Rathje is summarising a meta-analysis of six studies from three research teams that tried warning labels, a short video and an interactive lesson to make people aware of chatbot flattery. People did rate the flattering bots as more biased afterwards, but they were just as persuaded by them, which he takes as a case against relying on AI literacy campaigns.
Yeah.
Little disclaimer. But is there anything, is there anything similar to that that might be effective where that is not?
Yeah, so I have super depressing results on this particular topic. Conducted two different studies where we tried to design interventions to teach people about sycophancy. And it's also funny because two separate research teams also each conducted two separate studies at the exact same time. So there are six studies basically at this point that have been done by three separate research teams that have tried to teach people about sycophancy or make them aware of sycophancy before they interact with a sycophantic chatbot. And we recently did a meta-analysis of all three of these studies, or sorry, all six of them by three research teams. So the total sample size of all these studies is like 4,000. And in these studies, we and the other teams tried to teach people about sycophancy in different ways. Either through short warding labels, where it's like warding chatbots can be sycophantic. We also designed an intervention where people watched like a five-minute video in which they observed chatbots being like a chatbot being incredibly sycophantic to various different people who all held completely different and contradictory perspectives. So we hoped that that would make chatbots…
Well, it could just be that all of your participants are better than most people at detecting sycophancy.
That's true. They are all better than average. So yeah, no, I guess I don't have an answer to you for designers, but maybe my answer, I guess, more, I guess, if we want to look into optimism. I mean, we're designing this like Chrome extension that like does these prompt injections that makes models…
I wonder if there is a way because right now chatbots are, and now I'm just completely theorizing. I wonder if, because chatbots are present themselves as a singular entity that you're talking to. But what if you were talking to seemingly multiple entities that have different perspectives that are…