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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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.
Yeah.
So we define AI sycophancy is basically when AI tends to be, um, a little too agreeable and tends to flatter you a bit too much and, uh, tends to tell you a bit too much of what you want to hear.
Um, the phrase really became popularized in, uh, April of 2025.
Um,
There was a big controversy with OpenAI when OpenAI released a new model, ChachiBT 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 people
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.
So that's when sycophancy became super popular as a concept.
And OpenAI tried to do things to reduce sycophancy in their model.
But it became very widely discussed around then.
And we, so my colleagues and I, we tried to examine in a series of psychological experiments, the actual
psychological consequences of interacting with sycophantic chatbots.
Right.
Maybe it isn't.
So
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