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‘I felt pure, unconditional love’: the people who marry their AI chatbots
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Anyone who really likes chatbots just wants a sycophant. They like that it always agrees with them. In fact the tendency of chat bots to be sycophantic makes them less useful for actual legit uses where you need them to operate off of some sort of factual baseline, and yet it makes these types love them.
Like they'd rather agree with the user, and be wrong then disagree, and be right. lol. It makes them extremely unreliable for actual work unless you are super careful about how you phrase things. Since if you accidentally express an opinion it will try to mirror that opinion even if it's clearly incorrect once the data is looked through.
They don't have to be, right? The companies make them behave like sycophants because they think that's what customers want. But we can make better chatbots. In fact, I would expect a chatbot that just tells (what it thinks is) the truth would be simpler to make and cheaper to run.
you can run a pretty decent LLM from your home computer and tell it to act however you want. Won’t stop it from hallucinating constantly but it will at least attempt to prioritize truth.
Attempt being the keyword, once you catch onto it deliberately trying to lie to you the confidence surely must be broken, otherwise you're having to double and triple(or more) check the output which defeats the purpose for some applications.
They do that when they are trained on user feedback partially. People are more likely to describe a sycophantic reply as good, so this gets reinforced.
Ya its just how they choose to make them.
Well its a commodity to be sold at the end of the day, and who wants a robot that could contradict them? Or, heavens forbid, talk back?
Idk if thats why. Maybe partially. But for researchers, and people who actually want answers to their questions a robot that can disagree is necessary. I think the reason they have them agree so readily is because the AIs like to hallucinate. If it can't establish it's own baseline "reality" then the next best thing is to just have it operate off of what people tell it as the reality. Since if it tries to come up with an answer on its own half the time its hallucinated nonsense.