[mindslight]

These quotes are harrowing, as I encounter the exact same ego-stroking sentence structures routinely from ChatGPT [0]. I'm sure anyone who uses it for much of anything does as well. Apparently for anything you might want to do, the machine will confirm your biases and give you a pep talk. It's like the creators of these "AI" products took direct inspiration from the name Black Mirror.

[0] I generally use it for rapid exploration of design spaces and rubber ducking, in areas where I actually have actual knowledge and experience.

[unyttigfjelltol]

The chats are more useful when it doesn't confirm my bias. I used LLMs less when they started just agreeing with everything I say. Some of my best experiences with LLMs involve it resisting my point of view.

There should be a dashboard indicator or toggle to visually warn when the bot is just uncritically agreeing, and if you were to asked it to "double check your work" it would immediately disavow its responses.

[duskwuff]

> There should be a dashboard indicator or toggle to visually warn when the bot is just uncritically agreeing

I would be very surprised if it were possible to reliably detect this. In fact, I'm not certain it's a distinction which can meaningfully be made.

[aspaviento]

I usually ask it to challenge its last response when it acts too agreeable.

[orionsbelt]

All models are not the same. GPT 4o, and specific versions of it, were particularly sycophantic, and it’s something models still do a bit too much, but the models are getting better at this and will continue to do so.

[mindslight]

That sycophancy has recently come roaring back for me with GPT-5. In many ways it's worse because it's stating factual assertions that play to the ego (eg "you're thinking about this exactly like an engineer would") rather than mere social ingratiation. I do need to seriously try out other models, but if I had that kind of extra time to play around I'd probably be leaning on "AI" less to begin with.

[costco]

Protip: Settings -> Personalization -> Base style and tone -> Efficient largely solves this for ChatGPT

[InsideOutSanta]

What does "better" mean? From the provider's point of view, better means "more engagement," which means that the people who respond well to sycophantic behavior will get exactly that.

[mikkupikku]

I had an hour long argument with ChatGPT about whether or not Sotha Sil exploited the Fortify Intelligence loop. The bot was firmly disagreeing with me the whole time. This was actually much more entertaining than if it had been agreeing with me.

I hope they do bias these things to push back more often. It could be good for their engagement numbers I think, and far more importantly it would probably drive fewer people into psychosis.

[dragonwriter]

> What does "better" mean?

More tuned to appeal to the median customer's tastes without being hitting an a kind of rhetorical “uncanny valley”.

(This probably makes them more dangerous, since fewer people will be turned off by peripheral things like unnaturally repetitive sentence structure.)

[refulgentis]

There’s a bunch to explore on this but im thinking this is a good entry point. NYT instead of OpenAI docs or blogs because it’s a 3rd party, and NYT was early on substantively exploring this, culminating in this article.

Regardless the engagement thing is dark and hangs over everything, the conclusion of the article made me :/ re: this (tl;dr this surprised them, they worked to mitigate, but business as usual wins, to wit, they declared a “code red” re: ChatGPT usage nearly directly after finally getting an improved model out that they worked hard on)

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/technology/openai-chatgpt...

Some pull quotes:

“ Experts agree that the new model, GPT-5, is safer. In October, Common Sense Media and a team of psychiatrists at Stanford compared it to the 4o model it replaced. GPT-5 was better at detecting mental health issues, said Dr. Nina Vasan, the director of the Stanford lab that worked on the study. She said it gave advice targeted to a given condition, like depression or an eating disorder, rather than a generic recommendation to call a crisis hotline.

“It went a level deeper to actually give specific recommendations to the user based on the specific symptoms that they were showing,” she said. “They were just truly beautifully done.”

The only problem, Dr. Vasan said, was that the chatbot could not pick up harmful patterns over a longer conversation, with many exchanges.”

“[An] M.I.T. lab that did [a] earlier study with OpenAI also found that the new model was significantly improved during conversations mimicking mental health crises. One area where it still faltered, however, was in how it responded to feelings of addiction to chatbots.”

[falkensmaize]

"will continue to do so"

What evidence do you have for this statement besides "past models improved"?

[layer8]

Did you try a different personalization than the default?

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11899719-customizing-you...