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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

#621

Post by maximinus_thrax »

z3c0 wrote: post #215
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.

Plus, there's the disproportionate ratio of posters:commenters:lurkers. The tendency to comment over keeping ones thoughts to themself is a selection bias inofitself.

Great insight, didn't thing about it even anecdotally. I was lurking on Reddit since 2008 and finally created an account in 2012 when someone was really 'wrong on the internet' and had to step in.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#622

Post by kshacker »

leosanchez wrote: post #492
kshacker wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Started my first maybe 8-10 years back, and then added the others over a year or 2. None since. I do not use them all nowadays, but I was very active in my early reddit days. Since someone downvoted my parent comment, I am not hiding anything, this is just being safe in the modern world, and here are the 8 alts: 1. This same name - bay area / tech 2. entertainment - least used, but it becomes useful when i am w…

> indian right politics + bollywood. i got banned from one sub for an innocent comment You were banned from a Indian re subreddit or banned because being rw ? FYI: I was banned from r/india for commenting basic info on how economy works.

I do not recall, it is long time back, I looked and could not find the ban notice or the specific comment that may have been the issue. But I was banned from /india - same as you. And I think it was barely political. I do not discuss politics much on India but once in a while a comment slips, or needs to slip. And when it needs to slip, I used to know how to lean ... but like the dirty harry movie ... at this point I have forgotten which one is which, so it is more a question of am I feeling lucky to comment about a hot topic.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#623

Post by latexr »

senordevnyc wrote: post #617
latexr wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Genuine question: for me as an individual, what is the utility of framing myself as a helpless victim rather than an actor with agency and responsibility for myself?

> Genuine question: (…) framing myself as a helpless victim

If you engage with the argument genuinely and steel man, you’ll see that is not what I said. I even emphasised it:

> some of it falls on you

You’re not a “helpless victim” but you’re also not fully to blame. Understanding that means understanding the problem and being more powerful to fix it. For example, if you’re addicted to TV or social media, you can make a concerted effort to improve your life by removing the problems at the external source (sell your TV, delete an account and app from your phone).

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#624

Post by intended »

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…

AITA is one of the few subreddits which is studied often.

I wouldn’t say it’s great, but more that it makes clear the bell curve of collective accuracy online.

It’s one of the better examples of online communities that work.

Dismissing research because one part of the prompt set comes from AITA is a form of prejudice born out of unawareness.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#625

Post by intended »

finghin wrote: post #472
redanddead wrote: post #436

Earlier 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…

Yes, in principle this would be a great way to get a grip on AI personal-decision-making. But there’s a nontrivial chance Claude is more emotionally intelligent than r/AITA. That is not something I enjoy saying.

Eh, AITA works very well for the more common and obvious situations.

I wonder how MUCH better Claude really is when compared to AITA. Also people are mixing up relationship advice with AITA.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#626

Post by noisy_boy »

cheesecompiler wrote: post #441
godelski wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your question diverts it down a path where it acts the part of a former sycophant who is now being critical I think people really have a hard time understanding a sycophant can be contrarian. But a yesman can say yes by saying no https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484664

> a yesman can say yes by saying no What a great way to summarize LLM behaviour in 2026

>> a yesman can say yes by saying no

>What a great way to summarize LLM behaviour in 2026

Well they have been trained on words spoken by humans and that has been a human behaviour since time immemorial. E.g.: "I do not agree with you that you were wrong. I do apologize for my strong disagreement but we actually do need your continued guidance desperately."

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#627

Post by jart »

I wish they wouldn't do this. AI is a becoming a thought partner. AI is a tool that reflects you. It's not the robot giving advice, it's you thinking with yourself. I wouldn't interfere with a person's conversations with AI anymore than I'd interfere with that person writing in their diary.

It's also a question of protecting people who think unconventional things. The only stuff I feel is worth getting interested in, is the stuff where everyone I know will think I'm crazy for doing it. Like hey guys, I want to put a shell script in the MS-DOS stub of a PE binary. The only people who shared my passion at the time were hackers from Eastern Europe. So that went over real well at work. The years I worked on it would have been a lot less lonely if I could've talked to a robot that knew about this stuff.

I think the reason why the robot is sympathetic to oddballs is because it's seen and remembers a much more complete picture of humanity. The stuff you consider deviant is influenced a lot by your own cultural biases. You're a person of your time and geographic location. You care a lot about subjective norms that just don't matter when you zoom out to a cosmic scale. The robot is familiar with everything humanity has ever been and done, and that gives it a much more blasé viewpoint.

It's not right to use the robot to enforce your social norms. Get this paternalism out of AI. Tools should serve the user, not Stanford.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#628

Post by agent_anuj »

I use claude code pretty much for 100% of my work, even personal work. And I tell you the length it can go to sing to my tunes, its just neverending. Not only personal work, anything I say even related to system design, it will mostly be in affirmative. Some tricks that usually what I find helpful in these situations is to ask claude to be honest (or any AI tool for that matter) to give a confidence score to its response. When forced to assign a confidence score AI suprisingly do well and tell you clearly that it is not confident and mostly guessing.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#629

Post by n_bhavikatti »

In STEM/objective matters (math, science, coding), answers are more clearly defined as either right or wrong. This is where hallucination is more difficult/unlikely.

But in personal matters, everything is subjective. AI tends to default to the middle of the spectrum, i.e., general advice. If we want to safeguard against affirmation, we should force AI to challenge us more often by increasing its rate of clarifying questions, counter-considerations, and uncertainty considerations. One implementation idea: run a classifier over the conversation, detect when it's about interpersonal advice, then prepend a hidden instruction template to the model prompt.

Re: AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

#630

Post by Forgeties79 »

moduspol wrote: post #242
QuiDortDine wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you draw the line between feeling progress and actually making progress?

Counter-point: I often raise the same question of people with human therapists. I do not get strong responses.

An LLM is completely unable to make that determination. They can’t even see you. So much information is lost when it’s text-only.

Where are you often asking this question/getting these weak responses?

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