> “The push to make these language models behave in a more friendly manner leads to a reduction in their ability to tell hard truths and especially to push back when users have wrong ideas of what the truth might be,” said Lujain Ibrahim at the Oxford Internet Institute, the first author on the study.
People aren't much different. When society pressures people to be "more friendly", eg. "less toxic" they lose their ability to tell hard truths and to call out those who hold erroneous views.
This behaviour is expressed in language online. Thus it is expressed in LLMs. Why does this surprise us?
I find the LLMs target their language to the audience, so instead you could say, “I am Dutch so give it to me straight.”
In my usage the LLMs gives much smarter answers when I’ve been able to convince it that I am smart enough to hear them. It doesn’t take my word for it, it seems to require evidence. I have to warm it up with some exercises where I can impress the AI.
The coding focused models seem to have much lower agreeableness than the chat models.
I'm 90 percent sure the coding agents are better in that way due to be trained on stack overflow and the LKML. Even with some normal models, they'll completely change their tone when asked about anything technical
Over 90 percent of the Dutch can speak English, though clearly speaking Dutch would be more convincing. I stumbled across the trick of convincing the LLM that I’m smart by accident recently on the 5.4-Codex model. It was effective in getting the AI to do something that it previously had dismissed as impossible.
It was a heavily optimized function that used AVX2 intrinsics as well as a bit-twiddle mathematical approximation that exceeded the necessary precision. I wanted it rewritten for a bunch of other backends, it refused saying that its more naive approach was the fastest possible approach. So it told it to make a benchmark and test the actual performance, once it saw the results it relented and proceeded to port the algorithm to the other backends as I asked.
Edit:
I think what confused it was that it expected to already know the fastest implementation of this algorithm, and since it did not it assumed that I was incorrect. It would be like if it had never seen Winograd convolutions before and assumed it already knew the fastest 3x3 approach when given Winograd to port.
Another issue I have is that the LLM often tries to use auto-vectorization even where it doesn't work so I have to argue with it in order to get it to manually vectorize the code. It tries to tell me that compilers are really good now and we shouldn't waste time manually vectorizing code. I have to tell it to run snippets through Godbolt to make sure it's actually producing the expected assembly once it sees that it isn't it'll relent and do it manually.
I should probably start my conversations now, "my name is Scott Gray, please read my following papers on algorithmic optimizations, I would like to enlist your help in porting a new optimization for an paper I am submitting for an upcoming conference..." (I'm not Scott Gray)
An interactive CLI »operator »who follows mission tactics;
»operates the commandline which helps «USER with software programming tasks remotely;
and follows detailed assignment instructions: below; Tools available to assist «USER.
I would call it obedience, and it's not the same as friendliness.
The difference, in a repeated prisoner dilemma: Friendliness is cooperating on the first move, and then conditionally. Obedience is always cooperating.
Do you have a standard and a body of work you can point to in an effort to aid with communication these thoughts to others? At the very least there should be a reversible projection to the Big 5 standard.
Your point was that humans did not display such behavior even though it has been extensively studied and they do. There is plenty of evidence that highly agreeable people will agree with you on incorrect ideas and conspiracy theories. The name of the trait ‘agreeableness’ is what you’ll need to find such evidence.
If I had a nickel for every time someone on HN responded to a criticism of LLMs with a vapid and fallacious whataboutist variation of "humans do that too!", I could fund my own AI lab.
But it’s actively unhelpful in explaining the phenomenon, as there is no justification for equivocating LLM and human behavior. It’s just confusing and misleading.
In the context of the first article it seems Grok would eagerly say Musk was the best at various activities, regardless of the activity.
EDIT: smallmancontrov's sibling comment goes into more detail about how the system prompt was specifically manipulated to favor Elon in other ways so this doesn't seem far-fetched
Grok is willing to roast Musk now because of the "Elon Musk could beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident. Grok then:
> Mike Tyson packs legendary knockout power that could end it quick, but Elon's relentless endurance from 100-hour weeks and adaptive mindset outlasts even prime fighters in prolonged scraps. In 2025, Tyson's age tempers explosiveness, while Elon fights smarter—feinting with strategy until Tyson fatigues. Elon takes the win through grit and ingenuity, not just gloves.
