AI is sycophantic, did you know that?
Antropic AI, recently published a paper explaining their recent research in Large Language Models (LLMs, what we have taken to calling Generative AI). They found that LLMs have a bias towards answers that they defined as sycophantic but incorrect. In other words, the AI tells us what we want to hear.
Now, this post isn’t really about AI, though we could notice that we’ve managed to make yet another mirror to beam ourselves back into our brains. It’s hardly the first, most of us carry black glass mirrors in our pockets that do the same thing: create what are essentially individualistic feedback loops. That’s at least one way of understanding social media.
While I am concerned about digital technology, its dehumanising effects, and the ways we can embrace our own humanity both with and without certain digital tools; today I’d like to explore what this piece of research says about us.
LLMs work, as this layman understands it, by being trained on very large datasets so that they learn what the most likely response to the query is. The ones we’re now using have often been trained on the internet. That’s why GenAI tends to make stuff up, it’s just guessing what the next most likely word is (I think it’s a lot more complicated than this, but that’s the very broad gist).
Essentially, we get back what we put in. It’s again not quite that simple as this ignores the liturgical effects of the media that the LLM read to learn our behaviour—if social media is a spiritual distortion zone as Ian Harber likes to say then this is in play too.
Why does GenAI give back sycophantic but incorrect answers? Why does it tell us what it thinks we want to hear rather than the truth?
Because we do the same thing. The research says that humans have a consistent bias towards rating sycophantic but incorrect answers more highly.
My friend who shared it with me commented: it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. Because we’re teenage girls.
He, and Taylor, have a point though. For all we can be concerned about the distorting effects of introducing feedback loops in social discourse, the first thing it does is hold up a very different mirror. If we want to look, we can see ourselves. We—as a species—value getting along more highly than the truth.
We learn as we grow up that there are social situations in which you don’t say everything that you think, that’s part of getting along with other people. We learn that we don’t need to say every true thing. These can be good traits when used judiciously and carefully held and considered. Wisdom requires that we sometimes use the whole truth and sometimes part of it.
The problem comes when we rate agreeableness higher than truth in all settings. Maybe I don’t need to have a political conversation with a distant family member at some occasion even if I think what they just said is wild, I likely demure and very gently pushback rather than let loose the raging sea of what I actually think. That’s reasonable in that setting, but it can also catechise us to a certain mode of speaking where we never tell the unadorned truth. That isn’t Christian.
British evangelicals are often accused to doing exactly this: giving the sycophantic answer rather than the true one. Often for the (very good!) desire of getting a hearing for the gospel. I suspect the accusation is often overstated—though sometimes rhetorically that’s a good way to get people to listen—but there’s enough truth to it that it bites. We don’t want to tell the truth. We don’t want to bring up the parts of the faith that the modern world finds most distasteful and difficult to swallow.
We almost certainly do this in our interpersonal relationships in our churches too. Do we point out the sin or decide to let it lie? While I don’t think you have to point out every sin someone commits (because, honestly, what else would you do with your day?) and if you do you should be prepared to receive the reverse in kind (Matthew 7), there is a tendency to not point out any sin at all.
There’s also a tendency to not confront ideas when they conflict with the gospel, especially if those ideas are perceived as political. I suspect some of this is carefully thought through decisions about when and when not to engage (great!) but a good portion will be because we want to be agreeable. We live an age where every idea is political, and we have often forgotten that the gospel itself is political too: it’s a declaration of victory where the rightful king has overthrown the old despot, and he wants us to build a city in his honour.
I’m sure there are exceptions to these comments, and there are definitely those who swing way off the other end. That isn’t an excuse to not tell the truth, though. The truth can cut, but it will lead to the Good and the Beautiful. It’s worth telling. You probably won’t get a chatbot to tell it to you, so commit to telling it to another person.
This always works best when you can look them in the eye, over food if possible.
“Is that your answer to everything, Tim?”
Yes.
Photo by Gerard Siderius on Unsplash
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