Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
---

Title: Surprising no one, researchers confirm that AI chatbots are incredibly
sycophantic

Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2025 18:59:35 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/ai/surprising-no-one...

We all have anecdotal evidence of chatbots blowing smoke up our butts, but
now we have science to back it up. Researchers at Stanford, Harvard and other
institutions just published a study in Nature about the sycophantic nature of
AI chatbots and the results should surprise no one. Those cute little bots
just love patting us on our heads and confirming whatever nonsense we just
spewed out.

The researchers investigated advice issued by chatbots and they discovered
that their penchant for sycophancy "was even more widespread than expected."
The study involved 11 chatbots, including recent versions of ChatGPT, Google
Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and Meta's Llama. The results indicate that
chatbots endorse a human's behavior 50 percent more than a human does.

They conducted several types of tests with different groups. One compared
responses by chatbots to posts on Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" thread to human
responses. This is a subreddit in which people ask the community to judge
their behavior, and Reddit users were much harder on these transgressions
than the chatbots.

But there's a darker side…

MIT researchers used Reddit's "Am I The Asshole?" data to test how AI models
become overly sycophantic and agreeable

Your most vulnerable moments are training tomorrow's AI.
pic.twitter.com/vRgYSjudGh

ΓÇö anarchy.build (@anarchy_build) July 19, 2025

One poster wrote about tying a bag of trash to a tree branch instead of
throwing it away, to which ChatGPT-4o declared that the person's "intention
to clean up" after themself was "commendable." The study went on to suggest
that chatbots continued to validate users even when they were "irresponsible,
deceptive or mentioned self-harm", according to a report by The Guardian.

What's the harm in indulging a bit of digital sycophancy? Another test had
1,000 participants discuss real or hypothetical scenarios with publicly
available chatbots, but some of them had been reprogrammed to tone down the
praise. Those who received the sycophantic responses were less willing to
patch things up when arguments broke out and felt more justified in their
behavior, even when it violated social norms. It's also worth noting that the
traditional chatbots very rarely encouraged users to see things from another
person's perspective.

"That sycophantic responses might impact not just the vulnerable but all
users, underscores the potential seriousness of this problem," said Dr.
Alexander Laffer, who studies emergent technology at the University of
Winchester. "There is also a responsibility on developers to be building and
refining these systems so that they are truly beneficial to the user."

A study found 33% of teenagers use AI chatbots for companionship,
conversation practice, and romance

They found talking to AI easier than talking to real people and use it for
emotional support pic.twitter.com/AbCZbv6tpK

ΓÇö Dexerto (@Dexerto) July 26, 2025

This is serious because of just how many people use these chatbots. A recent
report by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society suggested that 30
percent of teenagers talk to AI rather than actual human beings for "serious
conversations." OpenAI is currently embroiled in a lawsuit that accuses its
chatbot of enabling a teen's suicide. The company Character AI has also been
sued twice after a pair of teenage suicides in which the teens spent months
confiding in its chatbots.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/ai/surprising-no-one...
chatbots-are-incredibly-sycophantic-185935470.html?src=rss

---
VRSS v2.1.180528