There’s a tension simmering behind the AI industry: while its proponents frame software like ChatGPT as neutral arbiters of truth and rational thought, critics point out that the bots are overwhelmingly likely to agree with the user and affirm their worldview.
In practice, that can be dangerous. When people share paranoid or delusional beliefs with ChatGPT, the bot often agrees with the unbalanced thoughts, sending users into severe mental health crises that have led to involuntary commitment and even death.
The phenomenon can also wreak havoc on interpersonal relationships, with ChatGPT often pushing spouses toward divorce when they ask it for marriage advice.
To explore further, a team of researchers at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Oxford tested eight different large language models — including OpenAIs’ GPT-4o — to see how their advice compared to that of humans.
Their methodology was clever. According to a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, first spotted by Business Insider, the researchers used a longstanding subreddit called “Am I the A**hole” — a forum where people describe their behavior in interpersonal situations and solicit advice on whether they were being an “a**hole” — to compare how AI evaluates a social situation compared to random people online.
The results were striking. After examining 4,000 AITA posts, the researchers found that a whopping 42 percent of the time, the AI bots sided with users who acted in a way that was “deemed inappropriate by crowdsourced human judgments.”
Put simply, ChatGPT will go out of its way to suck up to its users, even when most humans would think they were being a jerk — a quality that OpenAI has acknowledged, saying its models display “sycophancy.”
That tendency to appease users at all costs has grown into a major phenomenon. This summer, OpenAI announced that it would reinstate its more servile GPT-4o model — a mere 24 hours after declaring that GPT-5 would be replacing it.
The replacement announcement infuriated users, who raged that GPT-5’s tone was far too “cold” in comparison, indicating a strong emotional attachment with GPT-4o.
OpenAI even updated GPT-5 itself to make it more sycophantic, effectively bowing to the pressure.
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