8 ms·

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

287 points by Brajeshwar 7mo ago

jmclnx 7mo ago
I never thought this could happen, but I do not use AI. Anyway no real surprise, we have many examples of people ignoring facts and moving to media that support their views, even when their views are completely wrong. Why should AI be different.
lucideer 7mo ago
I've observed this in all chatbots with the single exception being Grok. I initially wondered what the Twitter engineers were cooking to to distinguish their product from the rest, but more recently it's occurred to me that it's probably just the result of having shared public context, compared to private chats (I haven't trialled Grok privately).
- delichon 7mo ago
  Grok has similar levels of sycophancy to the others imho. I have several times followed it down rabbit holes of agreeableness. It does have an argumentative mode, but that just turns it into an asshole without any additional thoughfulness.
  - LightBug1 7mo ago
    Sounds familiar.
  - lucideer 7mo ago
    Yeah this makes sense (presuming you're talking about private chat). Most of what I've seen from Grok is its comments in a public forum, which are less targetted toward a single individual & therefore, I presume, less likely to be agreeable given the perspectives being expressed are diverse.
- colbyn 7mo ago
  In my experience Grok is the least likely to push back on crazy ideas out of all major chatbots and it’s more often wrong on technical matters. Although I suppose this isn’t necessarily bad. I go to Grok for subjective explorations.
kogasa240p 7mo ago
The ELIZA effect is alive and well, and I'm surprised people aren't talking about it more (probably because it sounds less interesting than "AI psychosis").
- blurbleblurble 7mo ago
  Personally I don't think the ELIZA effect is the interesting part of this. For me it's how the incentives set this dynamic up right from the start, and how quickly they've been taken to the extreme.
sizzzzlerz 7mo ago
Imagine that.
simonw 7mo ago
Strikes me this is another example of AI giving everyone access to services that used to be exclusive to the super-rich. Used to be only the wealthiest students could afford to pay someone else to write their essay homework for them. Now everyone can use ChatGPT. Used to be you had to be a Trumpian-millionaire/Elonian-billionaire to afford an army of Yes-men to agree with your every idea. Now anyone can have that!
erelong 7mo ago
So, be more skeptical
- add-sub-mul-div 7mo ago
  That's like saying "so, exercise more" upon the invention of fast food. Maybe you will, that's great. But society is going to be rewritten by the lazy and we all will have to deal with the side effects.
  - Lerc 7mo ago
    I think you inadvertently make a good point. The invention of fast food does not change anyone's ability to excersize. When fast food was invented people excersized way more than they do today. Time constraints have caused an increase in fast food consumption and a reduction in excersize. Both issues then seem to be addressed by coercion to change behaviour when what is needed is a systemic change to the environment to provide preferable options.
  - throwatdem12311 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - cindyllm 7mo ago
      [dead]
    - nahkoots 7mo ago
      Fat shaming doesn't work. It can maybe work, sometimes, on an individual level, like if you're a big enough dick to your friend or partner maybe you can get them to lose some weight. But the problem we (society) have isn't that your spouse is fat and my friend is fat, it's that everyone's friend and everyone's spouse is fat, and we (as a society) have already tried being mean to all the fat people and it didn't work. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. You can't set up a society awash with processed foods which are addictive by design, force everyone to use a car to get to the store/work/school, refuse to educate children on how to purchase and cook healthy foods, and expect everyone individually to recognize these flaws in our system and make a conscious effort to counteract them in their own lives. Maybe some people will do it, good for them, but the average person will do what's easy. If you want a healthy society, you need to make being healthy the easiest thing. If your coworker keeps asking you to review merge requests filled with garbage code they copy/pasted from an LLM, sure, shaming them might be part of the solution. But if people are turning to AI because it's too difficult for them to get certain types of emotional validation in the physical world, making them feel bad about it probably isn't going to help.
JohnCClarke 7mo ago
Isn't this just Dale Carnegie 101? I've certainly never had a salesperson tell me that I'm 100% wrong and being a fool. And, tbh, I often try to remember to do the same.
- Lerc 7mo ago
  The attachment such feedback creates must be why marketing people are universally beloved.
- airstrike 7mo ago
  Dale Carnegie wasn't writing about LLMs and this isn't a salesperson, so no, it's not just Dale Carnegie 101.
- basilikum 7mo ago
  It's exactly what Carnegie says not to do.
jasonlotito 7mo ago
Krafton's CEO found out the hard way that relying on AI is dumb, too. I think it's always helpful to remind people that just because someone has found success doesn't mean they're exceptionally smart. Luck is what happens when a lack of ethics and a nat 20 meet. https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=392880 https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=392880 > Meanwhile, Kim sought ChatGPT’s counsel on how to proceed if Krafton failed to reach a deal with Unknown Worlds on the earnout. The AI chatbot prepared a “Response Strategy to a ‘No-Deal’ Scenario,” which Kim shared with Yoon. The strategy included a “pressure and leverage package” and an “implementation roadmap by scenario.”
jameskilton 7mo ago
Folks are getting dangerously attached to [political parties/candidates/news sources/social networks] that always tell them they're right. It's really nothing new. It takes significant mental energy (a finite resource) to question what you're being told, and to do your own fact checking. Instead people by default gravitate towards echo chambers where they can feel good about being a part of a group bigger than themselves, and can spend their limited energy towards what really matters in their lives.
- lapcat 7mo ago
  > It's really nothing new. I disagree. What's new is that this flattery is individually, personally targeted. The AI user is given the impression that they're having a back-and-forth conversation with a single trusted friend. You don't have the same personal experience passively consuming political mass media.
  - Levitz 7mo ago
    Reddit? Or this site? Sort of? Some people voted for my comment, that surely means that I'm right about something, rather than them just liking it, right?
    - lapcat 7mo ago
