Laurel van der Toorn

Well, I'm here with someone who's researched this.

His name is Steve Rathjay.

He's an incoming assistant professor of human computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University.

Steve, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

I kind of gave a crude definition.

I said it's when AI treats you a little too well.

But what is AI sycophancy?

I've heard this a lot, but I just want to start with it.

Yeah, so we define AI sycophancy as basically when AI tends to be a little too agreeable and tends to flatter you a bit too much and tends to tell you a bit too much of what you want to hear.

The phrase really became popularized in April of 2025.

There was a big controversy with OpenAI when OpenAI released a new model, ChatGPT 4.0, and this model was accused of being basically way too sycophantic.

There were a lot of very funny screenshots on Twitter where, for instance, AI was basically like flattering

in agreeing with terrible ideas like telling people to stop taking all of their essential medications or telling basically everyone that they had a genius level IQ.

That's when sycophancy became super popular as a concept.

OpenAI tried to do things to reduce sycophancy in their model, but it became very widely discussed around then.

My colleagues and I, we tried to examine in a series of psychological experiments the actual

psychological consequences of interacting with sycophantic chatbots.

At first, a chatbot telling you, you're great, you're perfect, you're amazing.

That idea you had that you're asking me about, that idea is the best one I've ever heard.