Laurel van der Toorn

If you're affirming sort of the delusions of mentally vulnerable individuals, that could cause a lot of significant problems.

Well, I know that I'm better than the average person at identifying the fact that I'm an idiot.

Most people aren't willing to do that.

Knowing what you know and knowing that a lot of people use these tools but perhaps don't want to be biased like this, what recommendations would you have to the average chatbot user?

Yeah, so one is to just be aware of sycophancy and to know that this is a problem.

That can be really powerful.

But then another thing is, you know, if you use ChatGBT, you can actually customize your ChatGBT where you can kind of go to the settings and you can change the system prompt or you can change ChatGBT's personality to tell it to be more cynical or tell it to show you alternate perspectives.

you can specifically prompt ChatGBT to act differently.

You can say, maybe be a devil's advocate and show me opposing perspectives.

So that's one recommendation here.

But another recommendation is for the tech companies to maybe, you know, update their models.

Why should these big companies that have a huge amount of money in control have to do anything?

Come on.

Oh, yeah, I know.

Well, Steve Rathjay is an incoming assistant professor of human computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University.

Steve, thank you for being here.

This has been a great chat.

Thanks for having me.

This was fun.

After the break, someone gets a birthday card late at work and then stops showing up entirely.