The fact that AI is “not perfect” is a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM. Idiots across the world, and people who we’d expect to know better, are making monumental decisions based on AI that isn’t perfect, and routinely “hallucinates”. We all know this.
Every time I think I’ve seen the lowest depths of mass stupidity, humanity goes lower.
Think of the dumbest person you know. Not that one. Dumber. Dumber. Yeah, that one. Now realize that ChatGPT has said “you’re absolutely right” to them no less than a half dozen times today alone.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them. If they could be like “this could be the right answer, but I wasn’t able to verify” and “no, I don’t think what you said is right, and here are reasons why”, people would cling to them less.
Put this instruction in ChatGPT, called ‘absolute mode’. You can try it on duck.ai instead of using an app or whatever.
System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
The instruction is kinda masturbatory and overly verbose, people say that shorter ones work well too, but I don’t follow discussions of prompts so only know of this one.
LowKey sprinkling my comments with error’s to make sure I’m talking with a member of the resistance instead of with a proxy of our AI overlords. Totally intended ;)
Honestly Claude is not that sycophantic. It often tells me I’m flat out wrong, and it generally challenges a lot of my decisions on projects. One thing I’ve also noticed on 4.6 is how often it will tell me “I don’t have the answer in my training data” and offer to do a web search rather than hallucinating an answer.
There is a benchmark that kinda tests that. It’s call the bullshit benchmark. Basically, LLMs are given questions that don’t make sense in different ways, and their answers are judged based on how much they pushed back or bought in. Claude is in a league of its own when it comes to pushing back on non-sense questions.
Yes i saw that benchmark and was honestly not surprised with the results. It seems that Anthropic really focused on those issues above and beyond what was done in other labs.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them
Unfortunately, we live in the attention economy. Chatbots are built to have an unending conversation with their users. During those conversations, the “guardrails” melt away. Companies could suspend user accounts on the first sign of suicidal or homicidal messaging, but choose not to. That would undercut their user numbers.
The sycopathy is because to make the chat bot (trained on Reddit posts, etc) to respond helpfully (instead of “well ackshually…”) and in a prosocial manner they’ve skewed it. What we’re interacting with is a very small subset of the personalities it can exhibit because a lot of them are extremely nasty or just unhelpful. To reduce the chance of them popping up to an acceptable level they’ve had to skew the weights so much that they become like this.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Like with all of their products, the primary goal of big tech here is to maximise engagement. More engagement means more subscriptions. People are less likely to keep talking to a chatbot that tells them they’re wrong.
The situation would probably improve somewhat if AI companies prioritised usefulness and truthfulness over engagement.
I think it’s pretty obvious that they’re instructed to be like that. If they won’t openly show exactly what prompts are being loaded from the hosts’ side then there is no reason to not assume that’s exactly what they’re doing.
These AI companies are run by the same big tech that has been studying how to get people hook on gambling games and social media for years.
I 100% agree not to mention I would like it better. Its kinda funny because every so often use them and im kinda trying to get a feel for where they are and changes and I swear briefly it actually acted a bit more like you have here but then its like they reverted to the sycophancy. Its kinda funny now because if you don’t clear it out (which from what I get will help save energy to) it will like carry stuff over from earlie and sorta get obsessed with it. I had it giving me a colonel potter summary of everything asked when I had started a convo asking about a mash episode. At other times it decides I want to be something and will be like. thats a real X move/insite/whatever. where X is something like pro or scientist or entrepenauer or whatever.
If you thought people were dumb before LLMs… just know that now those people have offloaded what little critical thinking they were capable of to these models.
The dumbest people you know are getting their opinions validated by automated sycophants.
Businesses are accustom to the privilege of hurting people to function. A few peasant sacrifices are just the cost of doing business to them, they are detached from the consequences of their actions.
I agree, a reasonable person wouldn’t have taken weapons and gone to that warehouse looking to steal a robot body for an AI. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t reasonable and get endlessly positive reinforcement without any human interaction. I do think that the problem is far more human than technical.
All tools are not equally safe nor should they all be publicly available.
A chainsaw is a tool that you might cause harm with if you use it in stupid ways. We don’t give chainsaws out to children. We don’t use chainsaws for cutting dinner.
There are human elements to the problem but that’s not a big reveal.
a tool is not convincing people to not trust their families, therapist; its not convincing people to murder themselves or someone else; its not eliminating the creativity in a process; its not costing hundreds of billions of usd; its not mass-producing propaganda
The fact that AI is “not perfect” is a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM. Idiots across the world, and people who we’d expect to know better, are making monumental decisions based on AI that isn’t perfect, and routinely “hallucinates”. We all know this.
Every time I think I’ve seen the lowest depths of mass stupidity, humanity goes lower.
Think of the dumbest person you know. Not that one. Dumber. Dumber. Yeah, that one. Now realize that ChatGPT has said “you’re absolutely right” to them no less than a half dozen times today alone.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them. If they could be like “this could be the right answer, but I wasn’t able to verify” and “no, I don’t think what you said is right, and here are reasons why”, people would cling to them less.
