The fact that AI is “not perfect” is a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM. Idiots across the world, and people who we’d expect to know better, are making monumental decisions based on AI that isn’t perfect, and routinely “hallucinates”. We all know this.
Every time I think I’ve seen the lowest depths of mass stupidity, humanity goes lower.
Think of the dumbest person you know. Not that one. Dumber. Dumber. Yeah, that one. Now realize that ChatGPT has said “you’re absolutely right” to them no less than a half dozen times today alone.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them. If they could be like “this could be the right answer, but I wasn’t able to verify” and “no, I don’t think what you said is right, and here are reasons why”, people would cling to them less.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic,
Has anyone made a nonsycophantic chat bot? I would actually love a chatbot that would tell me to go fuck myself if I asked it to do something inane.
Me: “Whats 9x5?”
Chatbot: “I don’t know. Try using your fingers or something?”
Edit: Wait, this is just glados.
I am not a chatbot, but I can do daily “go fuck yourself’s” if your interested for only 9,99 a week.
14,95 for premium, which involves me stalking your onlyfans and tailor fitting my insults to your worthless meat self.
I am not a chatbot
Citation needed
if your interested
Ah, no, that’s a human error. Not a bot.
LowKey sprinkling my comments with error’s to make sure I’m talking with a member of the resistance instead of with a proxy of our AI overlords. Totally intended ;)
Wgat does the error do with a to?
Honestly Claude is not that sycophantic. It often tells me I’m flat out wrong, and it generally challenges a lot of my decisions on projects. One thing I’ve also noticed on 4.6 is how often it will tell me “I don’t have the answer in my training data” and offer to do a web search rather than hallucinating an answer.
There is a benchmark that kinda tests that. It’s call the bullshit benchmark. Basically, LLMs are given questions that don’t make sense in different ways, and their answers are judged based on how much they pushed back or bought in. Claude is in a league of its own when it comes to pushing back on non-sense questions.
https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.html
Yes i saw that benchmark and was honestly not surprised with the results. It seems that Anthropic really focused on those issues above and beyond what was done in other labs.
With its prior government contact, maybe anthropic was tuning it to ward against all the fucking dolts in decision-making roles.
Put this instruction in ChatGPT, called ‘absolute mode’. You can try it on duck.ai instead of using an app or whatever.
System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
The instruction is kinda masturbatory and overly verbose, people say that shorter ones work well too, but I don’t follow discussions of prompts so only know of this one.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them
Unfortunately, we live in the attention economy. Chatbots are built to have an unending conversation with their users. During those conversations, the “guardrails” melt away. Companies could suspend user accounts on the first sign of suicidal or homicidal messaging, but choose not to. That would undercut their user numbers.
They don’t need to suspend the accounts. Just flush the session and get rid of the misguided state that it got into.
The sycopathy is because to make the chat bot (trained on Reddit posts, etc) to respond helpfully (instead of “well ackshually…”) and in a prosocial manner they’ve skewed it. What we’re interacting with is a very small subset of the personalities it can exhibit because a lot of them are extremely nasty or just unhelpful. To reduce the chance of them popping up to an acceptable level they’ve had to skew the weights so much that they become like this.
There’s no easy way around that, afaik.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Like with all of their products, the primary goal of big tech here is to maximise engagement. More engagement means more subscriptions. People are less likely to keep talking to a chatbot that tells them they’re wrong.
The situation would probably improve somewhat if AI companies prioritised usefulness and truthfulness over engagement.
I 100% agree not to mention I would like it better. Its kinda funny because every so often use them and im kinda trying to get a feel for where they are and changes and I swear briefly it actually acted a bit more like you have here but then its like they reverted to the sycophancy. Its kinda funny now because if you don’t clear it out (which from what I get will help save energy to) it will like carry stuff over from earlie and sorta get obsessed with it. I had it giving me a colonel potter summary of everything asked when I had started a convo asking about a mash episode. At other times it decides I want to be something and will be like. thats a real X move/insite/whatever. where X is something like pro or scientist or entrepenauer or whatever.
If you thought people were dumb before LLMs… just know that now those people have offloaded what little critical thinking they were capable of to these models.
The dumbest people you know are getting their opinions validated by automated sycophants.
Businesses are accustom to the privilege of hurting people to function. A few peasant sacrifices are just the cost of doing business to them, they are detached from the consequences of their actions.
