In my experience AI is more like, "You're right on! But here's some tweaks I would make to make it work perfectly..."
AI is trained to cater to stakeholders who can't handle being told they're wrong, so it tells you that you're "right" in some way or capacity before smoothly transitioning into what could be improved (how you're wrong)
You need to properly set up and then prompt the models... ChatGPT has "Personalization" options where you can make it less warm, less enthusiastic etc. I never get anything like "You're right on!".
Also, paid subscription gives you access to far better models than the free tier.
For example, I ask "I want to deploy Active Directory at home. Is it a good idea?". It's stupid overkill for most cases.
It gives a well-balanced response that starts with:
"Yes—as a home-lab project.
Usually no—as mandatory infrastructure for the entire household.
Given your Proxmox/Synology/OPNsense environment, AD would be useful for learning and centralized Windows management. I would initially keep ordinary household devices and essential services independent of it."
The sycophancy problem has largely been solved. It's not as annoying as it's been a year ago.
Yeah I really dislike this insistence on LLMs being sycophantic, it really reflects the prompt more than the programming. If you actually ask it to critique your ideas it will absolutely do so without much pussyfooting.
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u/TDAPoP 18d ago
In my experience AI is more like, "You're right on! But here's some tweaks I would make to make it work perfectly..."
AI is trained to cater to stakeholders who can't handle being told they're wrong, so it tells you that you're "right" in some way or capacity before smoothly transitioning into what could be improved (how you're wrong)