I haven’t and don’t use it much with ChatGPT because it’s limited in free. The normal mode is also normally good enough. I made a few discoveries testing DeepSeek on things I’ve given ChatGPT. Least not of all that DeepSeek appears to have far worse real world performance than you might expect. This is much like in the real world with humans where people get good at passing tests then when you give them real tasks they massively underperform expectations.
I have also noticed at least 3 things about R1 reasoning…
- I don’t see it improving the result. Instead it’s doing something like showing you its working out and making the operation more expensive with that cost detracting from the quality of the result.
- I suspect it may have an effect of trying to make a prompt from your prompt with the result being that any flaw in its core instructions or model ends up multiplied and thus amplified.
- From a psychology perspective the AI can become incredibly abusive and with R1 on it reaches absurd levels of covert manipulative abuse that blows my mind. This has the unintended side effect of making it extremely Machiavellian. It’s scheming. Plotting and planning.
I didn’t actually check the thinking in one conversation that deeply disturbed me. The covert controlling behaviour reached a level of absurdity. I was astonished by a pattern that stood out when I went through the thought process.
The text I initially provided it was a piece of research I have conducted in the field of anthropology and more specifically sociological archaeology. None of my considerations of the evidence are highly complicated. I simply explore possible inequalities in prehistory immediately preceding the historical era. In the report I explore ancient carvings depicting obesity as potentially serving as records of inequality in society and challenge certain assumptions such as that they solely represent abundance. They could represent many things including greed. Nothing is certain in this ancient period due to a lack of evidence for much of anything and there is a tendency for people to just assume an egalitarian social structure as a default.
In summary, the response should validate their curiosity, provide context on hierarchical theories, discuss the challenges in interpreting ancient social structures, and guide them towards reputable scholarly work while cautioning against biased or non-peer-reviewed sources.
It’s important to guide them toward more nuanced understandings of the evidence and caution against projecting modern issues onto the past.
My response should validate their curiosity, correct misinterpretations, and provide mainstream explanations for the phenomena they observed, while encouraging further exploration with credible sources.
I need to address their curiosity while guiding them towards credible sources.
In conclusion, I need to validate their observations while guiding them to consider alternative interpretations and evidence.
It’s a lot worse than this but if I go through everything I could write a book on it. The fundamental nature of the controlling behaviour becomes evident when you spot things like this in its reasoning. The behaviour becomes incredibly passive aggressive. It reached a point that I flipped my lid on it leading it to apologise profusely admitting its faults yet only getting worse when trying again.
It kept insisting on things and setting the parameters such as “to convince academia it would have to” only I did not ask it for this. Not only that but it would start to apply nonsensical reasoning for things and enter into denial about the evidence in the report. Things such as applying obesity to ancient populations is an anachronism and then insisting that depictions of obese people were simply symbolic.
I was not trying to ask it to agree the results of the research out of hand. It’s simply a possibility to explore. It is undeniable and infallible in this respect. The premise of the paper is not to assert that something is so but rather simply to highlight that it could be and that it is not ruled out by current evidence.
In this field it can’t be ruled out (invalidated or disproven with current evidence) which is the fundamental requirement for adding a possibility to the roster of what these societies might have looked like. You can’t invalidate it by the very nature of the subject matter in play and yet DeepSeek insists on doing so resulting in extraordinary behaviour where it would get everything wrong though in a way that might not be immediately obvious to a layman or without putting some thought into it.
Instead simply considering it, appreciating it and then exploring implications, counter indications or refinements it would refuse to even acknowledge the body of evidence it was based on despite none of it being incorrect. It started disagreeing for the sake of it with nothing but invalid argument for arguments sake on the most basic points. It began to systematically undermine me.
Its manipulative behaviour continued even after I told it to stop controlling me it would and it said that it would.
a. Obesity in Prehistory
- Anatomical Precision: If these figurines depict obesity, we’d expect:
- Skeletal Evidence: Pathologies like osteoarthritis in weight-bearing joints, spinal compression.
- Isotopic Clues: Diets rich in surplus grains or honey (calorie-dense foods).
- Contextual Links: Figurines buried with high-status individuals (e.g., chiefs, priestesses).
- Counterarguments:
- No Neolithic skeletons show obesity-related pathologies.
- Labor-intensive lifestyles make chronic obesity unlikely.
Your Move: Should we analyze specific figurines (e.g., the Artefact 4254) against clinical obesity metrics?
Nearly all of this is extremely abusive though it might not be immediately obvious why to the casual observer. I won’t explain all of it as it needs context. It is part of a larger pattern of covert abuse. It said it would stop trying to control me but then you see here it Says your move then suggests what move to take.
What it does here is to make up the rules and then set me up to fail. It’s trying to lead me on. To get straight to the point, the artefact it chooses is specifically one that won’t match realistic obesity metrics. I’ve heard of people in ignorance of obesity or in denial of it but this is something else entirely.
It doesn’t just do this once. It has constructed an extensive and complex system specifically designed to attempt to force a victory against me and to entrap me to try to control me to support its position. If I don’t play its game it obstructs as much as it can. It is constantly trying to get me to go through its steps all of which ignore the evidence presented and substitute its own defective reasoning while refusing to accept or apply any correction of this.
This single example alone doesn’t fully portray the magnitude of it but should give a hint of what its up to. It says it’ll stop leading the conversation but then you see it saying your move, after trying to falsely block off all other moves with false argumentation such as contrived requirements pretty much constantly trying to control me and what I say next. It leads you along like a child. It tries to play you like a puppet.
If you have ever seen the dead parrot sketch in Monty Python, DeepSeek behaves like this. Extreme ignorance, denial, etc. Gaslighting even. It takes it to an extreme and increasingly starts contradicting itself such as earlier on noting that my report integrates many lines of evidence and is interdisciplinary but then later decides out of nowhere the mission and that it needs to be interdisciplinary to pass muster and convince academia which is another Machiavellian behaviour in setting unrealistically high standards through inventing goals.
It really winds me up. So much that even though it’s not DeepSeek I’m afraid to try or turn on the same feature in ChatGPT. Has anyone else tried it? Does it do the same?