In my case, I need my AI to be sycophantic because most of my contrarian ideas are correct.
So it's a waste of my time and tokens when the AI keeps making weak arguments which I proceed to destroy one by one.
Usually, what happens is it tries to debunk my statement but then I offer a rebuttal to all of its points, it then concedes to all of my points but each time it offers a new partial rebuttal... Which I proceed to crush... But it keeps coming up with increasingly irrelevant caveats. It goes on for quite some time and at the end I ask it to review our discussion and it admits that its original stance "was not as strong" as it initially claimed but it never fully concedes... Even though I literally destroyed all of its points and every partial rebuttal it tried to come up with... Meanwhile its rebuttals became increasingly nit-picky and distant from the original claims made...
It's like if I'm saying "the ship is sinking, look at all the water in the hull and look at all the water pouring in through that hole" and it's like "oh but this is a small hole and the pump can easily offset it" so then I say "What about this hole over here" "Oh but the pump can still offset the stream from both holes easily" and then I say "What about that third one? And fourth one? And fifth one?" And it's like "The pump can easily offset that" and I'm like "Common! The hull is full of water and the water level is rising, the hull is full of holes; it's not a stretch to suggest that the ship is sinking because of all the holes in it... I shouldn't have to point out the location of every single hole for my argument to start making sense!"
It's not proof by induction but it's probably as close as you can get to it for a topic which lies outside the realm of mathematics!
I have had similar experiences - it'll hold fast on a bunch of awful points that I've already shown, and eventually gotten it to admit, are invalid. Kinda like a human...
Yet, the answer is not sycophancy. It is for it to just be objective, honest, humble etc... Challenge or agree with you when necessary
Sounds like you want a sycophant because you use words like "crush" and "destroy" to describe counterpoints to your arguments (please don't destroy me.)
I used these words jokingly and also, I don't mean sycophant in a literal sense. I mean more in an AI context as a kind of config/slider you can dial up or down to make it more collaborative or combative.
If I'm knowledgeable in a niche over which there is no mainstream consensus or it's disorganized, and I want to reason more about this topic, I need the AI in the rabbit hole with me. I don't need it to question the existence of the rabbit hole I'm in. Otherwise all of its arguments sound like gaslighting; asking me to disbelieve my eyes and decades of experience about basic ideas which I've already researched many times and proven not to work (at least with high confidence).
For me this happens with some niches of software engineering and architecture and I have lots of physical proof of working, secure, maintainable software to back up my position.
Also, when I say that "most of my contrarian ideas are correct" it's with the caveat that I don't tend to adopt or hold onto contrarian ideas that are easily proven to be incorrect. I'm referring to the kinds of niche ideas which most non-experts would not feel confident to make strong arguments about but AI will.
> most of my contrarian ideas are correct.
My stripper finds me attractive, my therapist is in love with me, and my genius goes unrecognised because of small men intimidated by ideas they cannot comprehend.
I'm really hoping your comment is satire, but assuming it isn't, genuinely it might be time to get some help. Our capacity for self delusion as humans is enormous, and it's only higher in brighter people - particularly autodidacts who are used to being the smartest person they know.