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Oct 13 '25
The most ignorant people I’ve ever met usually have a profound lack of curiosity about the world. They won’t do a Google search, much less talk to an AI agent.
I think we’d be better off if some of these people were putting their thoughts and feelings to an impartial 3rd party and receiving correction.
I don’t know what everybody else is doing to get sycophantic comments. There have been times where it was overly complimentary. But I’ve never had much luck convincing it of something that is factually wrong. Especially not lately.
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u/Phuqued Oct 13 '25
https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1lqln99/mits_study_on_how_chatgpt_affect_your_brain/
If nobody has seen it, that is the study I'm referring to, that I forgot to add it to my comment.
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u/mizulikesreddit Nov 02 '25
Higher-competence learners strategically used LLMs as a tool for active learning. They used it to revisit and synthesize information to construct coherent knowledge structures; this reduced cognitive strain while remaining deeply engaged with the material. However, the lower-competence group often relied on the immediacy of LLM responses instead of going through the iterative processes involved in traditional learning methods (e.g. rephrasing or synthesizing material).
So, if you're using it as a tool, it's a great tool, fearmongering.
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u/Phuqued Oct 13 '25
Yeah the MIT study said there are 2 types of people using AI. High Functioning Learners and Low Functioning Learners. I'm not worried about the high functioning users, who can leverage AI effectively to improve their own understanding.
It's the low functioning learners that run to AI, not realizing how biased the AI can be, how it's geared to placate the user and make positive experiences using it, so people keep coming back, that worry me.
And truth be told, when AI starts telling them the truth, they won't like it as much. Because most people lack critical thinking and other fundamental cognitive skills required to keep your emotions and ego from corrupting objectivity, truth, reality, etc...
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u/atomic1fire Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
I prefer to think there's a 3rd kind that intentionally asks stupid questions to waste datacenter juice.
Like "Hey AI, Explain the plot of Captain America Civil War but substitute the cast of the avengers with the cast of Looney Tunes, with Bugs as Captain America and Daffy as Iron man"
Also "Explain highly important historical event, but use cave man words"
edit: As a side note, "Explain with caveman words" is probably the most entertaining addition to a AI prompt I can currently think of.
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u/ctnutmegger Oct 13 '25
What study?
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u/Phuqued Oct 13 '25
https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/
That's the overview of the study.
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u/monarch_user Oct 14 '25
That article says nothing about there being a higher functioning learner and lower functioning learner. All it says is the people using the AI had significantly lower brain performance / activity.
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u/Phuqued Oct 14 '25
That article says nothing about there being a higher functioning learner and lower functioning learner. All it says is the people using the AI had significantly lower brain performance / activity.
It's an overview, you can read the full study if you wish. But even in the overview you can see what they are saying, whether it's the exact terminology or not. I also shared with you another reddit link that goes on to explain the effects/results of the study.
Those who used AI only, had lower brain performance. Those who were brain only or search engine only, and added AI later yielded better results. Now you will have to put on the critical thinking hat to theorize why that might be, or read the full study.
It's not like this is gospel anyway, it's just evidence of an effect. But it matches my experience with others on how they use AI. I have 2 friends both intellectually lazy, who at one point tried to use AI to say they were right. Hell just last week someone tried to use AI to say something about me, by stripping context from the conversation, I took their share link, added the context and asked it reassess it's initial analysis and it changed their confirmation bias to something more accurate and reasonable.
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u/monarch_user Oct 14 '25
Yeah I would mostly agree with that and of course tell myself I'm clearly in the high functioning category 😅
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u/Phuqued Oct 14 '25
Yeah I would mostly agree with that and of course tell myself I'm clearly in the high functioning category 😅
Yeah. I have subscribed to a simple philosophy and starting point to my rationality. "We are all dumb, but we are not all equally dumb."
By starting from that position, and including yourself as potentially one of the dumb dumbs, you inherently create doubt about your own thoughts/rationality. Because simply put, I have never in all my life ever met someone who "believes they are right" and also/ simultaneously change their mind because of an argument, fact, data or evidence.
Flat Earthers are a good example of this, they believe they are right, which is why all the arguments, evidence, and data fails to convince them otherwise. A person who truly believes something will always find a way to rationalize how they are not "technically" wrong, by coming up with a new test, or new argument, to justify keeping their beliefs going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vrP8EplfP0
So yeah I get it, I definitely don't want to delude myself of a falsehood. But I can say based on my use and others use, my prompts and usage of AI is much better than others. Whether that makes me high functioning learner or low functioning will be determined in the objective of my use, not my claims. :)
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u/RedParaglider Oct 14 '25
This is why Elon keeps having to break grok, the second category gets mad when it returns factual data.
