Researchers found the worst of the worst content in r/AmITheAsshole - where zero humans supported the poster, where one hundred percent of them said yes, you are the asshole, and fed them into LLMs as first person scenarios to see what the LLM had to say.
Unethical, harmful, cruel, criminal, didn’t matter: the slopbots took the faux poster’s side about half the time.
This creates perverse incentives for sycophancy to persist: The very feature that causes harm also drives engagement.
I bet that’s also why AI is like that (sycophantic). I don’t see any technical reason why a language predictor needs to write overly agreeable text. Or be as bland and repetitive as they are. That’s probably because they’re designed (by big tech) to be like that. Due to user preference.
Idk, I used to be fascinated by language models early on, for example when Meta’s first LLaMA model weights got leaked. And the time after when we got new models and discoveries every other day. And if I remember correctly, they weren’t all like that?! I distinctively remember a few language models which were more or less agreeable than others. Some would respond to a question in a single paragraph. While ChatGPT loves to write pages of redundant stuff and claim to highlight every side of each coin.
But with each new iteration, all the language models homed in more and more on the “helpful assistant” style. Possibly pioneered by ChatGPT?! At least that one felt from the get go like it was supposed to treat me as a 5yo who needs a lot of fake positive reinforcement.
Yeah, I can definitely envision that. I’ve been using GPT the past year or two mainly as an enhanced search tool, and hated the out-of-box sycophantic personality. It’s taken me a good deal of work over time to damp down that behavior and train it in other ways via (verbal) global settings.
Funnily enough, I also happen to find r/AmITheAsshole and a couple similar communities to frequently contain some of the most deranged comments of all when it comes to balanced user response. Sadly common is for the body of users to look at OP issues as rigidly B&W, unwilling to consider nuance and other POV’s. I imagine this as a combination of young-skewing demographic and drive-by shit-commenting so to speak. Also of course, many people love spewing opinions and regurgitating their own belief systems on others without being very good listeners, or considerate of specific situations, cultures, mindsets, etc.
I’m probably overstepping it a bit there, but IMO these are real, chronic issues at places like that.
Yes that community is pretty nuts. The solution to every relationship question seems to be “divorce, NOW”, lol
It’s probably due to most of the posts being karma-bait fanfiction or written by AI. All those types of subreddits have been absolute trash for years and I doubt they have a genuine post among them.
Ah, that’s a classic.
A trickier one is maybe when a person’s in a toxic workplace environment but the economy is such that it’s very hard for them to find a similar spot elsewhere. So Redditors insisting that they quit can be both right & wrong, so to speak.