When the Grok system prompt was leaked, it contained this:
> * Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.
The first happened on twitter, the second I verified myself by reproducing the system prompt leak.
I have used grok extensively for politics questions and it was undoubtedly left-wing.
Goes to show that no matter how you try to change a bot to say whatever you want, you can't without making it too obvious. These bots have been trained on the output of internet fora, printed media, etc. which is overwhelmingly left-wing, and therefore either you have a left-wing bot or you try to “push it” the other way and the bot starts saying nonsense like "kill the boer" or mechahitler.
It tells the truth, as long as you redefine truth to not include anything perceived as "liberal bias" (which by extension, also makes reality itself excluded)
Seems like it! I find myself rather agreeing with the sentiment. The world is a offensive place, it's not gonna become less offensive from lying about it, better to stick with honesty then.
I do have to wonder what the mix is between "our data show this is how most people want to be talked to" and "these tokens lead to better responses on objective measures of correctness." That is, in the training data insightful questions are tangled with insightful answers, so if the bot basically always treats the user like a genius it gets on the track that leads to better answers.
“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
A few weeks ago I was gently admonished by a coding agent that the code already did what I was asking it to make the code do. I was pleasantly surprised.
In fact it was Gemini, but I don't remember which version and there are big differences. I'm signed up for all the betas and I switch among them frequently.
"Claude" is a big program that wraps a coding agent around a specific model. It would be the specific model that "stands up to you". I post this pedantry only because it may be helpful to you to realize this for other reasons.
Yeah I wish AI didn’t try to agree with you so much. It’s ok to just say “No that’s not correct at all.” I do find Gemini better at this than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is that annoying coworker that just agrees with everything you say to get in good with you, like Nard Dog from The Office.
“I'll be the number two guy here in Scranton in six weeks. How? Name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake"
The H-neuron paper[0] found something similar (if not more general): the same bits of the model responsible for hallucination also make the model a sycophant, and also make the model easier to jailbreak.
Doesn't surprise me. But I don't think this is caused by friendliness, but by obedience. And I think we want the agents to be obedient. And I am afraid there is a tradeoff - more obedience means more willful ignorance of common sense ethical constraints.
In my opinion, the article should be classified as harmful speech for containing polarizing language about conspiracy theories. We live in an era of rampant disinformation, we should stop polarizing people. Therefore this article is harmful.
Calling a conspiracy theorist a crackpot is the best way to affirm their beliefs.
LLM technology specifically beam-searches manifolds (or latent space) of lingustics that are closely related to the original prompt (and the pre-prompting rules of the chatbot) which it then limits its reasoning inside of. Its just the basic outcome of weights being the primary function of how it generates reasonable answers.
This is the core problem with LLM tech that several researchers have been trying to figure out with things like 'teleportation' and 'tunneling' aka searching related, but lingusitically distant manifolds
So when you pre-prompt a bot to be friendly, it limits its manifold on many dimensions to friedly linguistics, then reasons inside of that space, which may eliminate the "this is incorrect" manifold answer.
Reasoning is difficult and frankly I see this as a sort of human problem too (our cognative windows are limited to our langauge and even spaces inside them).
This is why I only use chat clients that allow me to modify both my previous messages AND the AI's previous messages. If the AI gets something wrong, and you correct it, you're now in a latent space with an AI that gets things wrong! It's very easy for context to get poisoned this way. I also see all the pre-amble of many chat clients as a type of poison for the context, so use the raw, blank, API if I need best problem solving results.
I keep thinking about a comment I read on HN that described neurotypical-style communication as "tone poems" [1]. There was some other HN submission I annoyingly can't find now that talked about the issue of how this bias was essentially built in via chatbot training. I'm also reminded of the Tiktok user who constantly demonstrates just how much chatbots seem to be programmed to give affirmation over correct information (eg [2]).
