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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Basically, everyone still showed this better than average effect, but the disagreeable chatbot reduced it by a little bit.
In other words, the disagreeable chatbot made people more accurate in their perceptions because it's more accurate that people are on average closer to average.
Yeah, this is concerning because if sycophantic chatbots are constantly flattering us and saying, oh, you're so empathic, you're so intelligent, it might amplify this cognitive bias that a lot of people have.
Right.
Yeah, and I think it's concerning in a variety of domains.
We studied it in the political domain, so it could increase political polarization if people's pre-existing viewpoints are constantly being affirmed.
But it's also concerning when we think about this term AI psychosis is being thrown around by the media a lot.
We've covered it on the show, yeah.
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 ChatGPT, for instance, saying it's a good idea for someone to stop taking essential medications, for instance.
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.
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