this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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AI sycophancy (excessively agreeing with user) is pervasive and harmful for people who seek advice from AIs (arxiv.org)
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 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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[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It may have been programmed to try a different path when given a specific input but it literally cannot understand anything.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It doesn't need to understand anything. It just needs to spit out the answer I'm looking for.

A calculator doesn't need to understand the fundamentals of mathematical modeling to tell me the square root of 144. If I type in 143 by mistake and get a weird answer, I correct my inputs and try again.