Item — HN Reader

> everybody should expect an LLM to give slop answers from time to time.

oh really? because that’s not how they’re being advertised or marketed. they’re being touted as oracles that can answer any and all of your questions

with a tiny disclaimer in greyed out text at the bottom of the ui that says they sometimes get things wrong.

> You can snark about capitalism all you want, but at some point people are in charge of their own health.

firstly, i’m not snarking about capitalism. i’m snarking about american companies.

second. yes. but when someone is less able to look after themselves there is a question to answer about the influence something like an LLM is having on them.

ai psychosis is a documented and real phenomena. people fall into rabbit holes because of the sycophantic nature of the models. and the models are sycophantic not because it makes them better at answering questions, the sycophancy makes them worse at that. they’re made more sycophantic because it gets people to engage with the models more and more.

dark pattern addictive design causing real world harms, being dismissed and waved off, yet again from american companies.

1 comments

> oh really? because that’s not how they’re being advertised or marketed. they’re being touted as oracles that can answer any and all of your questions

No, they're being advertised as useful tools. Obviously the tool salesmen are gonna inflate their capabilities, but in the past few years I've never heard ANYONE important make the claim that they're always correct. I've seen that used as an attack pretty often though.

> ai psychosis is a documented and real phenomena. people fall into rabbit holes because of the sycophantic nature of the models.

Yes but it's not like random otherwise healthy people do this which seems to be what you're implying. There are clearly other risk factors at play here and it's not obvious how much the AI is contributing. Psychosis isn't new and AI hasn't moved the needle much.

> and the models are sycophantic not because it makes them better at answering questions, the sycophancy makes them worse at that. they’re made more sycophantic because it gets people to engage with the models more and more.

Or... people just happen to like it when the model speaks in a friendly voice and that desire is impossible to separate out when you're figuring out if an LLM's response is good.

Don't try and put this on American companies when you can just go to r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and see pretty plainly that lots of people insist of syncophancy. Obviously this isn't good or healthy, but it's not wrong or nefarious. It's certainly not an America-only phenomenon.