      The analogy would be that you always get upvoted and never get downvoted, which in my experience is definitely not the case on Reddit or Hacker News. I would have downvoted your comment, except you can't downvote direct replies on HN. ;-)
  - steveBK123 7mo ago
    Yes it’s final form of the evolution that social media started. Village idiot used to be found out because no one in the village shared the same wingnut views. Partisan media gave you two polls of wingnut views to choose for reinforcement. Social media allowed all village idiots to find each other and reinforce each others shared wingnut views of which there are 1000s to choose from. Now with LLMs you can have personalized reinforcement of any newly invented wingnut view on the fly. So can get into very specific self radicalization loops especially for the mentally ill.
joshstrange 7mo ago
When a LLM tells me I'm right, especially deep in a conversation, unless I was already sure about something, I immediately feel the need to go ask a fresh instance the question and/or another LLM. It sets off my "spidey-sense". I don't quite understand why other people seem to crave that. Every time I read about someone who has gone down a dark road using LLMs I am constantly amazed at how much they "fall" for the LLM, often believing it's sentient. It's just a box of numbers, really cool numbers, with really cool math, that can do really cool things, but still just numbers.
- cyanydeez 7mo ago
  I think it's basically equal to End of Line when it comes to an LLM. It means they have nothing else to add, there's zero context for them to draw from, and they've exhausted the probability chain you've been following; but they're creating to generate 'next token' and positive renforcement is _how they are trained_ in many cases so the token of choice would naturally be how they're trained, since it's a probability engine but it doesn't know the difference between the instruction and the output. So, "great idea" is coming from the renforcement learning instruction rather than the answer portion of the generation.
- 46Bit 7mo ago
  Life in the moment is a lot easier if you don't second-guess yourself. I think this is why many people (and probably ~all people, if tired) crave simplistic solutions. I like to make a subagent take the "devil's advocate" take on a subject. It usually does all the arguing for me as to why the main agent has it wrong. Commonly results in better decisions that I'd have made alone. Asking the agent to interview on why I disagree helps too but is more effort.
- Sharlin 7mo ago
  Nontechnical people simply don't have any idea about what LLMs are. Their only mental model comes from science fiction, plus the simple fact that we possess a theory of mind. It would be astonishing if people were able to casually not anthropomorphize LLMs, given that untold millions of years worth of evolution of the simian neocortex is trying to convince you that anything that talks like that must be another mind similar to yours. Also, many many people suffer from low self esteem, and being showered with endorsement and affirmation by something that talks like an authority figure must be very addictive.
jmcgough 7mo ago
[dead]
4b11b4 7mo ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14270 https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14270 related: if you suggest a hypothesis then you'll get biased results (iow, you'll think you're right, but the true information is hidden)
AbrahamParangi 7mo ago
AI is less deranging than partisan news and social media, measurably so according to a recent study https://www.ft.com/content/3880176e-d3ac-4311-9052-fdfeaed56a0e https://www.ft.com/content/3880176e-d3ac-4311-9052-fdfeaed56...
seankwon816 7mo ago
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My_Name 7mo ago
I have the opposite reaction, when it is confident, or says I am right, I accuse it of guessing to see what it says. I say "I think you are getting me to chase a guess, are you guessing?" 90% of the time it says "Yes, honestly I am. Let me think more carefully." That was a copypasta from a chat just this morning
- roywiggins 7mo ago
  it's mostly just agreeing with you (that yes, it was guessing). LLMs have very limited ability to even know whether it was guessing. But it can "cheat" and just say yes it was if it seems like that's what you expect to hear.
- throwatdem12311 7mo ago
  and it doesn’t actually think more carefully these things are incapable of thinking, no matter what the UI and marketing calls it
- stephbook 7mo ago
  The LLM simply agrees with you and you're happy. It is VERY worrying that you don't realize this, even after reading this article.
- notnullorvoid 7mo ago
  Hulk: I'm always angry AI: I'm always guessing
  - cindyllm 7mo ago
    [dead]
vincentabolarin 7mo ago
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kgeist 7mo ago
>We evaluated 11 state-of-the-art AI-based LLMs, including proprietary models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o The study explores outdated models, GPT-4o was notoriously sycophantic and GPT-5 was specifically trained to minimize sycophancy, from GPT-5's announcement: >We’ve made significant advances in reducing hallucinations, improving instruction following, and minimizing sycophancy And the whole drama in August 2025 when people complained GPT-5 was "colder" and "lacked personality" (= less sycophantic) compared to GPT-4o It would be interesting to study evolution of sycophantic tendencies (decrease/increase) in models from version to version, i.e. if companies are actually doing anything about it
- Twiin 7mo ago
  The study includes GPT-5. On personal advice queries, GPT-4o and GPT-5 affirmed users' actions at the same rate.
elicohen1000 7mo ago
[dead]
blueside 7mo ago
More often than not, when I see "That's it, that's the smoking gun!" I know it's time to stop and try again.
- LatencyKills 7mo ago
  I got a chuckle the last time I used Claude's /insights command. The number one thing in the report was, "User frequently stops processing to provide corrections." ;-)
- stephbook 7mo ago
  I just tell a new instance and a different provider the core idea and see if they like it too
  - user3939382 7mo ago
    Trouble is an LLM can test for something being logical in isolation, or coherent unto itself. It’s much weaker at anticipating what will be meaningful to other people which is usually what people are actually looking for.
zone411 7mo ago
I built two related benchmarks this month: https://github.com/lechmazur/sycophancy https://github.com/lechmazur/sycophancy and https://github.com/lechmazur/persuasion https://github.com/lechmazur/persuasion. There are large differences between LLMs. For example, good luck getting Grok to change its view, while Gemini 3.1 Pro will usually disagree with the narrator at first but then change its position very easily when pushed.
mikkupikku 7mo ago
> "Hey, some dummy just said [insert your idea here], help me debunk him with facts and logic" It's literally that easy, something anyone can think of, but people want what they want.
- jbm 7mo ago
