They aren’t explicitly trained to sound confident, that’s just how users tend to talk. You don’t often see “I don’t know but you can give this a shot” on Stack Overflow, for instance. Even the incorrect answers coming from users are presented confidently.

Funnily enough, lack of confidence in response is something I don’t think LLMs are currently capable of, since it would require contextual understanding of both the question, and the answer being given.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No, I'm sure you're wrong. There's a certain cheerful confidence that you get from every LLM response. It's this upbeat "can do attitude" brimming with confidence mixed with subservience that is definitely not the standard way people communicate on the Internet, let alone Stack Overflow. Sure, sometimes people answering questions are overconfident, but it's often an arrogant kind of confidence, not a subservient kind of confidence you get from LLMs.

I don't think an LLM can sound like it lacks in confidence for the right reasons, but it can definitely pull off lack of confidence if it's prompted correctly. To actually lack confidence it would have to have an understanding of the situation. But, to imitate lack of confidence all it would need to do is draw on all the training data it has where the response to a question is one where someone lacks confidence.

Similarly, it's not like it actually has confidence normally. It's just been trained / meta-prompted to emit an answer in a style that mimics confidence.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

ChatGPT went through a phase of overly bubbly upbeat responses, they chilled it out tho. Not sure if that’s what you saw.

One thing is for sure with all of them, they never say “I don’t know” because such responses aren’t likely to be found in any training data!

It’s probably part of some system level prompt guidance too, like you say, to be confident.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I think "I don't know" might sometimes be found in the training data. But, I'm sure they optimize the meta-prompts so that it never shows up in a response to people. While it might be the "honest" answer a lot of the time, the makers of these LLMs seem to believe that people would prefer confident bullshit that's wrong over "I don't know".

[–] derpgon 3 points 2 days ago

SO answers and questions are usually edited multiple times to sound professional, confident, and be correct.