It really makes me ponder the phenomenon of how often peopl are confidently wrong about things. Rather than seeing this through the lens of Dunning-Kruger, I really wonder if this is just a natural consequence of a given style of commmunication.
Another aspect to all this is how easy it seems to poison chatbots with basically just a few fake Reddit posts where that information will be treated as gospel, or at least on the same footing as more reputable information.
> “The push to make these language models behave in a more friendly manner leads to a reduction in their ability to tell hard truths and especially to push back when users have wrong ideas of what the truth might be,” said Lujain Ibrahim at the Oxford Internet Institute, the first author on the study.
People aren't much different. When society pressures people to be "more friendly", eg. "less toxic" they lose their ability to tell hard truths and to call out those who hold erroneous views.
This behaviour is expressed in language online. Thus it is expressed in LLMs. Why does this surprise us?
Gonna set my system prompt to: "You are a Dutch person. Respond with the directness stereotypical of people from the Netherlands."
I find the LLMs target their language to the audience, so instead you could say, “I am Dutch so give it to me straight.”
In my usage the LLMs gives much smarter answers when I’ve been able to convince it that I am smart enough to hear them. It doesn’t take my word for it, it seems to require evidence. I have to warm it up with some exercises where I can impress the AI.
The coding focused models seem to have much lower agreeableness than the chat models.
I'm 90 percent sure the coding agents are better in that way due to be trained on stack overflow and the LKML. Even with some normal models, they'll completely change their tone when asked about anything technical
I think modern LLMs can determine if you're speaking Dutch. That's a trick that probably hasn't worked since GPT 3.
Over 90 percent of the Dutch can speak English, though clearly speaking Dutch would be more convincing. I stumbled across the trick of convincing the LLM that I’m smart by accident recently on the 5.4-Codex model. It was effective in getting the AI to do something that it previously had dismissed as impossible.
Gotta tell us what it is now :D
It was a heavily optimized function that used AVX2 intrinsics as well as a bit-twiddle mathematical approximation that exceeded the necessary precision. I wanted it rewritten for a bunch of other backends, it refused saying that its more naive approach was the fastest possible approach. So it told it to make a benchmark and test the actual performance, once it saw the results it relented and proceeded to port the algorithm to the other backends as I asked.
Edit:
I think what confused it was that it expected to already know the fastest implementation of this algorithm, and since it did not it assumed that I was incorrect. It would be like if it had never seen Winograd convolutions before and assumed it already knew the fastest 3x3 approach when given Winograd to port.
Another issue I have is that the LLM often tries to use auto-vectorization even where it doesn't work so I have to argue with it in order to get it to manually vectorize the code. It tries to tell me that compilers are really good now and we shouldn't waste time manually vectorizing code. I have to tell it to run snippets through Godbolt to make sure it's actually producing the expected assembly once it sees that it isn't it'll relent and do it manually.
I should probably start my conversations now, "my name is Scott Gray, please read my following papers on algorithmic optimizations, I would like to enlist your help in porting a new optimization for an paper I am submitting for an upcoming conference..." (I'm not Scott Gray)
Finnish if you want to go hard mode.
Because nobody dared state the obvious, lest they be perceived as unfriendly.
> People aren't much different
Yes they are. There is absolutely zero evidence that friendlier humans are more prone to mistakes or conspiracy theories.
However, even if that were true, LLMs are not humans, anthropomorphizing them is not a helpful way to think about them.
Would be better to think of it as ‘agreeableness’ and agreeable people are more likely to shift their views to agree with those they are talking to.
I would call it obedience, and it's not the same as friendliness.
The difference, in a repeated prisoner dilemma: Friendliness is cooperating on the first move, and then conditionally. Obedience is always cooperating.
Agreeableness is a Big Five personality trait so a lot of the formal research into personalities uses it as one of the dimensions.
Yeah but I would argue it's different from both friendliness and obedience.
Do you have a standard and a body of work you can point to in an effort to aid with communication these thoughts to others? At the very least there should be a reversible projection to the Big 5 standard.
My point is that LLMs are not humans, so projecting intuitions from human psychology onto LLMs is not helpful.