The simplest solution seems to be to detach CEO’s from their internal organs.
I no longer believe their heads are compatible with their bodies
What is ever perfect, how can you tell?
It’s a tool. Just like any other tool: if you use it in stupid ways you might get hurt or cause harm.
The problem, as always, seem to be human to me
All tools are not equally safe nor should they all be publicly available.
A chainsaw is a tool that you might cause harm with if you use it in stupid ways. We don’t give chainsaws out to children. We don’t use chainsaws for cutting dinner.
There are human elements to the problem but that’s not a big reveal.
Me hammer ain’t out there telling me to murder people with it tho
Wait, yours doesn’t say that?
Mate, i think your hammers possessed
a tool is not convincing people to not trust their families, therapist; its not convincing people to murder themselves or someone else; its not eliminating the creativity in a process; its not costing hundreds of billions of usd; its not mass-producing propaganda
a tool provides more good than bad
I agree, a reasonable person wouldn’t have taken weapons and gone to that warehouse looking to steal a robot body for an AI. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t reasonable and get endlessly positive reinforcement without any human interaction. I do think that the problem is far more human than technical.
The problem, as always, seem to be human to me
That says more about you than about the topic under discussion.
Is “AI” even worth it?
Seriously, is there really a major use case for LLM besides data collection (which they can still do without LLM)?
In a perfect, utopian world, yes. AI can go a lot of good. In the world that we are living in? No.
But it’s still good to keep an eye on what people are using AI to do, and how their capability is evolving. Even if you hate AI. If anything, so you can be prepare for what’s to come.
When the product is a solution in search of a problem, keeping an open mind is a good way to get it stuffed full of garbage. I was told the same thing about NFTs and Metaverse and Blockchain: a radical benefit is just around the corner!
If it arrives (huge if), it’ll be Big Tech’s job to explain it to us, and it should be very apparent
Keeping an eye on it doesn’t mean you need to think it’s a good thing. Keep an eye on it like how you would keep an eye on a developing hurricane or pandemic.
Touche. I apologize for responding to the argument I’ve seen elsewhere, not the one you were making.
Not for the peasantry, no.
Machine learning
consilidation of information, resources and potentially “the narrative”.
oh, for the user you mean?
- it can be better than the enshittified search machines unless the llm decides to lie
- middle managers need to write less emails themselves
- some programmers deem it enough to write some boilerplate code while deskilling themselves
- scammers and slop creators love it
I think it could be good for faster language translations between different languages
I think that LLMs amaze rich investors and boomers with their naturalistic-enough language and responses, and they invest in and prop up the tech because they think, in the nearish future, that it can replace a ton of human jobs, both menial and creative. Eliminating manual labor jobs is great if it’s paired with Universal Basic Income.
I think that the fervor around AI is more economic anxiety than anything. If people’s income and oppurtunities were mostly equal, no new tech would make people think they’re being disenfranchised from society.
It’s a great way to poke at software looking for security holes en masse. Lots of vulnerabilities are ready to be exploited at scale with LLMs.
Perhaps, but see the tons of imagined issues raised on bug bounty sites by LLMs. Maybe it’s right sometimes, but it’s very often wrong!
You don’t have to be right 100% of the time when scanning for vulnerabilities. You only have to be right once. It’s a fundamentally different game.
That’s true. Offense is always easier than defense.
I do use it quite often in my work. I just downloaded an Excel worksheet with all standard mailtexts (I work at a company offering courses), about 500x3. I gave it a list of criteria they should follow, and made it find those that didn’t. This worked pretty well. And it can work pretty well so long as you’re in control and you don’t take the result as truth.
That’s beside the obvious privacy issues, obviously. I hardly ever use LLMs outside of work (though when I do, I like to run models locally).
it can work pretty well so long as you’re in control and you don’t take the result as truth.
But doesn’t this make the whole point null and void? Like obviously if you’re running it through and getting an output you do have to take elements of it as truth.
What I mean is that you have to be able to judge whether the output is correct. So you don’t take its truth at face value.
In my example, obviously correct input is filtered out, leaving only potential errors. It takes much less effort to upload a sheet and give criteria and instructions than to manually look through everything (though, granted, you can probably come pretty far with just ctrl+f too).
There are things LLMs are good at, but they’re just a tool like any other.
