alt Hacker NewsI know someone who gets sycophantic answers from AI at a rate that I find awe inspiring; they like it, I find it sickening. I almost never get those types of answers. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is, probably the type of questions being asked, the way it's written, some susceptibility that is detected and the statistical token generator plays to the audience. Maybe emotional resilience and clear thinking has become an important skill in working with your tools so they don't take advantage of you.
There are perhaps two different modes of communication between people.
On the one hand we have vibing. Everyone just sits around telling each other things that affirm the group to be correct. No actual information is being transferred in the traditional information theory sense because saying something surprising would kill the vibe.
I don't really understand what this is good for but it happens all the time so I'm going to assume it has some social function.
Then there's communication that's more in line with information theory. That is information theory at least in part is dealing with some percentage of being surprised at what you receive. And so some human to human communication seems to be about hearing not what you expect but what you don't.
Personally, I seek the later, but I think most people desire the former.
And so, when the AI (or other people for that matter) tell me that I'm right, I assume that I don't understand the whole picture yet or am otherwise confused about something.