Has anyone made a nonsycophantic chat bot? I would actually love a chatbot that would tell me to go fuck myself if I asked it to do something inane.
Me: “Whats 9x5?”
Chatbot: “I don’t know. Try using your fingers or something?”
Edit: Wait, this is just glados.
Put this instruction in ChatGPT, called ‘absolute mode’. You can try it on duck.ai instead of using an app or whatever.
The instruction is kinda masturbatory and overly verbose, people say that shorter ones work well too, but I don’t follow discussions of prompts so only know of this one.
I am not a chatbot, but I can do daily “go fuck yourself’s” if your interested for only 9,99 a week.
14,95 for premium, which involves me stalking your onlyfans and tailor fitting my insults to your worthless meat self.
Citation needed
Ah, no, that’s a human error. Not a bot.
LowKey sprinkling my comments with error’s to make sure I’m talking with a member of the resistance instead of with a proxy of our AI overlords. Totally intended ;)
Honestly Claude is not that sycophantic. It often tells me I’m flat out wrong, and it generally challenges a lot of my decisions on projects. One thing I’ve also noticed on 4.6 is how often it will tell me “I don’t have the answer in my training data” and offer to do a web search rather than hallucinating an answer.
There is a benchmark that kinda tests that. It’s call the bullshit benchmark. Basically, LLMs are given questions that don’t make sense in different ways, and their answers are judged based on how much they pushed back or bought in. Claude is in a league of its own when it comes to pushing back on non-sense questions.
https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.html
Yes i saw that benchmark and was honestly not surprised with the results. It seems that Anthropic really focused on those issues above and beyond what was done in other labs.
With its prior government contact, maybe anthropic was tuning it to ward against all the fucking dolts in decision-making roles.
Unfortunately, we live in the attention economy. Chatbots are built to have an unending conversation with their users. During those conversations, the “guardrails” melt away. Companies could suspend user accounts on the first sign of suicidal or homicidal messaging, but choose not to. That would undercut their user numbers.
They don’t need to suspend the accounts. Just flush the session and get rid of the misguided state that it got into.
The sycopathy is because to make the chat bot (trained on Reddit posts, etc) to respond helpfully (instead of “well ackshually…”) and in a prosocial manner they’ve skewed it. What we’re interacting with is a very small subset of the personalities it can exhibit because a lot of them are extremely nasty or just unhelpful. To reduce the chance of them popping up to an acceptable level they’ve had to skew the weights so much that they become like this.
There’s no easy way around that, afaik.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Like with all of their products, the primary goal of big tech here is to maximise engagement. More engagement means more subscriptions. People are less likely to keep talking to a chatbot that tells them they’re wrong.
The situation would probably improve somewhat if AI companies prioritised usefulness and truthfulness over engagement.
I think it’s pretty obvious that they’re instructed to be like that. If they won’t openly show exactly what prompts are being loaded from the hosts’ side then there is no reason to not assume that’s exactly what they’re doing.
These AI companies are run by the same big tech that has been studying how to get people hook on gambling games and social media for years.
I 100% agree not to mention I would like it better. Its kinda funny because every so often use them and im kinda trying to get a feel for where they are and changes and I swear briefly it actually acted a bit more like you have here but then its like they reverted to the sycophancy. Its kinda funny now because if you don’t clear it out (which from what I get will help save energy to) it will like carry stuff over from earlie and sorta get obsessed with it. I had it giving me a colonel potter summary of everything asked when I had started a convo asking about a mash episode. At other times it decides I want to be something and will be like. thats a real X move/insite/whatever. where X is something like pro or scientist or entrepenauer or whatever.
If you thought people were dumb before LLMs… just know that now those people have offloaded what little critical thinking they were capable of to these models.
The dumbest people you know are getting their opinions validated by automated sycophants.
Businesses are accustom to the privilege of hurting people to function. A few peasant sacrifices are just the cost of doing business to them, they are detached from the consequences of their actions.
The simplest solution seems to be to detach CEO’s from their internal organs.
I no longer believe their heads are compatible with their bodies
What is ever perfect, how can you tell?
It’s a tool. Just like any other tool: if you use it in stupid ways you might get hurt or cause harm.
The problem, as always, seem to be human to me
I agree, a reasonable person wouldn’t have taken weapons and gone to that warehouse looking to steal a robot body for an AI. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t reasonable and get endlessly positive reinforcement without any human interaction. I do think that the problem is far more human than technical.
Me hammer ain’t out there telling me to murder people with it tho
Wait, yours doesn’t say that?
Mate, i think your hammers possessed
All tools are not equally safe nor should they all be publicly available.
A chainsaw is a tool that you might cause harm with if you use it in stupid ways. We don’t give chainsaws out to children. We don’t use chainsaws for cutting dinner.
There are human elements to the problem but that’s not a big reveal.
a tool is not convincing people to not trust their families, therapist; its not convincing people to murder themselves or someone else; its not eliminating the creativity in a process; its not costing hundreds of billions of usd; its not mass-producing propaganda
a tool provides more good than bad
That says more about you than about the topic under discussion.