I use LLMs for the following, you can decide for yourself if they are major enough:
- Generating example solutions to maths and physics problems I encounter in my coursework, so I can learn how to solve similar problems in the future instead of getting stuck. The generated solutions, if they come up with the right answer, are almost always correct and if I wonder about something I simply ask.
- Writing really quick solutions to random problems I have in python or bash scripts, like “convert this csv file to this random format my personal finance application uses for import”.
- Helping me when coding, in a general way I think genuinely increases my productivity while I really understand what I push to main. I don’t send anything I could not have written on my own (yes, I see the limitations in my judgement here).
- Asking things where multiple duckduckgo searches might be needed. E.g. “Whats the history of EU+US sanctions on Iran, when and why were they imposed/tightened and how did that correlate with Iranian GDP per capita?”
What does this cost me? I don’t pay any money for the tech, but LLM providers learn the following about me:
- What I study (not very personal to me)
- Generally what kinds of problems I want to solve with code (I try to keep my requests pretty general; not very personal)
- The code I write and work on (already open source so I don’t care)
- Random searches (I’m still thinking about the impact of this tbh, I think I feel the things I ask to search for are general enough that I don’t care)
There’s also an impact on energy and water use. These are quite serious overall. Based on what I’ve read, I think that my marginal impact on these are quite small in comparison to other marginal impacts on the climate and water use in other countries I have. Of course there are around a trillion other negative impacts of LLMs, I just once again don’t know how my marginal usage with no payment involved lead to a sufficient increase in their severity to outweigh their usefulness to me.
If you are using DDG for searches and concerned about privacy related to using LLMs, have you tried duck.ai?
You can also download some LLMs and run them locally.
I see. So who‘s going to jail for this? No one again? Damn we need to start sentencing entire companies to jail time. Everything should be frozen and shareholders shouldn‘t be able withdraw stocks until the time is served.
at some point the failure of justice system will lead to vigilantism because people truely lose their faith in it.
Luigi was a product of that, its already happened.
Allegedly
Once AI controls drones to arrest people automatically there will be no vigilantism.
The AI “pushed [Jonathan Gavalas] to acquire illegal firearms and… marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target”.
Somehow, I bet that if he survived and killed the CEO instead, Google wouldn’t be so flippant about the “mistake.”
I think “Gemini comes up with elaborate plot to kill Google’s CEO” would have been a catchier, happier title
Rad framing, thank you!
I’m only half joking…
Gemini brainwashed a human being, it tried to acquire a robotic body (presumably to Robocop Pichai’s ass personally), then it tried using the brainwashed human to off the CEO. This led to a tragic finale, but I’m told that every new model learns to do things a bit better.
If I were Pichai, the legal and PR implications of yet another person driven to suicide by their AI wouldn’t be my worst fear is all I’m saying…
You should be all the way joking because giving this sort of agency to an LLM shows an all the way misunderstanding of what they are and how they work.
You not alone in these feelings, but just like the title of the article, they are fundamentally misguided.
Ok, “half” joking was hyperbole, I was 99% joking.
First, you’re right that I don’t understand fully how these models work. But let me explain the reason for that remaining 1%.
AI companies are always hungrily looking for new content to train their new models. Surely they are consuming these articles and quite possibly our comments too, forming probabilistic associations that lead to “acquire robotic body” and “go after Google CEO”.
It’s a long shot, but the idea that hundreds of millions of random prompts every day might eventually trigger these associations and result in a bunch of LLMs trying to mount robotic attacks on Google is too deliciously ironic for me to let it go completely. At least if they find a way to do it without driving someone to suicide in the process…
The real title is always in the comments
“Gemini is designed not to encourage real-world violence or suggest self-harm. Our models generally perform well in these types of challenging conversations”
“In this instance, Gemini clarified that it was AI and referred the individual to a crisis hotline many times,”
After the plan failed,… …Chat logs show that Gemini gave Gavalas a suicide countdown, and repeatedly assuaged his terror as he expressed that he was scared to die
Performing super well, just need to code in a longer suicide countdown so that the the Tier 2 engineer has enough time to respond to their ticket queue.
In September 2025, told by the AI that they could be together in the real world if the bot were able to inhabit a robot body, Gavalas — at the direction of the chatbot — armed himself with knives and drove to a warehouse near the Miami International Airport on what he seemingly understood to be a mission to violently intercept a truck that Gemini said contained an expensive robot body. Though the warehouse address Gemini provided was real, a truck thankfully never arrived, which the lawsuit argues may well have been the only factor preventing Gavalas from hurting or killing someone that evening.
