science

22269 readers

293 users here now

A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.

rule #1: be kind

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

m3t00@lemmy.world

Joleee@lemmy.world

laverabe@lemmy.world

DeadPand@midwest.social

laverabe@lemmy.zip

202

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

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by zlatiah@lemmy.world to c/science@lemmy.world

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 22 points 5 days ago

Reminds me of a tweet from a few years ago that said something along the lines of "Middle managers think AI is intelligent because it speaks just like they do instead of realizing it means that they aren't intelligent "