Steve Rathje

speaker

259 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Apr

Steve Rathje’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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The Last Show with David Cooper · Steve Rathje: Chatbots Think You're Brilliant - January 23, 2026 · 24 Jan 2026 podcast

Oh, really?

Okay.

Yeah.

And it's kind of a fuzzy term and people have a lot of disagreement about what it actually is.

But I think that sycophancy might be particularly concerning.

And this is more speculative.

We don't have a ton of research on this.

But basically, for individuals with mental health vulnerabilities, if people have their delusions affirmed, and I gave the example before of like, chat GBT, for instance, saying, you know, it's a good idea for someone to stop taking essential medications, for instance, if

If you're affirming sort of the delusions of mentally vulnerable individuals, that could cause a lot of significant problems.

Yeah, so one is to just be aware of sycophancy and to know that this is a problem.

That can be really powerful.

But then another thing is, you know, if you use ChatGBT, you can actually customize your ChatGBT where you can kind of go to the settings and you can change the system prompt or you can change ChatGBT's personality to tell it to be more cynical or tell it to show you alternate perspectives.

you can specifically prompt ChatGBT to act differently.

You can say, maybe be a devil's advocate and show me opposing perspectives.

So that's one recommendation here.

But another recommendation is for the tech companies to maybe, you know, update their models.

Oh, yeah, I know.

Thanks for having me.

This was fun.

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