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

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Basically, the setup for these experiments, and we conducted three very similar experiments, we had thousands of participants.

We had them interact with various different chatbots.

One was a chatbot that was designed to be sycophantic.

It would basically flatter people, agree with them.

One was a chatbot that was designed to be gently disagreeable.

So it was sort of gently show people opposing perspectives and maybe try to open their mind to other viewpoints.

One was just a regular chatbot like ChatGBT or Gemini.

We basically took a few frontier models.

And then we also had a control condition where people just talked about the benefits of owning dogs and cats with a chatbot.

So in all these conditions, people discuss political topics, but we're currently analyzing non-political topics as well in follow-up experiments.

And broadly, this is what we found.

So...

This isn't too unexpected, but people really liked the sycophantic chatbots.

They really enjoyed them.

They said that they would want to interact with them again.

And basically, as expected, people really did not like these disagreeable chatbots that would gently challenge their opinion.

We also found that the sycophantic chatbots caused people to entrench their beliefs, basically become more extreme about their prior beliefs.

And the disagreeable chatbots had the opposite effect.

They led people to become more moderate about their beliefs.

And now here's where things get really interesting.

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