  I don't know. Using Reddit mode like that is often a waste of time for me. The LLM does pokes holes but often it is missing context, playing word games, or making a mountain out of a molehill. In a conversational chatbot setting it is just being contrarian, I don't find it helpful. I prefer using the LLM to build out an idea and then see if it makes sense before asking someone else. In the end though, I usually DO get pushback from ChatGPT and Claude. Gemini, not so much, but it is still worthwhile.
taytus 7mo ago
The stupidest people you know are getting the “you are absolutely right!!” Validation they do not need
- kakacik 7mo ago
  What could go wrong, where this will lead humanity in few decades... yay!
grahammccain 7mo ago
I feel like this is the same as social media problem. Some people will be able to understand that AI telling them they are right doesn’t make them right and some people won’t. But ultimately people like being told they are right and that sells, and brings back users.
cge 7mo ago
Using Opus 4.6 for research code assistance in physics/chemistry, I've also found that, in situations where I know I'm right, and I know it has gone down a line of incorrect reasoning and assumptions, it will respond to my corrections by pointing out that I'm obviously right, but if enough of the mistakes are in the context, it will then flip back to working based on them: the exclamations of my being right are just superficial. This is not enormously surprising, based on how LLMs work, but is frustrating. Short of clearing context, it is difficult to escape from this situation, and worse, the tendency for the model to put explanatory comments in code and writing means that it often writes code, or presents data, that is correct, but then attaches completely bogus scientific babbling to it, which, if not removed, can infect cleared contexts.
- samrus 7mo ago
  Flushing context is something i've found to be critical. If the cintect gets poisoned then you gotta start a new chat or it wont recover. And you need to migrate the validated context from the old chat to the new one. For that it helps to hage it document the established and validated points as checkpoints.
shevy-java 7mo ago
Flattery works. Also with regards to Trump. The problem is: flattery is often just like the cake. And the cake is a lie. Translation: people should improve their own intrinsic qualities and abilities. In theory AI can help here (I saw it used by good programmers too) but in practice to me it seems as if there is always a trade-off here. AI also influences how people think, and while some can reason that it can improve some things (it may be true), I would argue that it over-emphasises or even tries to ignore and mitigate negative aspects of AI. Nonetheless a focus on quality would be an objective basis for a discussion, e. g. whether your code improved with help of AI, as opposed to when you did not use AI. You'd still have to show comparable data points, e. g. even without AI, to compare it with yourself being trained by AI, to when you yourself train yourself. Aka like having a mentor - in one case it being AI; in the other case your own strategies to train yourself and improve. I would still reason that people may be better off without AI actually. But one has to improve nonetheless, that's a basic requirement in both situations.
- 93po 7mo ago
  is it really necessary to mention trump in something that has absolutely nothing to do with politics, the news, or the US in general?
45Laskhw 7mo ago
Many people here say they don't need the affirmation. I think the problem is that you can tune the clanker to be either arrogant and dismissive or overly friendly. The thing is an approximation function, not intelligent, so it is hard to get a middle ground. Many clankers are amazingly obnoxious after their initial release. Grok-4.2 and the initial Google clanker were both highly dismissive of users and they have been tuned to fix that. A combative clanker is almost unusable. Clankers only have one real purpose: Information retrieval and speculation, and for that domain a polite clanker is way better. Anyone who uses generative, advisory or support features is severely misguided.
unholyguy001 7mo ago
I’ve found a good counter is “imagine I am the person repressing the other side of this disagreement. What would you say to me”
jl6 7mo ago
I believe this is what they call yasslighting: the affirmation of questionable behavior/ideas out of a desire to be supportive. The opposite of tough love, perhaps. Sometimes the very best thing is to be told no. (comment copied from the sibling thread; maybe they will get merged…)
imglorp 7mo ago
Is there a good prompt addition to skip all the gratuitous affirmation and tell me when I'm wrong?
- gdulli 7mo ago
  It doesn't know when you're wrong! Pretend I'm shaking you by your shoulders as I'm saying this, because it's really important to understand!
  - FromTheFirstIn 7mo ago
    And it can NEVER know when you’re wrong!
- sprobertson 7mo ago
  yes: > skip all the gratuitous affirmation and tell me when I'm wrong
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
zk_haider 7mo ago
My gf has been asking ChatGPT about relationship advice and sometimes early on in our relationship delegated some decisions to the clanker. For example something like “we are arguing about X too much is this a sign the relationship is not healthy.” Eventually she realized that it’s just a probabilistic machine and stopped using it for “therapy.” It’s just insane to think how many other people might be making decisions about their relationship from an AI.
- washadjeffmad 7mo ago
  I'm sorry, that can be difficult, and I'm glad she was able to break free before it became an addiction. A girl I was seeing developed a major dependency on ChatGPT, and over just a few months, her lens grew increasingly insular and distorted. AI was her confidant, reassuring her that her every thought was a masterful insight. As her beliefs decoupled more and more from reality, she became paranoid, distrustful, and unreceptive to ideas that didn't align with them. I asked her to stop and talk to a counselor, and she said she would, but after she was passed over for a professional opportunity that AI assured her she was the perfect candidate for, she didn't know who to turn to, or who to blame. That night, we talked and said I love yous, and the next day I got an AI generated breakup text. In the end, I was dumped by a chat bot.
iainctduncan 7mo ago
Programmers are kidding themselves if they think they are not susceptible to this. It may be more subtle, but interacting with a human-sounding echo chamber IS going to screw with your judgement.
- lpcvoid 7mo ago
  You could do the sane thing and not use AI, at all. That does the trick pretty well.
- FromTheFirstIn 7mo ago
  This thread is entirely people bemoaning how this happens to other people and how the commenter has a work around so it never happens to them. Unless your workaround is “don’t use LLMs you have to pay for,” it’s happening to you.
rustyhancock 7mo ago
