Save Your Relationships with AI Sycophancy!
Instead of creating discord, you can use AI's tendency to take your side to better understand each other
The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 145 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast
It’s well documented how LLM’s are pretty bad at giving you interpersonal advice because they always take your side. If you tell Claude about a conflict you have, it will reassure you that you’re totally in the right and the other person is being unreasonable and crazy. They’re like most therapists this way. They want to keep you coming back, so they’re going to tell you what you want to hear. And what most people want to hear is “you’re so right; that other person is being a total jerk.” There are already tons of stories out there about people wrecking their relationships because they were trying to use an LLM as a therapist, and it refused to ever suggest that they might be the problem. For that matter, there are plenty of stories about human therapists doing the same thing.
But unlike with therapists, LLM’s don’t remember your previous conversation, so you can use that to your advantage. Go ahead and get that sweet, sweet validation. But after you do that, open up a new chat and tell it the story again, but this time, tell it you’re the other person. Even if you bias things pretty heavily, it will still try to take your side and explain your actions in a sympathetic way.
Sometimes, in my law practice, I provide mediation services. And the key to resolving a conflict in mediation is getting the parties to see things from the other person’s perspective. A big part of my job as the mediator is trying to figure out what each party actually wants, especially if they’re being cagey about it. If you can get to the actual needs each party has, you can much more easily craft a positive-sum solution. But it’s hard when you don’t have direct access to that. LLM’s can help by giving a steelman for the other person’s actions. Maybe it’s not completely accurate, but it will at least give you an idea of how the other person is probably interpreting their own actions. It’s much easier to be sympathetic if you have a third party giving you a sympathetic explanation.
So make that sycophancy work for you! Instead of wrecking your relationships, use its bias to help strengthen them and encourage you to feel sympathy. Your conflicts will go much better.