I don't know. Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities. I feel like this is a larger problem -- people leaning into extremifying their views or just playing to an audience -- even though one might frame it as "prosocial" because it happens within the context of an online community.
Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
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Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#12I don't know. Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities. I feel like this is a larger problem -- people leaning into extremifying their views or just playing to an audience -- even though one might frame it as "prosocial" because it happens within the context of an online community.
Both could be true. People follow incentives.
Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#13You're absolutely right!
It's a pretty overdone joke at this point, don't you think?
Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#14Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#15I think this goes along way to explain people's very defensive reactions when you are skeptical about Agentic Development.
I'm one of the people who gets accused of this. I don't mind skepticism. But every time I turn around, someone's claiming nobody gets any value from these tools and anyone who says otherwise is deluded or running a scam. That gets really old.
I can believe people get value out of them. I think I do.
But "OH MY GOD EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED THE OLD WAY IS DEAD 10X MORE PRODUCTIVE" - no. If that were true, we'd notice it in the software all around us.
Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#16Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#17> This suggests that people are drawn to AI that unquestioningly validate, even as that validation risks eroding their judgment
I believe this is a larger problem than just AI.
The internet has helped people surround themselves with only voices that agree with them and validate them, often to their detriment.
There are entire online communities urging people to cut others out of their lives over the slightest disagreement.
Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#18I don't know. Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities. I feel like this is a larger problem -- people leaning into extremifying their views or just playing to an audience -- even though one might frame it as "prosocial" because it happens within the context of an online community.
> Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities.
Yeah. I've gotten caught in this pattern here on HN. Post something, there's some disagreement but then I see the quiet upvotes trickling in, sometimes by the dozen. That sort of signal slowly convinced me I was right about plenty of stuff.
I used AI to datamine all of my HN comments and find those patterns. Then I started asking the AI to steelman the hell out of my world view, every single argument.
Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#19I think this goes along way to explain people's very defensive reactions when you are skeptical about Agentic Development.
I'm one of the people who gets accused of this. I don't mind skepticism. But every time I turn around, someone's claiming nobody gets any value from these tools and anyone who says otherwise is deluded or running a scam. That gets really old.
I've had one conversation that was sorta like this, it was around the time some kid kept releasing videos of him interacting with a very bad TTS gpt model or something and it would give very very bad answers confidently.
Their frame of reference was that, and this was at a time when opus 4.5 was around. Hard to expect a reasonable conversation when one person has such a different view of what the tools are capable of.
Re: Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)
#20I think this goes along way to explain people's very defensive reactions when you are skeptical about Agentic Development.
Those are two different things. Chatgpt being sycophantic while playing the role of a therapist with a teenager is much different from Codex being sycophantic while reviewing user feedback. The former is extremely dangerous for society.
I make no societal judgments; just that the nastiness of the reactions I get suggests something more than technical choice is going on.
I had one prominent "influencer" publicly challenge me to a coding competition over it. It was very weird.