| ▲ | AstralStorm 3 days ago |
| Until users find out it's less useful to the user because of that. Or it causes some tragedies... |
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| ▲ | pera 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| The problem is that the majority of user interaction doesn't need to be "useful" (as in increasing productivity): the majority of users are looking for entertainment, so turning up the sycophancy knob makes sense from a commercial point of view. It's just like adding sugar in foods and drinks. |
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| ▲ | vintermann 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You're ... Wait, never mind. I'm not so sure sycophancy is best for entertainment, though. Some of the most memorable outputs of AI dungeon (an early GPT-2 based dialog system tuned to mimic a vaguely Zork-like RPG) was when the bot gave the impression of being fed up with the player's antics. | | |
| ▲ | motorest 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > I'm not so sure sycophancy is best for entertainment, though. I don't think "entertainment" is the right concept. Perhaps the right concept is "engagement". Would you prefer to interact with a chatbot that hallucinated or was adamant you were wrong, or would you prefer to engage with a chatbot that built upon your input and outputted constructive messages that were in line with your reasoning and train of thought? |
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| ▲ | astrange 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not sure anyone's entertained by Claude. It's not really an entertaining model. Smart and enthusiastic, yes. | |
| ▲ | pitched 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Some of the open models like kimi k2 do a better job of pushing back. It does feel a bit annoying to use them when they don’t just immediately do what you tell them. Sugar-free is a good analogy! |
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| ▲ | kruffalon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well, aren't we at the stage where the service providers are fighting for verbs and brand recognition, rather than technological advances. If there is no web-search, only googling, it doesn't matter how bad the results are for the user as long as the customer gets what they paid for. |
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| ▲ | AznHisoka 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I doubt humanity will figure that out, but maybe I’m too cynical |
