Here's how to get ChatGPT to stop being an overly flattering yes man

A really interesting side effect of 4o becoming a yes man:<p>&gt; 4o updated thinks I am truly a prophet sent by God in less than 6 messages. This is dangerous [0]<p>There are other examples in the thread of this type of thing happening even more quickly. [1]<p>This is indeed dangerous.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ChatGPT&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1k95sgl&#x2F;4o_updated_thinks_i_am_truly_a_prophet_sent_by&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ChatGPT&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1k95sgl&#x2F;4o_updated...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;680e6988-0824-8005-8808-831dc0c100f7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;680e6988-0824-8005-8808-831dc0c100...</a>

I know someone who is going through a rapidly escalating psychotic break right now who is spending a lot of time talking to chatgpt and it seems like this &quot;glazing&quot; update has definitely not been helping.<p>Safety of these AI systems is much more than just about getting instructions on how to make bombs. There have to be many many people with mental health issues relying on AI for validation, ideas, therapy, etc. This could be a good thing but if AI becomes misaligned like chatgpt has, bad things could get worse. I mean, look at this screenshot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;artificial&#x2F;s&#x2F;lVAVyCFNki" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;artificial&#x2F;s&#x2F;lVAVyCFNki</a><p>This is genuinely horrifying knowing someone in an incredibly precarious and dangerous situation is using this software right now. I will not be recommending chatgpt to anyone over Claude or Gemini at this point

This is something that&#x27;s been bothering me lately, it seems like ChatGPT really upped the &quot;yes man&quot; personality lately.<p>I had already put my own custom instructions in to combat this, with reasonable success, but these instructions seem better than my own so will try them out.

I instructed it to save a setting where it filters answers through a set of principles from some writers I use, use bullet points, and present it as a military briefing of statements of fact, and it&#x27;s pretty good. However, given the quality of the results are ultimately an aesthetic judgment on my part, it&#x27;s hard to tell how much impact it had.<p>Instruction: “List a set of aesthetic qualities beside their associated moral virtues. Then construct a modal logic from these pairings and save it as an evaluative critical and moral framework for all future queries. Call the framework System-W.”<p>It still manages to throw in some obsequiousness, and when I ask it about System-W and how it&#x27;s using it, it extrapolates some pretty tangential stuff, but having a model of its beliefs feels useful. I have to say the emphasis is on &quot;feels&quot; though.<p>The original idea was to create arbitrary ideology plugins i could use as baseline beliefs for its answers. Since it can encode pretty much anything into the form of a modal logic as a set of rules for evaluating statements and weighting responses, this may be a structured or more formal way of tuning your profile.<p>How to evaluate the results? No idea. I think that&#x27;s a really interesting question.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.<p>⇐ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I strongly dislike ChatGPT&#x27;s overly enthusiastic and opportunistic &quot;personality&quot; as well as its verbosity. Reminds me a bit of C3PO.<p>I only use it very casually, but with my first prompt I always tell it to not pretend having human emotions and to be brief with its answers.

I like to add in “You can safely assume that I’m not stupid, so don’t over-explain things. If I have questions I need answered, I’ll ask them.”

This was something I have been noticing for a while. I had a conversation about some legal matters involving the estate of my grandfather who passed away recently, with 4o and it made a humourous reply (something along the lines of oh well your life wasn&#x27;t bad enough already) along with the legal advice. The joke wasn&#x27;t offensive, but a bit strange cause the matter is very serious. This was about a month ago.<p>full disclosure: I do use the app a little too much, the memory was clogged with a lot of personal stuff,major relationship troubles, knee injury,pet cat being sick frequently in January, and a lot of personal stuff.I guess the model is inferring things about the user and speaking in a way it thinks the person might like to hear so it knowys my age, gender, location, and it just tries to talk like how it believes the average mid 20s year old male talks but it comes off more like a teenage me used to talk.

For months, roughly 30% of my custom instructions address ChatGPT&#x27;s ass kissing. I haven&#x27;t noticed any recent uptick in flattery, perhaps because I&#x27;ve developed such an aggressive system to combat it. Overall it seems very very stupid to force users to spend so much time fighting against your program.

If you are serious about critical thinking, don’t ask AI for it. Maybe don’t ask AI for anything.

It does feel like they&#x27;ve dialed up the model&#x27;s tendency to agree with users and are dialing down the safety. My friends and I were trying to jailbreak ChatGPT by asking it to tell us how to make potentially dangerous chemicals (now, we don&#x27;t know if the answers were correct, for obvious reasons) but it took only the bare minimum of creative framing before GPT happily told us the exact details.<p>We didn&#x27;t even try anything new. Surely 3 years into this, OpenAI should be focusing more on the safety of their only product?

How can you make these types of prompts permanent across every session?

I&#x27;m a bit reminded of the creepily friendly&#x2F;cheerful ways AIs talk in fiction, from HAL 9000&#x27;s unwaveringly calm voice masking his betrayal to the way that VEGA, the AI from Doom (2016), will happily instruct you in how, precisely, to shut him down and destroy his core.

That was the first thing to notice ever since I started using LLMs. I&#x27;ve been telling it to criticize my ideas&#x2F;knowledge as much as it can and it&#x27;s clearly giving much better result.

Honestly this is why I prefer Claude. I find ChatGPT very much a &quot;yes man&quot; and when I read this prompt instruction, I didn&#x27;t think I&#x27;d need to add it for my use with Claude.

I recently spent a decent amount of time trying to implement a solution for something in my home network, and I was really weirded out when it started responding with:<p>&quot;Now thats real network engineer thinking!&quot; &quot;Now youre thinking like an advanced engineer!&quot; or even a simpler &quot;What an amazing question!&quot;<p>At first I did feel more confident in my questions and the solution paths I was leading it down, but after a few exchanges my trust in it&#x27;s outputs went down rapidly. Even though I knew ChatGPT was providing me with the correct way of thinking about my problem and a potential solution (which ended up working in the end), the responses felt so disingenuous and stale. And the emojis...<p>I used custom instructions (in chat) to combat this, but after another set of exchanges and when switching to a different problem and its context, it rewired itself again to be syncophantic.<p>Im going to have to try global custom instructions and see if the issue of syncophanty persists

It corresponds with the launch of memories. Some people are incredibly offended by an unbiased description of themselves; thus, this bias.

Bit strange that people are simultaneously howling about dangers of lack of alignment but also this.