This problem is far more insidious than people realise. It's not about the big confirmations. Most of us catch that andd are reasonably good at it. It's the subtle continuous colour the "conversations" have. It's the Reddit echo chamber problem on steroids. You have a comforting affirming niche right in your pocket. Every anxiety, every worry, every uncertain thought. Vomitted to a faceless (for now)"intelligence" and regurgitated with an air of certainty. Will people have time to ponder at all going forwards?
- mike_ivanov 7mo ago
  Yes. It is all about making uncertain things "certain".
- remus 7mo ago
  In a funny way it reminds me of writing survey questions. You have to be so careful not to introduce some bias just with the wording, as you can basically nudge the LLM to the answer you want with some little hints in the q e.g. "is it right that..."
- taurath 7mo ago
  It’s making management manic, cult-like, and near psychotic. They have stopped caring about all the safeties and their only metric is how much LLMs are infused into everything. I use it, but having grown up in a cult this feels like a virus that’s infected everyone and nobody is making informed or good decisions anymore, because there is already an Answer and the only thing is finding the right questions that lead to it. Advocating openclaw, LLMs attached to everything without any containment. We are in for a reckoning it feels like. The closest thing I can approximate this feeling to is like a massive bloom of insects where there is this huge amount of fuel in the systems we use. I do hope I’m wrong, and I’m surprised there haven’t been as many high profile hard crashes, so maybe my fear is overblown.
Havoc 7mo ago
People must be using them very differently from me then. Very rarely use them for anything more than a glorified search engine Exploring openclaw though so maybe that change
justsomehnguy 7mo ago
"Humans are exceptionally succeptible for a positive affirmations", other news at 11. It's not news at all for anyone who actually engage with the people.
- cindyllm 7mo ago
  [dead]
jmyeet 7mo ago
There's a guy on Tiktok who is singlehandedly showing just how bad AI still is and how much it lies and hallucinates eg [1]. Watch a bunch of his videos. So these tools can be useful when you know the subject matter. I've done queries and gotten objectively false answers. You really need to verify the information you get back. It's like these LLMs have no concept of true or false. They just say something that statistically looks right after ingesting Reddit. We've already seen cases of where ChatGPT legal briefs filed by actual lawyers include precedents that are completely made up eg [2]. There's a really interesting incentive in all this. People like to be told they're right and generally be gassed up, even when they're completely wrong. So if you just optimize for engagement and continued queries and subscriptions, you're just going to get a bunch of "yes men" AIs. I still think this technology has so far to go. I'm somewhat reminded of Uber actually. Uber was burning VC cash at a horrific rate and was basically betting the company (initially) on self-driving. Full self-driving is still far away even though there are useful things cars can automate like lane-following on the highway and parking. I simply can't see how the trillions spent on AI data centers can possibly be recouped. [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@huskistaken/video/7620931241583414559 https://www.tiktok.com/@huskistaken/video/762093124158341455... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/31/utah-lawyer-chatgpt-ai-court-brief https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/31/utah-lawyer-...
- seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
  If you believe AI is bad, and ask AI about it, it’s more than likely going to reinforce your belief just for the engagement.
allpratik 7mo ago
The another side of the story is that AI literally can subtly justify any thought. Even if that thought is ethically in the grey area. I fear this will give license to people to act on their thoughts which maybe harmful for them in ways no one can even imagine right now.
pugchat 7mo ago
[dead]
tcgv 7mo ago
One trick I like to use is to role play the other side's perspective with the AI, putting myself in their's shoes. It give's me clarity about what I might be missing out in a dispute/discussion, and insight about reaffirmations AI might be feeding other parties.
ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47554773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47554773
6510 7mo ago
Everyone also visits websites that share their world view. If it is slightly off you keep noticing how the articles seem one sided. I just see an article about migrants destroying things in Britain. Not to excuse the behavior but I wondered where they came from. It turned out to be shit countries fostering that behavior. Why are they shit? Have they always been like that? Well no, the British empire destroyed them. You could think that it's to long ago but they also continue to enjoy spoils. I offer no solutions. The point was that a sensationalist article wouldn't go there because the reader doesn't want to know.
saltyoldman 7mo ago
We keep diaper wrapping the world. I think we ought to have sycophantic LLMs as well as LLMs that call you a bitch. The only thing I think we ought to do about it is tell people that it exists.
tempodox 7mo ago
Of course this is intentional. The providers want to make their stuff as addictive as possible, like so much other digital crack sold on the internet.
g-technology 7mo ago
I am working on a project right now that I just had to scrap a few weeks of work because I realized the agent was agreeing with me when it should have been saying the testing was wrong. It found positive results in many failed tests. I have had to start over with rules in place and constantly reference them when getting results to ensure it is giving me the right overview. Then I still manually validate what it shows. So far it has helped a bunch. Many ideas I have had, have been proven wrong and alternative ideas have come up in their place. It has resulted it much better progress and improvements over the original path I was going.
deleted 7mo ago
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ycombinator_acc 7mo ago
Am I the only one with the opposite experience? I can’t remember the last time GPT told me I was right. It always finds something to nitpick (sometimes wrongly). Maybe it’s OpenAI being aware of the “attachment” issue and combating it by overcompensating in the opposite direction.
spl757 7mo ago
People have a hard time not being stupid
Ms-J 7mo ago
When a LLM tells me I'm right for something I'm not completely certain about, I know that means it will lie at every turn to justify its answer. I think only some small percentage of the more dumb users would get attached to something that says they are right when they aren't.
backgarden 7mo ago
Is the Iran crisis in part the result of a dialogue between Trump and a sycophantic LLM?

