Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence (2025)

>I get it, we can use AI agents, and they keep improving. Great, now calm down and go build stuff, and show me the stuff.

I completely agree with this sentiment. What I have seen is that these types of people never show the results of their work, they only discuss how productive they were or how fast it was to develop their project. The actual details of the project are not really mentioned.

In the rare event they do show their project, there's three categories: a worse version of something else that already exists (e.g. their version of Counter Strike that is less fun, rewriting some Python library into Rust but is now also worse), a dashboard, a visually engaging website you'll find interesting for less than 10 minutes and then never touch again.

I am not even an LLM hater, I am just not that impressed with majority of what has been built. Honestly I think back in the 90s I was far more impressed with the early websites that were totally garbage by today's standards. I remember spending so much time on the US Treasury's website as a kid learning everything about how currency works, I do not think I have ever had that level of engagement or fascination with anything that was generated by an LLM or where an LLM had significant support in the development.

Certainly this technology is nascent, however allegedly it should be making us far more productive so in the fourish years it's been around I feel like I should have witnessed something interesting by now. Perhaps I am a curmudgeon, but even in that case I think that there should at least be something else that's taking the world by storm and I am just not seeing it either.

Maybe there are some cool LLM creations, I think the speed at which it creates is also its own weakness. If anyone can create things really quickly, that includes people who are lazy and lack imagination, so then we're inundated with so much slop. Increasing accessibility does not mean that the quality will be maintained. Much like National Parks, if we make sensitive wilderness areas as accessible as possible that will degrade the quality significantly with the arrival of so many tourists, thus the parks have to consider the balance between preservation and conservation. Therefore, it was better when art et al. required some time, intention and skill before it could be shared with the world. These restrictions inherently kept the balance of quality much like how limits of accessibility in National Parks preserve the natural beauty.

any close relationship forms a dependence. If you talk to something that poses as a helpful human 8 hours a day to do your job, you already spending more time with this "person" than with your loved ones

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> Recognise it is simply a zero-intelligence search engine

I think that this highlights the problem: it's not even a proper search engine. If it were, it would find existing material and link to it. The chatbot instead re-elaborates the message. This is different enough to have legal consequences (see the recent German ruling).

By squashing everything together, one loses the ability to evaluate sources, including their credibility and ulterior motives. With a search engine, I can tell if I am getting climate information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, from an oil trading consortium, or from a random blog.

The parent poster's suggestion is trying to work around the selection of sources, but such an attempt is fighting against the questionable design of the whole thing.

I don't think it's currently solvable, as selling those models as oracles is an essential component of their business plan.

Sounds like you want a sycophant because you use words like "crush" and "destroy" to describe counterpoints to your arguments (please don't destroy me.)