This is something that's been bothering me lately, it seems like ChatGPT really upped the "yes man" personality lately.

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.

A really interesting side effect of 4o becoming a yes man:

> 4o updated thinks I am truly a prophet sent by God in less than 6 messages. This is dangerous [0]

There are other examples in the thread of this type of thing happening even more quickly. [1]

This is indeed dangerous.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k95sgl/4o_updated...

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/680e6988-0824-8005-8808-831dc0c100...

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

    Settings > Personalization > Custom Instructions

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.”

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's pretty good. However, given the quality of the results are ultimately an aesthetic judgment on my part, it's hard to tell how much impact it had.

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.”

It still manages to throw in some obsequiousness, and when I ask it about System-W and how it'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 "feels" though.

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.

How to evaluate the results? No idea. I think that's a really interesting question.

It does feel like they've dialed up the model'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'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.

We didn't even try anything new. Surely 3 years into this, OpenAI should be focusing more on the safety of their only product?

Honestly this is why I prefer Claude. I find ChatGPT very much a "yes man" and when I read this prompt instruction, I didn't think I'd need to add it for my use with Claude.

For months, roughly 30% of my custom instructions address ChatGPT's ass kissing. I haven't noticed any recent uptick in flattery, perhaps because I'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.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

⇐ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

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

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 "glazing" update has definitely not been helping.

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: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/s/lVAVyCFNki

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 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't bad enough already) along with the legal advice. The joke wasn't offensive, but a bit strange cause the matter is very serious. This was about a month ago.

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.

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