Your point was that humans did not display such behavior even though it has been extensively studied and they do. There is plenty of evidence that highly agreeable people will agree with you on incorrect ideas and conspiracy theories. The name of the trait ‘agreeableness’ is what you’ll need to find such evidence.
> and agreeable people are more likely to shift their views to agree with those they are talking to
Agreeable people are more likely to shift their expressed views to agree with those they are talking to.
If they're more likely to shift their views, we call them "gullible", not "agreeable".
But this is a distinction you can't apply to language models, which don't have views.
Agreeable people are also the most suggestible in that they are the most likely to actually change their views. These traits share the same axis.
> People aren't much different.
If I had a nickel for every time someone on HN responded to a criticism of LLMs with a vapid and fallacious whataboutist variation of "humans do that too!", I could fund my own AI lab.
> Why does this surprise us?
No one said they were surprised.
In this case I think parent-poster is trying to explain a phenomenon, rather than downplay the problem.
But it’s actively unhelpful in explaining the phenomenon, as there is no justification for equivocating LLM and human behavior. It’s just confusing and misleading.
So Elon Musk was right in his view that Grok should focus on truth above all, even if it became offensive?
Grok is one of the more biased models out there.
Less truth, and more guardrails to protect musks feelings.
“Kill the boer” mean anything to you?
Not my experience. Grok seems to be perfectly willing to roast Musk for his shortcomings.
Where did you observe the bias? Can you share any example of the conversation or post by Grok?
Here are a couple of articles with examples:
Grok says Musk is fitter than Lebron and funnier than Jerry Seinfeld:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...
Grok didn't stop there. Elon is best in the world at drinking pee:
https://newrepublic.com/post/203519/elon-musk-ai-chatbot-gro...
Also randomly mentions white genocide out of nowhere (one of Elon's pet political issues)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/elon-...
> Elon is best in the world at drinking pee
What? How does this not show willingness to insult Musk?
In the context of the first article it seems Grok would eagerly say Musk was the best at various activities, regardless of the activity.
EDIT: smallmancontrov's sibling comment goes into more detail about how the system prompt was specifically manipulated to favor Elon in other ways so this doesn't seem far-fetched
Grok is willing to roast Musk now because of the "Elon Musk could beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident. Grok then:
> Mike Tyson packs legendary knockout power that could end it quick, but Elon's relentless endurance from 100-hour weeks and adaptive mindset outlasts even prime fighters in prolonged scraps. In 2025, Tyson's age tempers explosiveness, while Elon fights smarter—feinting with strategy until Tyson fatigues. Elon takes the win through grit and ingenuity, not just gloves.
When the Grok system prompt was leaked, it contained this:
> * Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.
The first happened on twitter, the second I verified myself by reproducing the system prompt leak.
I have used grok extensively for politics questions and it was undoubtedly left-wing.
Goes to show that no matter how you try to change a bot to say whatever you want, you can't without making it too obvious. These bots have been trained on the output of internet fora, printed media, etc. which is overwhelmingly left-wing, and therefore either you have a left-wing bot or you try to “push it” the other way and the bot starts saying nonsense like "kill the boer" or mechahitler.
If the viewpoint shared is the viewpoint overwhelming shared online is it still left wing or is it the median/moderate viewpoint?
Could you share some examples of where you thought it was left wing?
> it was undoubtedly left-wing
What if it's just… right?
Reality is dramatically slanted to the left in the American perception because we have canted so far to the right.
It tells the truth, as long as you redefine truth to not include anything perceived as "liberal bias" (which by extension, also makes reality itself excluded)
Yea, Mecha-Hitler is a real bastion of truth. /S
Seems like it! I find myself rather agreeing with the sentiment. The world is a offensive place, it's not gonna become less offensive from lying about it, better to stick with honesty then.
I really wish they'd stop trying to suck up to me--all the "that's a really insightful question!" stuff.
I'm one of those aspy people who immediately don't trust other humans who try to fluff up my ego. Don't like it from a chatbot either.
But the fact that all the chatbots do it means that most people really crave that ego reinforcement.
