Comment by Lerc
15 hours ago
This is not sycophantic (assuming you meant that, syncophantic is not a word). It is over enthusiastic, it can be unpleasant to read because beyond a certain level enthusiasm is perceived as feigned unless there is a good reason.
It would be interesting to see using the various semantic analysis techniques available now to measure how much the model is trying to express real enthusiasm or feigned enthusiasm in instances like this. This is kind-of difficult to measure from pure output. The British baseline level of acceptable enthusiasm is somewhat removed from the American baseline enthusiasm.
Sycophantic: behaving or done in an obsequious way in order to gain advantage.
Obsequious: obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree.
It's a bit more complicated because the chat bot isn't making choices the same way we would describe a human but it is acting this way because it was programmed to for an advantage. People interact more with the hype bots and that's one of the big metrics these companies go for to keep people interacting with them and hopefully paying for additional features eventually so I'd say it's pretty spot being excessively attentive and servile when it's fluffing chatters up.
> This is not sycophantic (assuming you meant that, syncophantic is not a word)
Am I the only one who feels like this kind of tone is off-putting on HN? OP made a small typo or English may not be their first language.
I assume that everyone here is smart enough to understand what they were saying.
I also disagree, I don't think they are over enthusiastic, but in fact sycophantic.
See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840842
Obsequious is my adjective of choice for this
I would use "saccharine" or "Pollyanna" based on some of the responses I get.
Early on, ChatGPT could be tricked into being sarcastic and using many swear words. I rewrote the prompt and dialed it back a bit. It made ChatGPT have a sense of humor. It was refreshing when it stopped acting like it was reading a script like a low level technician at Comcast.
It is "cloying"
Sycophantic is obviously a word, because we understand what it means.
Furthermore, it obviously hasn't been a word since at least 1800:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_e...
On the other hand https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=syncophantic&y...
GOP wrote syncophantic, with an n. Which is not a word. Well, not a known word at least.
They were pointing out a typo ("syncophantic").
It wasn't so much pointing it out as a typo as making myself clear.
When suggesting a word is not what the writer meant, when it was also not the word that the writer wrote, it seemed wise to clarify exactly what I was talking about.