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0 pointspopopo733mo ago0 comments

>is "you are absolutely right" wrong somehow?

It makes sense in English, however:

a) "you are" vs "you're". "you are" sounds too formal/authoritative in informal speech, and depending on tone, patronising.

b) one could say "you're absolutely right", but the "absolutely" is too dramatic/stressed for simple corrections (an example of sycophancy in LLMs)

If the prompt was something like "You did not include $VAR in func()", then a response like "You're right! Let me fix that.." would be more natural.

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kenty3mo ago

Thanks for the thorough explanation, that, indeed, is a level of nuance that's hard for me to spot.

Interestingly, "absolutely right" is very common in German: "du hast natürlich absolut Recht" is something which I can easily imagine a friend's voice (or my voice) say at a dinner table. It's "du hast Recht" that sounds a little bit too formal and strong x[.

Agreed on the sycophancy point, in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.

d-lisp3mo ago

> in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.

Using this kind of strategy eventually leads to the LLM recurrently advertising what it just produced as «straight to the point, no fluff, no bullshit». («Here is the blunt truth»).

Of course no matter how the LLM advertise its production, it is too often non devoid of sycophancy.

popopo73OP3mo ago

There's likely a cultural element to it as well regarding how we admit mistakes and correct ourselves.

With how blame-avoidant western individualist culture can be, seeing something "admit" doing wrong so quickly, and so emphatically, could be uncanny valley-level jarring.

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