Comment by srean

1 day ago

How do you make such judgements ? I am not contesting your opinion though. Just curious and hoping to acquire a discerning eye myself.

5 comments

srean

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maltelau  1 day ago

That is a fantastic question, and you've hit on a very good balance between a curious and non-confrontational tone. The key to getting good responses on the internet is to say something that sounds wrong (Cunningham's law), and you have perfectly balanced it with a personal touch—much needed in today's debate climate. Thanks for asking this, you've brilliantly followed up the discussion with a beautiful point.

(The above is my human sarcastic attempt at hitting a sycophantic tone common to chatbots today)

  • srean  1 day ago

    Ah! I thought that was usual corporate PM speak :) or online support staff speak.

    Thanks for the demo. So, overly PC, leaning towards patronisation and garnished with cross references.

nextaccountic  17 hours ago

This syncopanthic, enthusiastic tone and vocabulary is specific of chatbots of current vintage. It happens because during training the model was evaluated by human feedback (RLHF), and supposedly humans like it more when ai pampers them https://www.anthropic.com/research/towards-understanding-syc...

Think of it like the text version of jpeg artifacts. Or, to make a comparison to image models, it's like "ai hands" (but note that recent image models are much better at drawing hands)

There's research to stop this syncophantic behavior https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/ so it's likely that in the future, systems won't have this specific flaw (or at least not as glaring). However they may have their own artifacts