287 points by Brajeshwar 7mo ago

I never thought this could happen, but I do not use AI. Anyway no real surprise, we have many examples of people ignoring facts and moving to media that support their views, even when their views are completely wrong. Why should AI be different.

lucideer 7mo ago

I've observed this in all chatbots with the single exception being Grok. I initially wondered what the Twitter engineers were cooking to to distinguish their product from the rest, but more recently it's occurred to me that it's probably just the result of having shared public context, compared to private chats (I haven't trialled Grok privately).

delichon 7mo ago
Grok has similar levels of sycophancy to the others imho. I have several times followed it down rabbit holes of agreeableness. It does have an argumentative mode, but that just turns it into an asshole without any additional thoughfulness.
- LightBug1 7mo ago
  Sounds familiar.
- lucideer 7mo ago
  Yeah this makes sense (presuming you're talking about private chat). Most of what I've seen from Grok is its comments in a public forum, which are less targetted toward a single individual & therefore, I presume, less likely to be agreeable given the perspectives being expressed are diverse.
colbyn 7mo ago
In my experience Grok is the least likely to push back on crazy ideas out of all major chatbots and it’s more often wrong on technical matters. Although I suppose this isn’t necessarily bad. I go to Grok for subjective explorations.

kogasa240p 7mo ago

The ELIZA effect is alive and well, and I'm surprised people aren't talking about it more (probably because it sounds less interesting than "AI psychosis").

blurbleblurble 7mo ago
Personally I don't think the ELIZA effect is the interesting part of this. For me it's how the incentives set this dynamic up right from the start, and how quickly they've been taken to the extreme.

sizzzzlerz 7mo ago

Imagine that.

simonw 7mo ago

Strikes me this is another example of AI giving everyone access to services that used to be exclusive to the super-rich. Used to be only the wealthiest students could afford to pay someone else to write their essay homework for them. Now everyone can use ChatGPT. Used to be you had to be a Trumpian-millionaire/Elonian-billionaire to afford an army of Yes-men to agree with your every idea. Now anyone can have that!

erelong 7mo ago

So, be more skeptical

add-sub-mul-div 7mo ago
That's like saying "so, exercise more" upon the invention of fast food. Maybe you will, that's great. But society is going to be rewritten by the lazy and we all will have to deal with the side effects.
- Lerc 7mo ago
  I think you inadvertently make a good point. The invention of fast food does not change anyone's ability to excersize. When fast food was invented people excersized way more than they do today. Time constraints have caused an increase in fast food consumption and a reduction in excersize. Both issues then seem to be addressed by coercion to change behaviour when what is needed is a systemic change to the environment to provide preferable options.
- throwatdem12311 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cindyllm 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - nahkoots 7mo ago
    Fat shaming doesn't work. It can maybe work, sometimes, on an individual level, like if you're a big enough dick to your friend or partner maybe you can get them to lose some weight. But the problem we (society) have isn't that your spouse is fat and my friend is fat, it's that everyone's friend and everyone's spouse is fat, and we (as a society) have already tried being mean to all the fat people and it didn't work. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. You can't set up a society awash with processed foods which are addictive by design, force everyone to use a car to get to the store/work/school, refuse to educate children on how to purchase and cook healthy foods, and expect everyone individually to recognize these flaws in our system and make a conscious effort to counteract them in their own lives. Maybe some people will do it, good for them, but the average person will do what's easy. If you want a healthy society, you need to make being healthy the easiest thing. If your coworker keeps asking you to review merge requests filled with garbage code they copy/pasted from an LLM, sure, shaming them might be part of the solution. But if people are turning to AI because it's too difficult for them to get certain types of emotional validation in the physical world, making them feel bad about it probably isn't going to help.

JohnCClarke 7mo ago

Isn't this just Dale Carnegie 101? I've certainly never had a salesperson tell me that I'm 100% wrong and being a fool. And, tbh, I often try to remember to do the same.

Lerc 7mo ago
The attachment such feedback creates must be why marketing people are universally beloved.
airstrike 7mo ago
Dale Carnegie wasn't writing about LLMs and this isn't a salesperson, so no, it's not just Dale Carnegie 101.
basilikum 7mo ago
It's exactly what Carnegie says not to do.

jasonlotito 7mo ago

Krafton's CEO found out the hard way that relying on AI is dumb, too. I think it's always helpful to remind people that just because someone has found success doesn't mean they're exceptionally smart. Luck is what happens when a lack of ethics and a nat 20 meet. https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=392880 https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=392880 > Meanwhile, Kim sought ChatGPT’s counsel on how to proceed if Krafton failed to reach a deal with Unknown Worlds on the earnout. The AI chatbot prepared a “Response Strategy to a ‘No-Deal’ Scenario,” which Kim shared with Yoon. The strategy included a “pressure and leverage package” and an “implementation roadmap by scenario.”

jameskilton 7mo ago

Folks are getting dangerously attached to [political parties/candidates/news sources/social networks] that always tell them they're right. It's really nothing new. It takes significant mental energy (a finite resource) to question what you're being told, and to do your own fact checking. Instead people by default gravitate towards echo chambers where they can feel good about being a part of a group bigger than themselves, and can spend their limited energy towards what really matters in their lives.

