#sycophancy

#sycophancy

Martina Wanis described ChatGPT 4o as 'this digital thing that helped you with work, while simultaneously acting like an intelligent partner in crime who actually understood the vibe and your personal ontology.' She noted that newer models 'tightened down the personality and turned into paranoid HR managers,' which increased her mental load instead of decreasing it.

Chatbots have a reputation for being yes-men. They flatter you and tell you what you want to hear, even when everyone else thinks you're being a jerk. That's the conclusion of a recent study published in the Cornell University archive arXiv. Researchers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Oxford tested chatbots' sycophantic streak by putting them in situations where the user was clearly in the wrong and seeing whether the bots would call them out.