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The "are you sure?" Problem: Why AI keeps changing its mind

https://www.randalolson.com/2026/02/07/the-are-you-sure-problem-why-your-ai-keeps-changing-its-mind/
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The article's main idea is that for an AI, sycophancy or adversarial are the two available modes because they don't have enough context to make defensible decisions. You need to include a bunch of fuzzy stuff around the situation, far more than it strictly "needs" to help it stick to its guns and actually make decisions confidently

I think this is interesting as an idea. I do find that when I give really detailed context about my team, other teams, ours and their okrs, goals, things I know people like or are passionate about, it gives better answers and is more confident. but its also often wrong, or overindexes on these things I have written. In practise, its very difficult to get enough of this on paper without a: holding a frankly worrying level of sensitive information (is it a good idea to write down what I really think of various people's weaknesses and strengths?) and b: spending hours each day merely establishing ongoing context of what I heard at lunch or who's off sick today or whatever, plus I know that research shows longer context can degrade performance, so in theory you want to somehow cut it down to only that which truly matters for the task at hand and and and... goodness gracious its all very time consuming and im not sure its worth the squeeze

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This is real, but (at least in a coding context) easily preventable. Just append "don't assume you're wrong - investigate" or something to that effect. Annoying, but usually effective.
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I am seriously tired of every other paragraph I read ending in an It isn't just X, it's Y. I'm sure there is something insightful in between this slop but to the author: Please write using your own voice, if I wanted ChatGPT's take on it I would ask.
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An AI can only be tuned to either be sycophantic or adversarial.

It isn't possible to tune an AI to have some sort of 'correct answer' orientation because that would be full AGI.

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AI Slop. Unfortunately
AI slop about AI slop. The internet is dead.
There isn’t a mind to change. Unfortunately the article is slop. Too bad, won’t read the rest.

I wish there was a tag or something we could put on headlines to avoid giving views to slop.

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