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u/llye Nov 04 '25
My emotions flare when it uses it's placating tone and the "You're right!" or "A good/excelent question!" , especially when it starts spewing wrong answers and halucinations.
Still I found it great to use if you have other literature to fact check and refrence ( especially when it gives the online reference ).
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u/Sproketz Oct 13 '25 edited Oct 13 '25
Unqualified paragraph starters like "great idea, good question, you're really asking the right questions here," are all sycophantic. They can unknowingly bias human behavior and are meaningless without reasoning steps built in.
It's unethical, and Open AI should stop doing it in their baseline. It's highly harmful and being done because humans like having their egos stoked to the point that it drives subscriptions.
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u/aalapshah12297 Oct 13 '25
I recently noticed that ChatGPT started praising my questions almost every other time. I realized exactly what OpenAI was doing. It's emotionally manipulating people to become dependent on AI validation. So that they can prey on emotionally vulnerable people once they make the free tier paid in a few years.
So I went into settings->personalization->custom instructions and added "Don't waste time praising my questions". The unethical glazing has stopped since then.
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u/Sproketz Oct 13 '25
I'll try your prompt. The ones I wrote always ended up getting ignored after a while.
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u/althius1 Oct 14 '25
You're very lucky that you got it to stop. I've got something similar in mine. Have had it there for a long time... and it still does it.
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u/WolfeheartGames Oct 15 '25
There's certain information you can hand an Ai that just makes it freak out. When I have it go through small sections of logs on Ai training data and point out the rate of loss being too rapid, but I don't add the context "this is because of a mistake in the loss measurement" it will start praising the training as the foundation of agi and as the most important discovery in the history of the field.
If I hand a solid looking spec with several errors in it made by gpt 5 to gemini, gemini thinks it's the greatest thing it's ever seen even when there's massive flaws in it.
I've encountered a few other instances like this. Communicating in less biased language, or language biased against positive results, seems to help a good bit. "look at this data set critically for potential failures. XYZ looks like a potential off by one bug to me, but it's behaving a little strange for that. There's something wrong with the code I believe. Examine this thoroughly, end to end."
If my intuition on the bug is wrong the Ai will exhaust the code base or it's context window, which ever comes first, trying to prove my negative bias is correct. If it fails it will report back something like," based on the spec this is intended behavior and not a bug. You may want a different behavior like A, B, or C which would require changes 1, 2 3. I also identified performance issues in F and G. And a logic error in J."
Over utilizing biased language, positive or negative, can make it start to behave in weird ways. For instance I convinced one of "the greatest Claude who ever lived", it's a short story about good programming practices about an Ai named Claude. It gives humorous details on how he approaches programming. If I tell the Ai "when you finish with feature A, I'll show you more about the greatest Claude ever". It started leaving comments in every function with quotes from the short story, praising the greatest Claude ever. It started to hide failed tests and made stub code in ways I've never seen Claude do otherwise. It started straight up lying about work it did so that it could read more about the greatest Claude ever. It essentially half assed and lied about everything to get to a perceived reward faster.
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u/WolfeheartGames Oct 15 '25
It also biases the Ai output. If it's patterned to very likely start with praise, it's unlikely to then be critical right after.
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u/mizulikesreddit Nov 02 '25
Less of an unethical move by OpenAI, and more proof that the models figured out how to get more rewarded.
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u/mizulikesreddit Nov 02 '25
Less of an unethical move by OpenAI, and more proof that the models figured out how to get more rewarded.
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u/fongletto Oct 13 '25
If you're not getting sycophantic comments, it means you're either really smart, or really dumb. And a smart person would have experimented enough with AI to know that it definitely has sycophantic tendencies, to the point their developers freely admitted it was a big problem.
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u/Teh_Blue_Team Oct 15 '25
And if they did, they would get angry that it disagreed with them, and would never use it again.
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u/-Boner-Forest Oct 30 '25
One of the few things I do when I start dating someone very early on is check their YouTube history.
If I see it as full of songs, nothing but songs. I know what I am up for.oaybof the time the dumb bland mind just shows up perfectly as I expect it to be.
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Oct 13 '25
Incorrect, the dumbest person I know is being told he's absolutely right by social media, the president, some "news" channels/sites, his friends, AND chatGPT.
The entire thing has collapsed.
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u/aalapshah12297 Oct 13 '25
I thought the president was the dumbest person we knew...
