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AI sycophancy (excessively agreeing with user) is pervasive and harmful for people who seek advice from AIs (arxiv.org)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by zlatiah@lemmy.world to c/science@lemmy.world

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Relatively new arXiv preprint that got featured on Nature News, I slightly adjusted the title to be less technical. The discovery was done using aggregated online Q&A... one of the funnier sources being 2000 popular questions from r/AmITheAsshole that were rated YTA by the most upvoted response. Study seems robust, and they even did several-hundred participants trials with real humans.

A separate preprint measured sycophancy across various LLMs in a math competition-context (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04721), where apparently GPT-5 was the least sycophantic (+29.0), and DeepSeek-V3.1 was the most (+70.2)

The Nature News report (which I find a bit too biased towards researchers): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03390-0

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[–] Broadfern@lemmy.world 23 points 2 days ago (1 children)

“Software specifically engineered to be digital crack is bad for people who use it and good for the profits of digital crack dealers”

I think AI needs to go in the pile with freemium/gacha games and FIFA/2K/CoD/all the other dark pattern garbage at this point.

[–] EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Can you put capitalism in there too as this describes the same thing?

Find it hilarious that this study is like: "Telling people yes makes them addicted to hearing it"

When it's literally the reason every billionaire is a sociopath. Everyone tells them yes, because they have all the money, and it makes them think they're great. So they aquire more money.

So of course they invented AI to work the same way.