Receptiveness, Not Sycophancy: Distinguishing Engagement from Deference in Language Models
[Przetwarzanie języka] Autorzy: Calvin Isley, Johann Gaebler, Max Lamparth i 2 więcej
A central concern with language models is sycophancy: their tendency to defer to users' views at the expense of independent substantive judgment. In parallel, work on social sycophancy has focused on behaviors such as validation and positivity that may signal inappropriate deference. Yet the markers of social sycophancy are also characteristic of conversational receptiveness, a construct from social psychology shown to improve interactions across disagreement. We argue that this overlap creates a construct-validity problem for social sycophancy evaluations. Using a popular moral-advice dataset, we find that responses classified as more socially sycophantic are also more receptive. Further, increasing the receptiveness of human-written responses---while preserving their substantive conclusions---causes them to be classified as more socially sycophantic. This tight coupling raises the pos…
- Kategoria arxiv
- cs.CL
- Kategoria
- Przetwarzanie języka