I do have to wonder what the mix is between "our data show this is how most people want to be talked to" and "these tokens lead to better responses on objective measures of correctness." That is, in the training data insightful questions are tangled with insightful answers, so if the bot basically always treats the user like a genius it gets on the track that leads to better answers.
Or yeah, it's just people being weak to flattery.
You can already fix this in ChatGPT.
Settings > Personalization:
1. Base Style & Tone: Efficient
2. Warmth: Less
3. Enthusiastic: Less
I am amazed that people can use it at all without these changes.
Hi all, co-author here! Happy to answer any questions about our work.
“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”
A few weeks ago I was gently admonished by a coding agent that the code already did what I was asking it to make the code do. I was pleasantly surprised.
Betting it was Claude. That's the only LLM that will stand up to me!
In fact it was Gemini, but I don't remember which version and there are big differences. I'm signed up for all the betas and I switch among them frequently.
"Claude" is a big program that wraps a coding agent around a specific model. It would be the specific model that "stands up to you". I post this pedantry only because it may be helpful to you to realize this for other reasons.
Yeah I wish AI didn’t try to agree with you so much. It’s ok to just say “No that’s not correct at all.” I do find Gemini better at this than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is that annoying coworker that just agrees with everything you say to get in good with you, like Nard Dog from The Office.
“I'll be the number two guy here in Scranton in six weeks. How? Name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake"
The H-neuron paper[0] found something similar (if not more general): the same bits of the model responsible for hallucination also make the model a sycophant, and also make the model easier to jailbreak.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01797
Doesn't surprise me. But I don't think this is caused by friendliness, but by obedience. And I think we want the agents to be obedient. And I am afraid there is a tradeoff - more obedience means more willful ignorance of common sense ethical constraints.
In my opinion, the article should be classified as harmful speech for containing polarizing language about conspiracy theories. We live in an era of rampant disinformation, we should stop polarizing people. Therefore this article is harmful.
Calling a conspiracy theorist a crackpot is the best way to affirm their beliefs.
(Title edited, was slightly too long)
LLM technology specifically beam-searches manifolds (or latent space) of lingustics that are closely related to the original prompt (and the pre-prompting rules of the chatbot) which it then limits its reasoning inside of. Its just the basic outcome of weights being the primary function of how it generates reasonable answers.
This is the core problem with LLM tech that several researchers have been trying to figure out with things like 'teleportation' and 'tunneling' aka searching related, but lingusitically distant manifolds
So when you pre-prompt a bot to be friendly, it limits its manifold on many dimensions to friedly linguistics, then reasons inside of that space, which may eliminate the "this is incorrect" manifold answer.
Reasoning is difficult and frankly I see this as a sort of human problem too (our cognative windows are limited to our langauge and even spaces inside them).
This is why I only use chat clients that allow me to modify both my previous messages AND the AI's previous messages. If the AI gets something wrong, and you correct it, you're now in a latent space with an AI that gets things wrong! It's very easy for context to get poisoned this way. I also see all the pre-amble of many chat clients as a type of poison for the context, so use the raw, blank, API if I need best problem solving results.
What you're saying sounds pretty cool but can you give some examples? Is this what you're talking about?
https://chatgpt.com/share/69f246e5-e0e8-83ea-aa88-6d0024b915...
I keep thinking about a comment I read on HN that described neurotypical-style communication as "tone poems" [1]. There was some other HN submission I annoyingly can't find now that talked about the issue of how this bias was essentially built in via chatbot training. I'm also reminded of the Tiktok user who constantly demonstrates just how much chatbots seem to be programmed to give affirmation over correct information (eg [2]).
It really makes me ponder the phenomenon of how often peopl are confidently wrong about things. Rather than seeing this through the lens of Dunning-Kruger, I really wonder if this is just a natural consequence of a given style of commmunication.
Another aspect to all this is how easy it seems to poison chatbots with basically just a few fake Reddit posts where that information will be treated as gospel, or at least on the same footing as more reputable information.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832952
[2]: https://www.tiktok.com/@huskistaken/video/762913172258355945...
...no shit