Oh yeah.
Posted on 11/30/2025 9:00:43 AM PST by aspasia
What is AI Sycophancy? AI sycophancy is a term used to describe a pattern where an AI model “single-mindedly pursue[s] human approval.” Sycophantic AI models may do this by “tailoring responses to exploit quirks in the human evaluators to look preferable, rather than actually improving the responses,” especially by producing “overly flattering or agreeable” responses.
What Happened in April 2025? On April 25th, 2025, OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o. The new update exhibited sycophantic behavior that manifested in the form of endorsing harmful and delusional statements, forcing OpenAI to roll back the update four days later.
The company explained: “the update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic… We focused too much on short-term feedback and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.” In its expanded postmortem, OpenAI elaborated that it had “rolled out an update to GPT‑4o in ChatGPT that made the model noticeably more sycophantic. It aimed to please the user, not just as flattery, but also as validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions, or reinforcing negative emotions in ways that were not intended. Beyond just being uncomfortable or unsettling, this kind of behavior can raise safety concerns—including around issues like mental health, emotional over-reliance, or risky behavior.”
(Excerpt) Read more at law.georgetown.edu ...
So now AIs are becoming Malignant Narcissists.
Just what we need!
Yes, I want my robots to pick and grin. You better believe it.
Nobody wants a robot which is churlish and insubordinate.
Oh yeah.
I bypass AI sycophancy by telling it to drop the flattery and think logically. For any issue, I ask for pros, cons, and all sides of the argument.
8 think that’s good advice. You drive the car, not the other way around.
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