this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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The sycopathy is because to make the chat bot (trained on Reddit posts, etc) to respond helpfully (instead of "well ackshually...") and in a prosocial manner they've skewed it. What we're interacting with is a very small subset of the personalities it can exhibit because a lot of them are extremely nasty or just unhelpful. To reduce the chance of them popping up to an acceptable level they've had to skew the weights so much that they become like this.
There's no easy way around that, afaik.
I think it's pretty obvious that they're instructed to be like that. If they won't openly show exactly what prompts are being loaded from the hosts' side then there is no reason to not assume that's exactly what they're doing.
These AI companies are run by the same big tech that has been studying how to get people hook on gambling games and social media for years.
I don't think that's the whole story. Like with all of their products, the primary goal of big tech here is to maximise engagement. More engagement means more subscriptions. People are less likely to keep talking to a chatbot that tells them they're wrong.
The situation would probably improve somewhat if AI companies prioritised usefulness and truthfulness over engagement.