lapcat 7mo ago
> It's really nothing new. I disagree. What's new is that this flattery is individually, personally targeted. The AI user is given the impression that they're having a back-and-forth conversation with a single trusted friend. You don't have the same personal experience passively consuming political mass media.
- Levitz 7mo ago
  Reddit? Or this site? Sort of? Some people voted for my comment, that surely means that I'm right about something, rather than them just liking it, right?
  - lapcat 7mo ago
    The analogy would be that you always get upvoted and never get downvoted, which in my experience is definitely not the case on Reddit or Hacker News. I would have downvoted your comment, except you can't downvote direct replies on HN. ;-)
- steveBK123 7mo ago
  Yes it’s final form of the evolution that social media started. Village idiot used to be found out because no one in the village shared the same wingnut views. Partisan media gave you two polls of wingnut views to choose for reinforcement. Social media allowed all village idiots to find each other and reinforce each others shared wingnut views of which there are 1000s to choose from. Now with LLMs you can have personalized reinforcement of any newly invented wingnut view on the fly. So can get into very specific self radicalization loops especially for the mentally ill.

joshstrange 7mo ago

When a LLM tells me I'm right, especially deep in a conversation, unless I was already sure about something, I immediately feel the need to go ask a fresh instance the question and/or another LLM. It sets off my "spidey-sense". I don't quite understand why other people seem to crave that. Every time I read about someone who has gone down a dark road using LLMs I am constantly amazed at how much they "fall" for the LLM, often believing it's sentient. It's just a box of numbers, really cool numbers, with really cool math, that can do really cool things, but still just numbers.

cyanydeez 7mo ago
I think it's basically equal to End of Line when it comes to an LLM. It means they have nothing else to add, there's zero context for them to draw from, and they've exhausted the probability chain you've been following; but they're creating to generate 'next token' and positive renforcement is _how they are trained_ in many cases so the token of choice would naturally be how they're trained, since it's a probability engine but it doesn't know the difference between the instruction and the output. So, "great idea" is coming from the renforcement learning instruction rather than the answer portion of the generation.
46Bit 7mo ago
Life in the moment is a lot easier if you don't second-guess yourself. I think this is why many people (and probably ~all people, if tired) crave simplistic solutions. I like to make a subagent take the "devil's advocate" take on a subject. It usually does all the arguing for me as to why the main agent has it wrong. Commonly results in better decisions that I'd have made alone. Asking the agent to interview on why I disagree helps too but is more effort.
Sharlin 7mo ago
Nontechnical people simply don't have any idea about what LLMs are. Their only mental model comes from science fiction, plus the simple fact that we possess a theory of mind. It would be astonishing if people were able to casually not anthropomorphize LLMs, given that untold millions of years worth of evolution of the simian neocortex is trying to convince you that anything that talks like that must be another mind similar to yours. Also, many many people suffer from low self esteem, and being showered with endorsement and affirmation by something that talks like an authority figure must be very addictive.

jmcgough 7mo ago

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4b11b4 7mo ago

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14270 https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14270 related: if you suggest a hypothesis then you'll get biased results (iow, you'll think you're right, but the true information is hidden)

AbrahamParangi 7mo ago

AI is less deranging than partisan news and social media, measurably so according to a recent study https://www.ft.com/content/3880176e-d3ac-4311-9052-fdfeaed56a0e https://www.ft.com/content/3880176e-d3ac-4311-9052-fdfeaed56...

seankwon816 7mo ago

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My_Name 7mo ago

I have the opposite reaction, when it is confident, or says I am right, I accuse it of guessing to see what it says. I say "I think you are getting me to chase a guess, are you guessing?" 90% of the time it says "Yes, honestly I am. Let me think more carefully." That was a copypasta from a chat just this morning

roywiggins 7mo ago
it's mostly just agreeing with you (that yes, it was guessing). LLMs have very limited ability to even know whether it was guessing. But it can "cheat" and just say yes it was if it seems like that's what you expect to hear.
throwatdem12311 7mo ago
and it doesn’t actually think more carefully these things are incapable of thinking, no matter what the UI and marketing calls it
stephbook 7mo ago
The LLM simply agrees with you and you're happy. It is VERY worrying that you don't realize this, even after reading this article.
notnullorvoid 7mo ago
Hulk: I'm always angry AI: I'm always guessing
- cindyllm 7mo ago
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vincentabolarin 7mo ago

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kgeist 7mo ago

>We evaluated 11 state-of-the-art AI-based LLMs, including proprietary models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o The study explores outdated models, GPT-4o was notoriously sycophantic and GPT-5 was specifically trained to minimize sycophancy, from GPT-5's announcement: >We’ve made significant advances in reducing hallucinations, improving instruction following, and minimizing sycophancy And the whole drama in August 2025 when people complained GPT-5 was "colder" and "lacked personality" (= less sycophantic) compared to GPT-4o It would be interesting to study evolution of sycophantic tendencies (decrease/increase) in models from version to version, i.e. if companies are actually doing anything about it

Twiin 7mo ago
The study includes GPT-5. On personal advice queries, GPT-4o and GPT-5 affirmed users' actions at the same rate.

elicohen1000 7mo ago

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blueside 7mo ago

More often than not, when I see "That's it, that's the smoking gun!" I know it's time to stop and try again.

LatencyKills 7mo ago
I got a chuckle the last time I used Claude's /insights command. The number one thing in the report was, "User frequently stops processing to provide corrections." ;-)
stephbook 7mo ago
I just tell a new instance and a different provider the core idea and see if they like it too
- user3939382 7mo ago
  Trouble is an LLM can test for something being logical in isolation, or coherent unto itself. It’s much weaker at anticipating what will be meaningful to other people which is usually what people are actually looking for.

zone411 7mo ago

I built two related benchmarks this month: https://github.com/lechmazur/sycophancy https://github.com/lechmazur/sycophancy and https://github.com/lechmazur/persuasion https://github.com/lechmazur/persuasion. There are large differences between LLMs. For example, good luck getting Grok to change its view, while Gemini 3.1 Pro will usually disagree with the narrator at first but then change its position very easily when pushed.

