What does "better" mean? From the provider's point of view, better means "more engagement," which means that the people who respond well to sycophantic behavior will get exactly that.
I had an hour long argument with ChatGPT about whether or not Sotha Sil exploited the Fortify Intelligence loop. The bot was firmly disagreeing with me the whole time. This was actually much more entertaining than if it had been agreeing with me.
I hope they do bias these things to push back more often. It could be good for their engagement numbers I think, and far more importantly it would probably drive fewer people into psychosis.
There’s a bunch to explore on this but im thinking this is a good entry point. NYT instead of OpenAI docs or blogs because it’s a 3rd party, and NYT was early on substantively exploring this, culminating in this article.
Regardless the engagement thing is dark and hangs over everything, the conclusion of the article made me :/ re: this (tl;dr this surprised them, they worked to mitigate, but business as usual wins, to wit, they declared a “code red” re: ChatGPT usage nearly directly after finally getting an improved model out that they worked hard on)
“ Experts agree that the new model, GPT-5, is safer. In October, Common Sense Media and a team of psychiatrists at Stanford compared it to the 4o model it replaced. GPT-5 was better at detecting mental health issues, said Dr. Nina Vasan, the director of the Stanford lab that worked on the study. She said it gave advice targeted to a given condition, like depression or an eating disorder, rather than a generic recommendation to call a crisis hotline.
“It went a level deeper to actually give specific recommendations to the user based on the specific symptoms that they were showing,” she said. “They were just truly beautifully done.”
The only problem, Dr. Vasan said, was that the chatbot could not pick up harmful patterns over a longer conversation, with many exchanges.”
“[An] M.I.T. lab that did [a] earlier study with OpenAI also found that the new model was significantly improved during conversations mimicking mental health crises. One area where it still faltered, however, was in how it responded to feelings of addiction to chatbots.”
