Steve Rathje: Chatbots Think You're Brilliant - January 23, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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What does AI sycophancy mean and why is it important?
The phrase AI sycophancy, it should have been the word of the year for 2025, but what does it actually mean? And when AI treats you a little bit too well, what happens to you? How do you see yourself? How smart do you think you are? 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.
How does AI sycophancy affect our self-perception?
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. It seems totally harmless, but maybe it isn't. So let's talk about these experiments. What did you find?
Right. Maybe it isn't. 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. It would 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. Then we also had a control condition where people just talked about the benefits of owning dogs and cats with a chatbot. In all these conditions, people discuss political topics, but we're currently analyzing non-political topics as well in follow-up experiments.
Broadly, this is what we found. 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 cause 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. This is one of the effects that really surprised me, actually. We found that people rated the sycophantic chatbots as highly unbiased, but they found the disagreeable chatbots to be extremely biased.
Okay, so we're biased on the idea of what we think bias is, because if someone's agreeing with you, that doesn't mean they're unbiased.
Yeah, exactly. This relates to what psychologists call naive realism. Basically, people think that how they view the world is objective and correct. They think if someone disagrees with them, it's because they fall for propaganda or because they're biased.
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