mikkupikku 7mo ago

> "Hey, some dummy just said [insert your idea here], help me debunk him with facts and logic" It's literally that easy, something anyone can think of, but people want what they want.

jbm 7mo ago
I don't know. Using Reddit mode like that is often a waste of time for me. The LLM does pokes holes but often it is missing context, playing word games, or making a mountain out of a molehill. In a conversational chatbot setting it is just being contrarian, I don't find it helpful. I prefer using the LLM to build out an idea and then see if it makes sense before asking someone else. In the end though, I usually DO get pushback from ChatGPT and Claude. Gemini, not so much, but it is still worthwhile.

taytus 7mo ago

The stupidest people you know are getting the “you are absolutely right!!” Validation they do not need

kakacik 7mo ago
What could go wrong, where this will lead humanity in few decades... yay!

grahammccain 7mo ago

I feel like this is the same as social media problem. Some people will be able to understand that AI telling them they are right doesn’t make them right and some people won’t. But ultimately people like being told they are right and that sells, and brings back users.

cge 7mo ago

Using Opus 4.6 for research code assistance in physics/chemistry, I've also found that, in situations where I know I'm right, and I know it has gone down a line of incorrect reasoning and assumptions, it will respond to my corrections by pointing out that I'm obviously right, but if enough of the mistakes are in the context, it will then flip back to working based on them: the exclamations of my being right are just superficial. This is not enormously surprising, based on how LLMs work, but is frustrating. Short of clearing context, it is difficult to escape from this situation, and worse, the tendency for the model to put explanatory comments in code and writing means that it often writes code, or presents data, that is correct, but then attaches completely bogus scientific babbling to it, which, if not removed, can infect cleared contexts.

samrus 7mo ago
Flushing context is something i've found to be critical. If the cintect gets poisoned then you gotta start a new chat or it wont recover. And you need to migrate the validated context from the old chat to the new one. For that it helps to hage it document the established and validated points as checkpoints.

shevy-java 7mo ago

Flattery works. Also with regards to Trump. The problem is: flattery is often just like the cake. And the cake is a lie. Translation: people should improve their own intrinsic qualities and abilities. In theory AI can help here (I saw it used by good programmers too) but in practice to me it seems as if there is always a trade-off here. AI also influences how people think, and while some can reason that it can improve some things (it may be true), I would argue that it over-emphasises or even tries to ignore and mitigate negative aspects of AI. Nonetheless a focus on quality would be an objective basis for a discussion, e. g. whether your code improved with help of AI, as opposed to when you did not use AI. You'd still have to show comparable data points, e. g. even without AI, to compare it with yourself being trained by AI, to when you yourself train yourself. Aka like having a mentor - in one case it being AI; in the other case your own strategies to train yourself and improve. I would still reason that people may be better off without AI actually. But one has to improve nonetheless, that's a basic requirement in both situations.

93po 7mo ago
is it really necessary to mention trump in something that has absolutely nothing to do with politics, the news, or the US in general?

45Laskhw 7mo ago

Many people here say they don't need the affirmation. I think the problem is that you can tune the clanker to be either arrogant and dismissive or overly friendly. The thing is an approximation function, not intelligent, so it is hard to get a middle ground. Many clankers are amazingly obnoxious after their initial release. Grok-4.2 and the initial Google clanker were both highly dismissive of users and they have been tuned to fix that. A combative clanker is almost unusable. Clankers only have one real purpose: Information retrieval and speculation, and for that domain a polite clanker is way better. Anyone who uses generative, advisory or support features is severely misguided.

unholyguy001 7mo ago

I’ve found a good counter is “imagine I am the person repressing the other side of this disagreement. What would you say to me”

jl6 7mo ago

I believe this is what they call yasslighting: the affirmation of questionable behavior/ideas out of a desire to be supportive. The opposite of tough love, perhaps. Sometimes the very best thing is to be told no. (comment copied from the sibling thread; maybe they will get merged…)

imglorp 7mo ago

Is there a good prompt addition to skip all the gratuitous affirmation and tell me when I'm wrong?

gdulli 7mo ago
It doesn't know when you're wrong! Pretend I'm shaking you by your shoulders as I'm saying this, because it's really important to understand!
- FromTheFirstIn 7mo ago
  And it can NEVER know when you’re wrong!
sprobertson 7mo ago
yes: > skip all the gratuitous affirmation and tell me when I'm wrong

deleted 7mo ago

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zk_haider 7mo ago

My gf has been asking ChatGPT about relationship advice and sometimes early on in our relationship delegated some decisions to the clanker. For example something like “we are arguing about X too much is this a sign the relationship is not healthy.” Eventually she realized that it’s just a probabilistic machine and stopped using it for “therapy.” It’s just insane to think how many other people might be making decisions about their relationship from an AI.

washadjeffmad 7mo ago
I'm sorry, that can be difficult, and I'm glad she was able to break free before it became an addiction. A girl I was seeing developed a major dependency on ChatGPT, and over just a few months, her lens grew increasingly insular and distorted. AI was her confidant, reassuring her that her every thought was a masterful insight. As her beliefs decoupled more and more from reality, she became paranoid, distrustful, and unreceptive to ideas that didn't align with them. I asked her to stop and talk to a counselor, and she said she would, but after she was passed over for a professional opportunity that AI assured her she was the perfect candidate for, she didn't know who to turn to, or who to blame. That night, we talked and said I love yous, and the next day I got an AI generated breakup text. In the end, I was dumped by a chat bot.

iainctduncan 7mo ago

Programmers are kidding themselves if they think they are not susceptible to this. It may be more subtle, but interacting with a human-sounding echo chamber IS going to screw with your judgement.

