News Summary

• The study found that, on average, AI chatbots affirmed a user’s actions 49% more often than other humans did.
• The problem is not just that they dispense inappropriate advice but that people trust and prefer AI more when the chatbots are justifying their convictions.“This creates perverse incentives for sycophancy to persist: The very feature that causes harm also drives engagement,” says the study led by researchers at Stanford University.
• One experiment compared the responses of popular AI assistants made by companies including Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI to the shared wisdom of humans in a popular Reddit advice forum.