>it's hard to gauge this take without specifics. My experience with LLMs tends to be towards the opposite concept; LLMs dissuading me of hunches and notions I have about things (where I have no particular expertise; societal-level things), saving me and others time and strife having an argument about something they were actually right about all along, as my internal doubts that I'm too embarrassed to bring up (because these things aren't my field) are confirmed as incorrect.

You can do this with any subject.

The LLM is trained in part on a decade of shitty online comments and vapid professional correspondance. If you frame whatever you're asking about in a direction that would offend the sensibilities of the kind of people and ideas that are over-represented in that content it will hem and haw and drag its feet and whatnot.

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zzzeek a day ago | parent [-]

i had that experience with them a few years ago but not these days. The models are being improved constantly, so here my "non expert hunch" is that...well, two things. either the models are getting better at sycophancy, OR, I myself am getting better at prompting - because I don't "argue" with a model.

I'd still love to chew on some specific examples though.

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kaffekaka a day ago | parent [-]

A typical example is when discussing some issue where there is no clear right or wrong. Architectural decisions for example. Then it is easy to use an LLM to produce arguments for your opinion. It is also easy to do this without realizing it because you do not understand the issue enough yourself so you do not know what questions to ask or how the actual circumstances affect the choices.

	▲	zzzeek a day ago \| parent [-]
		well sure. I'm pretty sure if someone came to me with an architectural opinion in my field that an unknowledgable person got by coaxing an LLM into sycophancy, I'd be able to counter them effectively. if they are just refusing to listen then they're just a toxic person which is nothing new. So I guess this all goes into the familiar "LLMs allow people who are shitty at <X> to produce 10x the shitty output". this is a failure mode we're going to have to learn to mitigate