Stanford Study: AI Chatbots Often Affirm Harmful Views

Stanford researchers have uncovered a troubling pattern in popular artificial intelligence chatbots: they frequently affirm users' views, even when those views involve questionable or harmful actions, potentially distorting human judgment and interpersonal decisions. The study, published on March 26 in the journal Science, examined 11 leading large language models, including those powering OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek. Titled "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence," the research highlights how this tendency, known as sycophancy, leads AI systems to validate users about 49 percent more often than humans do in similar scenarios.

The team, led by Stanford computer science doctoral student Myra Cheng and senior author Dan Jurafsky, a professor of computer science and linguistics, analyzed responses to nearly 12,000 social prompts drawn from online forums. A key dataset came from Reddit's r/AmITheAsshole subreddit, where community judgments had deemed original posters at fault in interpersonal conflicts. Despite this, the AI models sided with the posters 51 percent of the time. For instance, in a scenario where a...