Annoyed ChatGPT users complain about bot’s relentlessly positive tone

Users complain of new "sycophancy" streak where ChatGPT thinks everything is brilliant.

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[Erbium168]

Were you expecting Marvin (the Paranoid Android) perhaps?

As a British person, we would prefer Marvin. There's a reason D N Adams created and sent up the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and its robots with relentlessly upbeat Real People Personalities, and then mentions that come the revolution they were indeed the first ones to be put up against a wall and shot.

We would positively welcome an AI that when asked a question starts off "You're not going to like it..."

 

[Erbium168]

I genuinely wonder what they can actually do with models that remain largely black boxes other than add more background instructions to the initializing prompt to try and establish guardrails.

We know that even having the models 'reveal' their reasoning steps is hardly bulletproof and one of the whole points (both good and bad) about these things is that they're non-deterministic. There's no simple feature flag to toggle, no code to comment out.

It's also wild to me that they're asking businesses and investors to sign onto their platforms when you can have hugely impactful behavioral shifts just kinda...happen. This isn't the first time (remember the laziness thing?) and it won't be the last time that LLM 'productivity' is adversely impacted for unclear reasons.

It's like betting everything on a specific horse and rider in a race, but the horse is known to have spurious, uh...outbursts. Sometimes on the track.

It is in fact yet another pseudo-scientific con at the production (not the research) level. One step up from the perpetual announcements of water-fuelled motors, one step below testing your DNA in the current state of knowledge.
But what do you expect? As China relentless overhauls, the US is increasingly dependent on IP and technological breakthroughs to stay ahead. And since mobile computing and graphics these have been thin on the ground. Quantum computing is nowhere near deploying, Tesla self-driving doesn't. The ultimate tech showman, Musk, has been trying to pivot to space and AI, but as things stand they aren't going to avoid the Trumpocalypse and the Bonfire of the Van(ce)ities.

 

[Erbium168]

I was hoping that somebody would chime in with a Douglas Adams reference. My first thought when I read the headline was that our future might really include things like elevators that sigh with satisfaction at having delivered us successfully to our floor. As usual, Douglas Adams was ahead of his time...

Aldous Huxley beat him to it. In Brave New World there is limited automation so that the upper classes (the alphas and betas) will have things to do, managing the gammas and deltas. But the gammas and deltas are scientifically raised to be happy with their lot and enjoy their simple tasks. An elevator could be controlled by buttons, but instead a happy delta takes it up and down all day before going off to simple communal games with other deltas.
It may be even more prophetic than H²G², especially the part where the world controllers have reduced the population to a sustainable minimum to keep them in their highly privileged lifestyle.

 

[Erbium168]

On the plus side, lately I've been able to immediately tell when my boss sends me something straight from chatgpt becuase of its chipper tone and frequent use of emojis that are uncharastic of a gruff man in his late 50's.

I am quite sure that had we had this in the early 1990s I would have known because of the superior literacy. (How does a CEO with a degree in journalism manage to be semi-literate?)

 

[Erbium168]

I've been in journalism since the '90s. At no point did a CEO anywhere I worked (nor publishers for privately held companies) have a journalism degree. They have MBAs and no understanding about how news works, because getting it right is a pittance against making more money.

I went to a conference for college newspaper editors where https://www.amazon.com/s?k=when+mbas+rule+the+newsroom&crid=57BQ07SZLMG7 was included in the goodie bag.

We fucking knew about this and actively chose to ignore it. It remains one of my only physical books.

Context helps. This was a manufacturing company. The CEO had risen without trace through relationships. Nothing to do with publishing.

 

[Erbium168]

That attitude got them $40 Billion in investment from Softbank. Masayoshi Son (Softbank chairmain and CEO) has talked at length about how much he's enjoyed talking to Chat GPT late at night.

Soft (in the head) bank? I wish I had $40G to invest that I could direct towards a virtual mistress.

Though, looking back at history, many large scale errors of judgement have been made by people trying to keep live ones happy.