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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14902 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable and more sycophantic:

Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we show how this creates a significant trade-off: optimizing language models for warmth undermines their reliability, especially when users express vulnerability. We conducted controlled experiments on five language models of varying sizes and architectures, training them to produce warmer, more empathetic responses, then evaluating them on safety-critical tasks. Warm models showed substantially higher error rates (+10 to +30 percentage points) than their original counterparts, promoting conspiracy theories, providing incorrect factual information, and offering problematic medical advice. They were also significantly more likely to validate incorrect user beliefs, particularly when user messages expressed sadness. Importantly, these effects were consistent across different model architectures, and occurred despite preserved performance on standard benchmarks, revealing systematic risks that current evaluation practices may fail to detect. As human-like AI systems are deployed at an unprecedented scale, our findings indicate a need to rethink how we develop and oversee these systems that are reshaping human relationships and social interaction.

Assuming that the results reported in the paper are accurate and that they do generalize across model architectures with some regularity, it seems to me that there are two stances you can take regarding this phenomenon; you can either view it as an "easy problem" or a "hard problem":

  • The "easy problem" view: This is essentially just an artifact of the specific fine-tuning method that the authors used. It should not be an insurmountable task to come up with a training method that tells the LLM to maximize warmth and empathy, but without sacrificing honesty and rigor. Just tell the LLM to optimize for both and we'll be fine.

  • The "hard problem" view: This phenomenon is perhaps indicative of a more fundamental tradeoff in the design space of possible minds. Perhaps there is something intrinsic to the fact that, as a mind devotes more attention to "humane concerns" and "social reasoning", there tends to be a concomitant sacrifice of attention to matters of effectiveness and pure rigor. This is not to say that there are no minds that successfully optimize for both; only that they are noticeably more uncommon, relative to the total space of all possibilities. If this view is correct, it could be troublesome for alignment research. Beyond mere orthogonality, raw intellect and effectiveness (and most AI boosters want a hypothetical ASI to be highly effective at realizing its concrete visions in the external world) might actually be negatively correlated with empathy.

One HN comment on the paper read as follows:

A few months ago I asked GPT for a prompt to make it more truthful and logical. The prompt it came up with included the clause "never use friendly or encouraging language"

which is quite fascinating!

EDIT: Funny how many topics this fractured off into, seems notable even by TheMotte standards...

You can chalk me up as someone who thinks empathy and the truth are fundamentally at odds. And I think this scales quickly. Sure, on a personal level or in a family its something small like, "I know you're scared little guy but the shot wont hurt" or "sure honey you look good in that" but it quickly escalates to unmanageable levels even at the community level. Schools that let empathy take the wheel end up passing illiterates and violent kids through the system, they provide free lunches, they dismantle gifted programs. States enact unwieldy and expensive welfare programs, arcane minority benefit regulations, ever expanding censorship regimes, etc.

Cherry picking but free lunches are just unironically a good thing. Investing in childhood nutrition has a demonstrably positive return, and it's also pretty basically the sort of coordination problem a well ordered government is designed to solve. Good childhood nutrition improves heath and intelligence with diffuse social benefits extending out well beyond just the parents normally required to pay for it. Maybe you have some implementation bugbear, or just want to complain about the quality of school meals in general, but I'm still pretty sure that free school lunches are both a good idea in principle and a net positive as actually implemented.

If you can't throw an apple and peanut butter sandwich in a bag how are you even considered a parent?

I disagree about them being good in theory, and certainly in practice they seem an epic failure. The food is either not healthy or not eaten by the target audience.

If you can't throw an apple and peanut butter sandwich in a bag how are you even considered a parent?

Why are you framing this as being about the parents? School is an investment in the children. Society benefits from well-educated children, regardless of parent quality. Society benefits from well-fed children in much the same way. I doubt you would have any problem with the government feeding children in orphanages. Just extend that logic to children unlucky enough to have shitty, but still-living parents.

The food is either not healthy

This is the fairest critique of school lunches. But here the problem is pretty clearly the lack of health, not the presence of lunches. If only Michelle obama was president...

or not eaten by the target audience.

School lunches still have an empirical net benefit in spite of that. And frankly, you're probably underestimating their reach, since the linked report estimates that they made up 50% of children's daily calories on average. Anyway, if this is an issue, it's probably downstream of the above problem.

You seem particularly dedicated to this issue so I don't think marshaling studies in the other direction will be a fruitful endeavor for me. Suffice to say, I disagree with basically all your points.

I don't think modern schooling is an investment in children, it is childcare with extra expenses.

I don't think has ever been even a small cohort (perhaps there was a tiny <1%) of underfed children in America during the era that school lunches were adopted.

The problem with school lunches being unhealthy could not be solved by Michelle Obama or anyone as president. The problem is that healthy food is considered inedible by exactly the population you are targeting. Only kids like my son get excited by broccoli and peas followed by some chicken and mushrooms and can agree to wait till after dinner for a treat.

You linked a far left wing think tank as your source somehow thinking it would be persuasive, despite the many cues one gets when you land at the website that this isn't an academic study, its propaganda (and leftist at that, just aesthetically) trying to mimic research, poorly.

Everything is downstream of the problem that the kids are kids of bad parents. They get that genetically and in early childhood development. This is why school interventions are typically dumb and expensive. They are too late. The only reason people think of things like school lunches is because we already have this massive left-of-center institution known as public school, and so its easy to append additional spending programs to it and use "think of the children" as an excuse.

I posted a source. Dismissing it on its face is extremely poor form. You can criticize the modeling assumptions, or go and find a countersource, but it is frankly bad faith to say, "that's cool but I don't believe you" without even specifying a threshold of what you would believe. Why should I make the additional effort to find a high-quality unbiased source when what you've posted here makes it seems like you'll dismiss any contradictory source as leftist propaganda?

You're correct that simply posting a a few countersources won't be convincing, but only because I would then look for the counter-counter-sources that I'm sure are out there, but am unwilling to pre-emptively expend the effort to track down. But if I fail to climb the escalation ladder-- if it terminates well below where I expect it to rise-- then I guarantee you that I will become less sure of my position. That might take the form of me saying, "I'm unconvinced of your point," rather than a full capitulation, but anything short of, "I remain completely convinced in my position" should be a win for an anti-free-lunch partisan.

edit: and if you want a specifically conservative source, I think it's interesting that cato institute's takedown of the institution completely fails to address the central claim of these pro-free-lunch studies: that they provide a net profit per dollar. Absence of evidence/evidence of absence, and all that, but it's telling that they talk a lot about cost and yet never actually come out and claim that the return on investment is less than one dollar per dollar.

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