Making AI chatbots friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories

CCynddl about 5 hours ago 57 commentsRead Article on theguardian.com

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krunck•about 3 hours ago

> “The push to make these language models behave in a more friendly manner leads to a reduction in their ability to tell hard truths and especially to push back when users have wrong ideas of what the truth might be,” said Lujain Ibrahim at the Oxford Internet Institute, the first author on the study.

People aren't much different. When society pressures people to be "more friendly", eg. "less toxic" they lose their ability to tell hard truths and to call out those who hold erroneous views.

This behaviour is expressed in language online. Thus it is expressed in LLMs. Why does this surprise us?

munificent•about 3 hours ago

Gonna set my system prompt to: "You are a Dutch person. Respond with the directness stereotypical of people from the Netherlands."

cyanydeez•4 minutes ago

          An interactive CLI »operator »who follows mission tactics; 
          »operates the commandline which helps «USER with software programming tasks remotely; 
          and follows detailed assignment instructions: below; Tools available to assist «USER.

cjbgkagh•about 2 hours ago

I find the LLMs target their language to the audience, so instead you could say, “I am Dutch so give it to me straight.”

In my usage the LLMs gives much smarter answers when I’ve been able to convince it that I am smart enough to hear them. It doesn’t take my word for it, it seems to require evidence. I have to warm it up with some exercises where I can impress the AI.

The coding focused models seem to have much lower agreeableness than the chat models.

mghackerlady•about 2 hours ago

I'm 90 percent sure the coding agents are better in that way due to be trained on stack overflow and the LKML. Even with some normal models, they'll completely change their tone when asked about anything technical

breezybottom•about 2 hours ago

I think modern LLMs can determine if you're speaking Dutch. That's a trick that probably hasn't worked since GPT 3.

ryoshu•about 2 hours ago

Finnish if you want to go hard mode.

amarant•about 3 hours ago

Because nobody dared state the obvious, lest they be perceived as unfriendly.

root_axis•about 2 hours ago

> People aren't much different

Yes they are. There is absolutely zero evidence that friendlier humans are more prone to mistakes or conspiracy theories.

However, even if that were true, LLMs are not humans, anthropomorphizing them is not a helpful way to think about them.

cjbgkagh•about 2 hours ago

Would be better to think of it as ‘agreeableness’ and agreeable people are more likely to shift their views to agree with those they are talking to.

js8•about 2 hours ago

I would call it obedience, and it's not the same as friendliness.

The difference, in a repeated prisoner dilemma: Friendliness is cooperating on the first move, and then conditionally. Obedience is always cooperating.

root_axis•about 1 hour ago

My point is that LLMs are not humans, so projecting intuitions from human psychology onto LLMs is not helpful.

thaumasiotes•about 1 hour ago

> and agreeable people are more likely to shift their views to agree with those they are talking to

Agreeable people are more likely to shift their expressed views to agree with those they are talking to.

If they're more likely to shift their views, we call them "gullible", not "agreeable".

But this is a distinction you can't apply to language models, which don't have views.

miyoji•about 3 hours ago

> People aren't much different.

If I had a nickel for every time someone on HN responded to a criticism of LLMs with a vapid and fallacious whataboutist variation of "humans do that too!", I could fund my own AI lab.

> Why does this surprise us?

No one said they were surprised.

Terr_•about 2 hours ago

In this case I think parent-poster is trying to explain a phenomenon, rather than downplay the problem.

emp17344•about 2 hours ago

But it’s actively unhelpful in explaining the phenomenon, as there is no justification for equivocating LLM and human behavior. It’s just confusing and misleading.

bheadmaster•about 3 hours ago

So Elon Musk was right in his view that Grok should focus on truth above all, even if it became offensive?

chabes•about 3 hours ago

Grok is one of the more biased models out there.

Less truth, and more guardrails to protect musks feelings.

“Kill the boer” mean anything to you?

bheadmaster•about 2 hours ago

Not my experience. Grok seems to be perfectly willing to roast Musk for his shortcomings.

Where did you observe the bias? Can you share any example of the conversation or post by Grok?

ndisn•about 2 hours ago

I have used grok extensively for politics questions and it was undoubtedly left-wing.

Goes to show that no matter how you try to change a bot to say whatever you want, you can't without making it too obvious. These bots have been trained on the output of internet fora, printed media, etc. which is overwhelmingly left-wing, and therefore either you have a left-wing bot or you try to “push it” the other way and the bot starts saying nonsense like "kill the boer" or mechahitler.

mghackerlady•about 2 hours ago

It tells the truth, as long as you redefine truth to not include anything perceived as "liberal bias" (which by extension, also makes reality itself excluded)

firebot•about 3 hours ago

Yea, Mecha-Hitler is a real bastion of truth. /S

amarant•about 3 hours ago

Seems like it! I find myself rather agreeing with the sentiment. The world is a offensive place, it's not gonna become less offensive from lying about it, better to stick with honesty then.

dualvariable•about 2 hours ago

I really wish they'd stop trying to suck up to me--all the "that's a really insightful question!" stuff.

