alt Hacker NewsI don't think these LLMs were explicitly designed based on the CEO's detailed input that boils down to 'reproduce these servile yes-men in LLM form please'.
Which makes it more interesting. Apparently reddit was a particularly hefty source for most LLMs; your average reddit conversation is absolutely nothing like this.
Separate observation: That kind of semi-slimey obsequious behaviour annoys me. Significantly so. It raises my hackles; I get the feeling I'm being sold something on the sly. Even if I know the content in between all the sycophancy is objectively decent, my instant emotional response is negative and I have to use my rational self to dismiss that part of the ego.
But I notice plenty of people around me that respond positively to it. Some will even flat out ignore any advice if it is not couched in multiple layers of obsequious deference.
Thus, that raises a question for me: Is it innate? Are all people placed on a presumably bell-curve shaped chart of 'emotional response to such things', with the bell curve quite smeared out?
Because if so, that would explain why some folks have turned into absolute zealots for the AI thing, on both sides of it. If you respond negatively to it, any serious attempt to play with it should leave you feeling like it sucks to high heavens. And if you respond positively to it - the reverse.
Idle musings.
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This is a really interesting observation, as someone who feels disquiet as the obsequiousness, but have been getting used to just mentally skipping over the first paragraph that's put an interesting spin on my behaviour
Thanks!
It’s not innate. Purpose trained llm can be quite stubborn and not very polite.
The servile stuff was trained into them with RLHF with the trainers largely being low-wage workers in the global south. That's also where some of the other stuff like excessive em-dash stuff came from. I think it's a combination of those workers anticipating how they would be expected to respond by a first-world employer, and also explicit instructions given to them about how the robot should be trained.