[kypro]

I also find when it disagrees with you it does so in a really patronising way.

In my experience it will always first affirm me for having my own opinions, but then go on to explain why I'm wrong as if I'm a child or idiot – often by making appeals to authority or emotion to "disprove" me.

I wish they were designed to not have opinions on things. Just give me the data and explain why most people disagree with me without implying I'm some uneducated idiot because I don't 100% align with what most people think on a certain topic.

I always thought this would be one of the benefits of AI... That it would be more interested in assigning probabilities to truth statements given current data, rather than resolving on a single position in the way humans do. Instead LLMs seem to be much more opinionated and less rationally so than most humans.

[superb_dev]

It doesn’t have an opinion, it’s just pretending to have an opinion. You can tell it to think something else and (in my experience) it will happily oblige and admit that it’s wrong. That’s not an opinion.

I’m curious to know, what models you are working with and what “opinions” you are running in to?

[bandrami]

It's not even "pretending"; that's still anthropomorphizing it. It's generating a stream of text that shares certain probabilistic characteristics with streams of texts it has seen in the past.

Which does make its sycophancy kind of weird, since it clearly didn't pick that up agreeability from scraping Internet message boards.

[abraxas]

Maybe it did. A lot of message boards where like minded people cluster often devolve into mutual adoration clubs.

[rainonmoon]

I'd be curious to know what your success rate is with altering the system prompt. I'd be surprised if this wasn't more of an issue with the application layer, and therefore easily modifiable, than the LLM.