I'm not sure why you think this is just a prompt thing. It's not. Sycophancy is a problem with GPT-4o, whatever magic incantations you provide. On the flip side, Sydney, was anything but sycophantic and was more than happy to literally ignore users wholesale or flip out on them from time to time. I mean just think about it for a few seconds. If eliminating this behavior was as easy as Microsoft changing the early document, why not just do that and be done with it ?

The document or whatever you'd like to call it is only one part of the story.

I'm not sure why you think-I-think it's just a prompt thing.

I brought up prompts as a convenient way to demonstrate that a magic-trick is being performed, not because prompts are the only way for the magician to run into trouble with the illusion. It's sneaky, since it's a trick homo narrans play on ourselves all the time.

> The document or whatever you'd like to call it is only one part of the story.

Everybody knows that the weights matter. That's why we get stories where the sky is generally blue instead of magenta.

That's separate from the distinction between the mind (if any) of an LLM-author versus the mind (firmly fictional, even if possibly related) that we impute when seeing the output (narrated or acted) of a particular character.