> My understanding is that the former (sucking up) is a personality trait, substantially influenced by the desire to facilitate engagement

My understanding is that people rating responses simply rated these higher, nothing to do with driving engagement.

> The latter (making up facts), I do not think is correct to ascribe to a personality trait (like compulsive liar); instead, it is because the fitness function of LLMs drive them to produce some answer and they do not know what they're talking about, but produce strings of text based on statistics.

It seems like you could perfectly describe this using personality. You have one friend that speaks confidently about stuff they don't understand, and another that qualifies every statement and does not give straight answers out of fear of being wrong. Again, this dysfunction could be attributed to what users rate higher.

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delusional 6 days ago | parent [-]

> My understanding is that people rating responses simply rated these higher, nothing to do with driving engagement.

That happens to be a distinction without a consequence. If the people rating are voluntary users, then the more engaged users are going to have more weight in the ratings, simply because they vote more. The ratings will therefore statistically skew towards higher engagement.

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zeroCalories 6 days ago | parent [-]

I think that's a very important distinction, because it speaks to the intentions of the creators. It's not being designed this way, it's an accident.

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delusional 6 days ago | parent [-]

I believe you would have to assume an inordinate amount of naivite, bordering on stupidity, by the developers to suggest they didn't know this is exactly the outcome. They are statistics experts. They know about survivorship bias.

	▲	zeroCalories 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Of course they were aware of the possibility, but there's not many good measures of quality.