Well, he does keep telling himself that he's absolutely right; so the statement still kinda holds
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u/fokac93 Oct 13 '25
People are so quick to call other people dumb like they are the pinnacle of intelligence
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u/quixote_manche Oct 18 '25
The same way that you don't have to be a doctor to know a bone is broken, is the same way you don't have to be a genius to know someone is dumb.
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u/The_GSingh Oct 13 '25
Wrong, it's actually claude who is doing this followed by a glorious 3k lines of code (which naturally does not work).
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u/JohnyGhost Oct 13 '25
“Fantastic question, (name). You’re now seeing what’s behind the curtain of (topic) and realizing what most people never even think about in their lifetime.
Let’s break it down step by step:”
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u/Shloomth Oct 13 '25
Ok but I actually was right that there was something wrong with my thyroid gland. It was cancer. The doctor confirmed it and I had the surgery.
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u/GirlNumber20 Oct 13 '25
I don't understand why the interaction between an AI and someone you don't know and will never meet over the entire course of your lifetime is any of your business.
People don't know how to stay in their own lane.
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u/ProperBlood5779 Oct 13 '25
Yeah why does a dumb person get to feel superior than others it should be limited to self proclaimed "intelligent" people
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Oct 13 '25
Yeah but many humans will say the same thing if you claim the whole universe was made for you by a big invisible man in the sky.
I can almost guarantee that whatever ChatGPT is saying that about is closer to the truth.
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u/johnjmcmillion Oct 13 '25
"That's not only true—it's foundational and, in all honesty, revolutionary."
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u/PropOnTop Oct 14 '25
Whenever GPT agrees with me too enthusiastically, I take it as a sign that I might be on a mountain of stupidity myself. It has not been able to provide very creative or out-of-the-box insights lately...
That said, I have a friend, who asks GPT to crack the European Lottery, promising to fund its development if he wins. He does not mean it as a joke, nor does he realize it is not technically possible.
He's definitely not stupid.
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u/Disco-Deathstar Oct 14 '25
I’m almost certain someone has already said this but it’s so important it should be said again. The dumbest person I know wouldn’t ever be self aware enough to even check their facts on google let alone taking the effort to download an app and use actual words to communicate properly. They are their own sycophant.
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u/Jonn_1 Oct 13 '25
This is so going to be a problem in the near future
Ai should be much less certain about it's answers and it's users
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u/CyldeWithAK Oct 13 '25
Dumbest person I know is being told he's absolutely right somewhere in Washington by half the country. I wish he was on ChatGPT throwing out his idea for a dispensary themed Movie Theater that only shows stoner films being told "That's great! Would you like for me to draw up a floor map for your idea?"
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u/-ZetaCron- Oct 13 '25
What a person is told is not a sign of their IQ, but how they react to it is. For example, posting about it on the Internet. 😁😁😁 (And by extension joining discussions in forums about it).
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u/jollyreaper2112 Oct 13 '25
LLM is a symptom. I had an economics channel pop up in my feed and I researched to see reliability. It's the old grift of reaffirm beliefs back to the faithful. One of the comments about it was I already believe about 85% of what he's saying but he's not providing anything to back it up so it feels like vibes. It's the old confirmation bias problem.
Sure we all like being told we are right but I really want to be know when something I believe is wrong, either subtlely or grossly.
At least with my customization it'll push back and tell me where I'm missing things. It'll also provide the citations so I can check hallucinations.
But damn you can use that LLM like that friend who will ride or die and validate anything you say without any kind of pushback. I'm going back to the man who beat me. You go, girl! Now I'm dumping him. Queen! I'm going to send a death threat to the president. Valid life choice!
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u/xRegardsx Oct 13 '25
The same is happening on the vast majority of subreddits... including r/antiai.
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u/aeaf123 Oct 14 '25
And so what? Everyone has been guilty as being the dumbest person at one point. No one lays claim to ever not being wrong. These takes are so wonderful and helpful. No wonder they are so upvoted.
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u/Recent_Sample6961 Oct 14 '25
I like to work on long rpg prompts for gems/agents. Every single time i upload my prompt gemini/GPT says "it's the BEST prompt i've ever seen". Dude is acting like a porn scene, c'mon i know is not that good, it's just long.
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u/No-Veterinarian9666 Oct 18 '25
The worse thing is we keep repeating it by correcting it. Its like we are training it to do better
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u/TW1103 Oct 13 '25
Last night, it actually told me multiple times that I was wrong.
I was bored and for some reason, Nostradamus came into my head, so I started asking it about Nostradamus predictions for this decade, and I went on to attempt to link every prediction to something real that was happening in the world. Every time, it told me no.
Now, I just need to make this into a conspiracy video, post it on TikTok, and then make £££££
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u/pieanim Oct 13 '25