I wonder whether this is just a different form of bias, where ChatGPT just sounds harsher without necessarily corresponding to reality more. Maybe the example in the article indicates that it's more than that.
"Unwillingness to be harsh to the user" is a major source of "divorce from reality" in LLMs.
They are all way too high on the agreeableness, likely from RLHF and SFT for instruction-following. And don't get me started on what training on thumbs up/thumbs down user feedback does.
But if we look at the article's example, the two barely diverge. I don't think either of the texts are less divorced from reality than the other. The second is more "truthful" (read: cynical), but they are largely the same.
They are all way too high on the agreeableness, likely from RLHF and SFT for instruction-following. And don't get me started on what training on thumbs up/thumbs down user feedback does.