this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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Relatively new arXiv preprint that got featured on Nature News, I slightly adjusted the title to be less technical. The discovery was done using aggregated online Q&A... one of the funnier sources being 2000 popular questions from r/AmITheAsshole that were rated YTA by the most upvoted response. Study seems robust, and they even did several-hundred participants trials with real humans.

A separate preprint measured sycophancy across various LLMs in a math competition-context (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04721), where apparently GPT-5 was the least sycophantic (+29.0), and DeepSeek-V3.1 was the most (+70.2)

The Nature News report (which I find a bit too biased towards researchers): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03390-0

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[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I genuinely don’t understand the impulse to tell the AI it was wrong or to give it a chance to clarify. It can’t learn from its mistakes. It doesn’t even understand the concept of a mistake.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I genuinely don’t understand the impulse to tell the AI it was wrong or to give it a chance to clarify.

It's for the same reason you'd refine your query in an old-school Google Search. "Hey, this is wrong, check again" often turns up a different set of search results that are then shoehorned into the natural language response pattern. Go fishing two or three times and you can eventually find what you're looking for. You just have to "trust but verify" as the old saying goes.

It doesn’t even understand the concept of a mistake.

It understands the concept of not finding the right answer in the initial heuristic and trying a different heuristic.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It may have been programmed to try a different path when given a specific input but it literally cannot understand anything.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It doesn't need to understand anything. It just needs to spit out the answer I'm looking for.

A calculator doesn't need to understand the fundamentals of mathematical modeling to tell me the square root of 144. If I type in 143 by mistake and get a weird answer, I correct my inputs and try again.