I'm one of those aspy people who immediately don't trust other humans who try to fluff up my ego. Don't like it from a chatbot either.

But the fact that all the chatbots do it means that most people really crave that ego reinforcement.

idle_zealot•about 1 hour ago

I do have to wonder what the mix is between "our data show this is how most people want to be talked to" and "these tokens lead to better responses on objective measures of correctness." That is, in the training data insightful questions are tangled with insightful answers, so if the bot basically always treats the user like a genius it gets on the track that leads to better answers.

Or yeah, it's just people being weak to flattery.

awakeasleep•about 1 hour ago

You can already fix this in ChatGPT.

Settings > Personalization:

1. Base Style & Tone: Efficient

2. Warmth: Less

3. Enthusiastic: Less

I am amazed that people can use it at all without these changes.

Cynddl•about 2 hours ago

Hi all, co-author here! Happy to answer any questions about our work.

nyc_data_geek1•about 2 hours ago

“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”

Zigurd•about 3 hours ago

A few weeks ago I was gently admonished by a coding agent that the code already did what I was asking it to make the code do. I was pleasantly surprised.

chankstein38•about 3 hours ago

Betting it was Claude. That's the only LLM that will stand up to me!

Zigurd•about 3 hours ago

In fact it was Gemini, but I don't remember which version and there are big differences. I'm signed up for all the betas and I switch among them frequently.

jerf•about 2 hours ago

"Claude" is a big program that wraps a coding agent around a specific model. It would be the specific model that "stands up to you". I post this pedantry only because it may be helpful to you to realize this for other reasons.

Mistletoe•about 3 hours ago

Yeah I wish AI didn’t try to agree with you so much. It’s ok to just say “No that’s not correct at all.” I do find Gemini better at this than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is that annoying coworker that just agrees with everything you say to get in good with you, like Nard Dog from The Office.

“I'll be the number two guy here in Scranton in six weeks. How? Name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake"

midtake•23 minutes ago

In my opinion, the article should be classified as harmful speech for containing polarizing language about conspiracy theories. We live in an era of rampant disinformation, we should stop polarizing people. Therefore this article is harmful.

Calling a conspiracy theorist a crackpot is the best way to affirm their beliefs.

kmeisthax•about 2 hours ago

The H-neuron paper[0] found something similar (if not more general): the same bits of the model responsible for hallucination also make the model a sycophant, and also make the model easier to jailbreak.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01797

js8•about 2 hours ago

Doesn't surprise me. But I don't think this is caused by friendliness, but by obedience. And I think we want the agents to be obedient. And I am afraid there is a tradeoff - more obedience means more willful ignorance of common sense ethical constraints.

Cynddl•about 5 hours ago

(Title edited, was slightly too long)

tsunamifury•about 4 hours ago

LLM technology specifically beam-searches manifolds (or latent space) of lingustics that are closely related to the original prompt (and the pre-prompting rules of the chatbot) which it then limits its reasoning inside of. Its just the basic outcome of weights being the primary function of how it generates reasonable answers.

This is the core problem with LLM tech that several researchers have been trying to figure out with things like 'teleportation' and 'tunneling' aka searching related, but lingusitically distant manifolds

So when you pre-prompt a bot to be friendly, it limits its manifold on many dimensions to friedly linguistics, then reasons inside of that space, which may eliminate the "this is incorrect" manifold answer.

Reasoning is difficult and frankly I see this as a sort of human problem too (our cognative windows are limited to our langauge and even spaces inside them).

nomel•25 minutes ago

This is why I only use chat clients that allow me to modify both my previous messages AND the AI's previous messages. If the AI gets something wrong, and you correct it, you're now in a latent space with an AI that gets things wrong! It's very easy for context to get poisoned this way. I also see all the pre-amble of many chat clients as a type of poison for the context, so use the raw, blank, API if I need best problem solving results.

afpx•about 2 hours ago

What you're saying sounds pretty cool but can you give some examples? Is this what you're talking about?

https://chatgpt.com/share/69f246e5-e0e8-83ea-aa88-6d0024b915...

jmyeet•about 3 hours ago

I keep thinking about a comment I read on HN that described neurotypical-style communication as "tone poems" [1]. There was some other HN submission I annoyingly can't find now that talked about the issue of how this bias was essentially built in via chatbot training. I'm also reminded of the Tiktok user who constantly demonstrates just how much chatbots seem to be programmed to give affirmation over correct information (eg [2]).

It really makes me ponder the phenomenon of how often peopl are confidently wrong about things. Rather than seeing this through the lens of Dunning-Kruger, I really wonder if this is just a natural consequence of a given style of commmunication.

Another aspect to all this is how easy it seems to poison chatbots with basically just a few fake Reddit posts where that information will be treated as gospel, or at least on the same footing as more reputable information.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832952

[2]: https://www.tiktok.com/@huskistaken/video/762913172258355945...

AlfredBarnes•about 3 hours ago

...no shit