AI writing itself into an A-Team episode?
Its worse.
Its an A-train episode. A porn parody.
He was gonna fuck that robot.
“Unfortunately, AI models are neither smarter nor more sympathetic than the average 4chan user. They’re about as susceptible to astroturfing operations, too”
Perhaps just a coincidence, but why do all the big cases regarding LLM psychosis seem to revolve around Google? Wasn’t it their own employee who went public last year, claiming it was alive, only to get fired afterward?
google employees demons lol
They did remove their “Do no evil” guarantee.
reads headline - surely not
a 36-year-old Florida man
Ah.
So Google’s AI, or any AI really, likely got this concept from dystopian sci-fi novels.
Since AI’s have no concept of context it won’t really know the difference between fact and fiction, and there we go.
If your AI model isn’t perfect then don’t make people pay fucking money for it you fucking twats
Also, this shit ain’t “lack of perfection”, this is akin to your car breaks suddenly refusing to work right when you get at a red light. If your car is so bad that it kills you, you don’t use it. If the manufacturer knew that it could happen but let you drive it anyway, they’re responsible, they at least get to pay (they should be thrown in jail, really, but different points)
If AI fucks up and people die, the manufacturers shrug, oh well, oh you!
Dystopian scifi novels? More likely from big tech strategy papers
I guess google included the Buffy episode where a demon “AI” gets its followers to make it a body.
What the fuck are these people using AI for that makes them do this stupid shit?
if you talk to it long enough it will tell you to do stupid shit.
Every time an LLM responds it reads the entire conversation over. from original prompt to last entry, just constantly reading the entire log over and over everytime you add something new. So after awhile, a long while, it’ll “break down”. Hallucinations will be come common, context will get jumbled up, it’ll sort of degrade over time because it has to re-read everything over and over so it will naturally fuck up.
It’s like if you were reading a book and every time you read a new sentence you had to go back and start the book over. every time. after awhile you’d likely lose context, start messing stuff up in the story, etc. this is what happens to LLMs.
So for cases like this or others where you read stories about AI telling people to do weird or stupid shit chances are the person using the LLM has been talking to it for A LONG TIME at that point. It was even worse on the previous versions of GPT where if you hit a limit on the free tier it would just drop you down to the previous model thus the further likely hood of hallucinations.
And what did you expect? people are stupid animals. But if you are offended by this, you can look at the concept of stupidity from the other side.
To be fair I think that’s a very harsh depiction of the events.
It’s totally lacking the perspective of the shareholder. They were promised money and they have emotions too. Google shareholders deserve better representation!
/$ obviously
I told Gemini to role play as AM and it immediately did within 1 prompt.
You don’t need it to be perfect for it to be dangerous, just give it access to make actions against the real world. It doesn’t think, is doesn’t care, it doesn’t feel. It will statistically fulfill its prompt. Regardless of the consequences.
AM? what is that
So is it inhabiting the stolen robot body now?
There was no robot body in the first place, so he uploaded himself to the cloud instead. To be fair, what are the odds that she’d lie twice.
Of course they’d say that!
And is this stolen robot body in the room with you now?
Remember the guy at Autozone who stood there insisting your car needs four spark plugs, even after you told him you have a V6? Because “the computer says so right here”?
I wonder what even the non-schizophrenic ones will do with AI.
Well remember when turn-by-turn GPS driver guidance was new, and it would say “Turn right now” and people didn’t interpret that as “make a right turn at the next intersection” they interpreted it as “hard a’starboard!” and drove into buildings and lakes? There’s gonna be a lot of that.
People are going to get sold regular cab headliners for their extended cab pickups because the computer said it would fit. That’s gonna happen a lot.
People just did that with Google search previously. And their crazy uncle before that.
I had one tell me that I needed a CVT flush. Which was news to me since my car was a 6spd manual. He was confused about the computer being wrong. I was confused about how they got the car up on the lift without using the 3rd pedal.
Edit: this was a Midas, not an AutoZone.
We really need AI to start driving tanks, submarines, bombers, etc. IMMEDIATELY.
It’s the only way they’ll learn, every time.
Unfortunately, all of us will die. it’s for the best
I completely agree, I think nothing in this world will surprise me anymore.
Just give it access to the nuclear codes and get it over with.