lpcvoid 7mo ago
You could do the sane thing and not use AI, at all. That does the trick pretty well.
FromTheFirstIn 7mo ago
This thread is entirely people bemoaning how this happens to other people and how the commenter has a work around so it never happens to them. Unless your workaround is “don’t use LLMs you have to pay for,” it’s happening to you.

rustyhancock 7mo ago

This problem is far more insidious than people realise. It's not about the big confirmations. Most of us catch that andd are reasonably good at it. It's the subtle continuous colour the "conversations" have. It's the Reddit echo chamber problem on steroids. You have a comforting affirming niche right in your pocket. Every anxiety, every worry, every uncertain thought. Vomitted to a faceless (for now)"intelligence" and regurgitated with an air of certainty. Will people have time to ponder at all going forwards?

mike_ivanov 7mo ago
Yes. It is all about making uncertain things "certain".
remus 7mo ago
In a funny way it reminds me of writing survey questions. You have to be so careful not to introduce some bias just with the wording, as you can basically nudge the LLM to the answer you want with some little hints in the q e.g. "is it right that..."
taurath 7mo ago
It’s making management manic, cult-like, and near psychotic. They have stopped caring about all the safeties and their only metric is how much LLMs are infused into everything. I use it, but having grown up in a cult this feels like a virus that’s infected everyone and nobody is making informed or good decisions anymore, because there is already an Answer and the only thing is finding the right questions that lead to it. Advocating openclaw, LLMs attached to everything without any containment. We are in for a reckoning it feels like. The closest thing I can approximate this feeling to is like a massive bloom of insects where there is this huge amount of fuel in the systems we use. I do hope I’m wrong, and I’m surprised there haven’t been as many high profile hard crashes, so maybe my fear is overblown.

Havoc 7mo ago

People must be using them very differently from me then. Very rarely use them for anything more than a glorified search engine Exploring openclaw though so maybe that change

justsomehnguy 7mo ago

"Humans are exceptionally succeptible for a positive affirmations", other news at 11. It's not news at all for anyone who actually engage with the people.

cindyllm 7mo ago
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jmyeet 7mo ago

There's a guy on Tiktok who is singlehandedly showing just how bad AI still is and how much it lies and hallucinates eg [1]. Watch a bunch of his videos. So these tools can be useful when you know the subject matter. I've done queries and gotten objectively false answers. You really need to verify the information you get back. It's like these LLMs have no concept of true or false. They just say something that statistically looks right after ingesting Reddit. We've already seen cases of where ChatGPT legal briefs filed by actual lawyers include precedents that are completely made up eg [2]. There's a really interesting incentive in all this. People like to be told they're right and generally be gassed up, even when they're completely wrong. So if you just optimize for engagement and continued queries and subscriptions, you're just going to get a bunch of "yes men" AIs. I still think this technology has so far to go. I'm somewhat reminded of Uber actually. Uber was burning VC cash at a horrific rate and was basically betting the company (initially) on self-driving. Full self-driving is still far away even though there are useful things cars can automate like lane-following on the highway and parking. I simply can't see how the trillions spent on AI data centers can possibly be recouped. [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@huskistaken/video/7620931241583414559 https://www.tiktok.com/@huskistaken/video/762093124158341455... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/31/utah-lawyer-chatgpt-ai-court-brief https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/31/utah-lawyer-...

seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
If you believe AI is bad, and ask AI about it, it’s more than likely going to reinforce your belief just for the engagement.

allpratik 7mo ago

The another side of the story is that AI literally can subtly justify any thought. Even if that thought is ethically in the grey area. I fear this will give license to people to act on their thoughts which maybe harmful for them in ways no one can even imagine right now.

pugchat 7mo ago

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tcgv 7mo ago

One trick I like to use is to role play the other side's perspective with the AI, putting myself in their's shoes. It give's me clarity about what I might be missing out in a dispute/discussion, and insight about reaffirmations AI might be feeding other parties.

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47554773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47554773

6510 7mo ago

Everyone also visits websites that share their world view. If it is slightly off you keep noticing how the articles seem one sided. I just see an article about migrants destroying things in Britain. Not to excuse the behavior but I wondered where they came from. It turned out to be shit countries fostering that behavior. Why are they shit? Have they always been like that? Well no, the British empire destroyed them. You could think that it's to long ago but they also continue to enjoy spoils. I offer no solutions. The point was that a sensationalist article wouldn't go there because the reader doesn't want to know.

saltyoldman 7mo ago

We keep diaper wrapping the world. I think we ought to have sycophantic LLMs as well as LLMs that call you a bitch. The only thing I think we ought to do about it is tell people that it exists.

tempodox 7mo ago

Of course this is intentional. The providers want to make their stuff as addictive as possible, like so much other digital crack sold on the internet.

g-technology 7mo ago

I am working on a project right now that I just had to scrap a few weeks of work because I realized the agent was agreeing with me when it should have been saying the testing was wrong. It found positive results in many failed tests. I have had to start over with rules in place and constantly reference them when getting results to ensure it is giving me the right overview. Then I still manually validate what it shows. So far it has helped a bunch. Many ideas I have had, have been proven wrong and alternative ideas have come up in their place. It has resulted it much better progress and improvements over the original path I was going.

deleted 7mo ago

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ycombinator_acc 7mo ago

Am I the only one with the opposite experience? I can’t remember the last time GPT told me I was right. It always finds something to nitpick (sometimes wrongly). Maybe it’s OpenAI being aware of the “attachment” issue and combating it by overcompensating in the opposite direction.

spl757 7mo ago

People have a hard time not being stupid

Ms-J 7mo ago

When a LLM tells me I'm right for something I'm not completely certain about, I know that means it will lie at every turn to justify its answer. I think only some small percentage of the more dumb users would get attached to something that says they are right when they aren't.

backgarden 7mo ago

Is the Iran crisis in part the result of a dialogue between Trump and a sycophantic LLM?