cost would be too high to stomach. Esp in a delicate growth situation.

See Facebook at its adverse mental health studies

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#63
post #49

LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense. Agents, however, are products. They should have clear UX boundaries: show what context they’re using, communicate uncertainty, validate outputs where possible, and expose performance so users can understand when and why they fail. IMO the…

> LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense. Per the predictive processing theory of mind, human brains are similarly predictive machines. "Psychology" is an emergent property. I think it's overly dismissive to point to the fundamentals being simple, i.e. that it's a token predict…

The difference is that we know how LLMs work. We know exactly what they process, how they process it, and for what purpose. Our inability to explain and predict their behavior is due to the mind-boggling amount of data and processing complexity that no human can comprehend.

In contrast, we know very little about human brains. We know how they work at a fundamental level, and we have vague understanding of brain regions and their functions, but we have little knowledge of how the complex behavior we observe actually works. The complexity is also orders of magnitude greater than what we can model with current technology, but it's very much an open question whether our current deep learning architectures are even the right approach to model this complexity.

So, sure, emergent behavior is neat and interesting, but just because we can't intuitively understand a system, doesn't mean that we're on the right track to model human intelligence. After all, we find the patterns of the Game of Life interesting, yet the rules for such a system are very simple. LLMs are similar, only far more complex. We find the patterns they generate interesting, and potentially very useful, but anthropomorphizing this technology, or thinking that we have invented "intelligence", is wishful thinking and hubris. Especially since we struggle with defining that word to begin with.

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#64
post #49

LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense. Agents, however, are products. They should have clear UX boundaries: show what context they’re using, communicate uncertainty, validate outputs where possible, and expose performance so users can understand when and why they fail. IMO the…

because they wanted to sell the illusion of consciousness, chatgpt, gemini and claude are humans simulator which is lame, I want autocomplete prediction not this personality and retention stuff which only makes the agents dumber.

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#65
post #49

LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense. Agents, however, are products. They should have clear UX boundaries: show what context they’re using, communicate uncertainty, validate outputs where possible, and expose performance so users can understand when and why they fail. IMO the…

> LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense. Per the predictive processing theory of mind, human brains are similarly predictive machines. "Psychology" is an emergent property. I think it's overly dismissive to point to the fundamentals being simple, i.e. that it's a token predict…

[dead]

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#66
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense. Per the predictive processing theory of mind, human brains are similarly predictive machines. "Psychology" is an emergent property. I think it's overly dismissive to point to the fundamentals being simple, i.e. that it's a token predict…

The difference is that we know how LLMs work. We know exactly what they process, how they process it, and for what purpose. Our inability to explain and predict their behavior is due to the mind-boggling amount of data and processing complexity that no human can comprehend. In contrast, we know very little about human brains. We know how they work at a fundamental level, and we have vague understanding of brain regio…

At no point did I say LLMs have human intelligence nor that they model human intelligence. I also didn't say that they are the correct path towards it, though the truth is we don't know.

The point is that one could similarly be dismissive of human brains, saying they're prediction machines built on basic blocks of neuro chemistry and such a view would be asinine.

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#67
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense. Per the predictive processing theory of mind, human brains are similarly predictive machines. "Psychology" is an emergent property. I think it's overly dismissive to point to the fundamentals being simple, i.e. that it's a token predict…

The fact that a theory exists does not mean that it is not garbage

So surely you can demonstrate how the brain is doing much different than this, and go ahead to collect your Nobel?

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#68
post #2

"Dark pattern" implies intentionality; that's not a technicality, it's the whole reason we have the term. This article is mostly about how sycophancy is an emergent property of LLMs. It's also 7 months old.

The intention of a system is no more, and no less than what the system does.

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 Or: The first president of the united

And that's better? Isn't that just SMS autocomplete?

Better? I am not sure. A parent comment [1] was suggesting better LLM performance using completion than using chat. UX wise it is probably worse except for power users.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46113298

Re: Sycophancy is the first LLM "dark pattern"

#70
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn’t the problem that if an LLM ‘neutralizes’ its sycophantic responses, then people will be driven to use other LLMs that don’t? This is like suggesting a bar should help solve alcoholism by serving non-alcoholic beer to people who order too much. It won’t solve alcoholism, it will just make the bar go out of business.

> This is like suggesting a bar should help solve alcoholism by serving non-alcoholic beer to people who order too much. It won’t solve alcoholism, it will just make the bar go out of business. Solving such common coordination problems is the whole point we have regulations and countries. It is illegal to sell alcohol to visibly drunk people in my country.

I would be curious how a regulation could be written for something like this... how do you make a law saying an LLM can't be a sycophant?
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